Out singer-songwriter Janelle Monae
said this week that she doesn't believe “women need to posses a
vagina to be women.”
Monae, who
recently came out as queer, made the comments to PEOPLE while
discussing her “PYNK” music video from her recently released
album Dirty Computer.
In the video, Monae is seen in an arid
landscape wearing pink fluted pants dubbed “vagina pants” on the
Internet.
“I'm so tickled and honored that
people are talking about the Pynk pants,” Monae
told PEOPLE. “I think that it's so cool to have discussions
around women's issues and women's bodies. I think it's amazing.”
“Sometimes I think people interpret
those as vagina pants, they call them vulva pants, they call them
flowers, but it just represents some parts of some women,” she
continued. “There are some women in the video that do not have on
the pants, because I don’t believe that all women need to possess a
vagina to be a woman. I have one I’m proud of it, but there’s a
lot of policing and controlling that people are trying to have over
our vaginas and when you think about female genital mutilation, when
you think about all these women’s issues, I wanted to make sure we
were discussing these issues but we were also celebrating each other.
I wanted Pynk to be a celebration of women who are unique, distinct,
different, may be different from one another but when they come
together they create something magical and special.”
She added that she chose to celebrate
her “LGBTQI brothers and sisters, minorities, women, immigrants,
those who are marginalized in this society” on Dirty Computer.