Before Manhood came Bare Reality - where Laura interviewed 100 anonymous women and took pictures of their chests. She wanted to explore the dichotomy between how we feel about breasts privately and how they are presented for public consumption. It opened up a lot of interesting conversations about femininity, motherhood and sexuality. The same themes run through everything I do: my work is an exploration of people, our lives and our place in the world. I’m drawn to telling the untold story with integrity. This book is quite informative and it is really cool that these men were able to expose themselves and to hear their honesty about their feelings and their lives. It is neat to see the changing of old patriarchic thought patterns to something that is more supportive towards themselves and women.

Sensitive and compassionate, Manhood will surprise you and reassure you. It may even make you reconsider what you think you know about men, their bodies and masculinity. The aubergine is the best emoji for this project – but I haven’t used it myself, because I don’t want to reduce masculinity to an aubergine’ As this is a driving force and predominant theme behind the mission of ABSOT, these lines aren’t new information. Nor are these notions just the musings of random men. The MENtion It survey from the Cleveland Clinic has consistently shown over the past three years that men just choose not to open up about their health. We know “traditional manhood” is broken. “Transformational manhood” is in a step in the right direction, but we should continue moving closer to just “humanhood.” In closing, I feel this final quote really drove home the overall message of where we need to go from here:All one hundred of these interviews are intimate and exploratory and give us candid, honest and sometimes difficult insights in what it means to be a man in the 21st Century. Manhood shows us the spectrum of ‘normal’, revealing men’s penises and bodies in all their diversity and glory, helping in dispelling body image anxiety and myths. I feel that when men come together and talk we can integrate our emotions and then be true in our actions.” I found myself less and less looking at the images of penises, and more just listening to their stories and more thinking about how far we have to go to be tender and connected with ourselves and each other. Perhaps male-identifying people have particular battles to fight in that regard. This was the opinion of many people in this book, certainly. I felt glad to hear their uncensored thoughts on these topics. It wasn't always comfortable to read - the views expressed in here were occasionally distressing to me - but I was glad to have it laid out anyway, and feel perhaps better able to have discussions with penis-owning people about these things now. The conventional wisdom is that men don’t like to talk about things, and that they are suffering and even dying because they don’t talk about this part of their body.”

My boy is very in touch with how he feels and I encourage that. I think it’s important that as fathers we step up. At the moment, in the collective… there’s more discussion about self-development.” As a small child, you were told, ‘Big boys don’t cry.’ I think this is why men sometimes have a higher incidence of some of the serious illnesses because we don’t like to complain about being ill.” I don’t think feminism should rewind, but there needs to be a way for men to say it’s hard for us, that we hurt. [But] that should take place away from feminism” Men really opened up and discussed anxieties, OCD and full-blown depression and suicidal thoughts. There are a lot of mental health stories in the book. They all really opened up emotionally and it felt like a very rare glimpse into men's inner world. There are men in the book who say they have never talked about this to anybody."I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't really what I was expecting. The interviewees talked relatively little about their penises per se. They talked about their childhoods and relationships with their parents or families, and walked you through the things that were most tender and vulnerable, and often still unresolved, for them. Vagina, vulva, lady garden, pussy, beaver, cunt, fanny...whatever you call it most women have no idea what’s ‘down there’. Culturally and personally, no body part inspires love and hate, fear and lust, worship and desecration in the same way. Dodsworth took different approaches depending on who she was talking to. “The way I’d handle an interview with a vicar would be completely different to how I’d handle and interview with a BDSM practitioner. One thing I asked absolutely everybody was how they felt about their penis, and every interview started like that, unless they went off in their own direction.” The chill factor I’m stealing a challenge from my friend, Dave Fuehrer: “If I can ask you to take one action, it is to admit to something that scares you. Admit it to a friend, to a partner, or to a piece of paper. But just admit it.” No matter if you’re talking to your male buddy, your wife, or a mashed up dead tree, it’s the first step in being a “transformational” man.

Dodsworth says the photos took only about 10 seconds to shoot, but that she would interview the men for a much longer period of time to document it in the book. She says that "once somebody bares their body, they are much more likely to bare their soul."

Sad, funny, shocking, sexy

She says what surprised her most about the whole process is the shame and anxiety many men feel about the size of their manhood. And what came first, the photo shoots or the interviews? The interviews were done clothed, right? “Yes! I always did the photograph first. For some people it’s quite important to get it out the way, so it wasn’t hanging over them. I think it makes it more successful – somebody feels that they’ve already bared their body, it helps them to open up and tell their story.” Everyone’s different I found it very illuminating in hearing each man's story about his relationship with his penis, his views on life in regards to it and how porn, abuse, size and cancer's have shaped each persons outlook on their views towards their penises and life in general. It was also interesting to see how older men had matured over the years in their views towards women, men, sex and/or being gay or transgendered. There is sadness as well that many men have experienced in their lives and sexuality and how they are working through that.

Each interview took between 30 and 60 minutes and no two were quite alike. “Some people come into an interview and they don’t need questions, they will just talk and some people really need the questions to help them open up.”Men just want to be men and not be a person with a penis and they don't want to worry about size and all the issues that society has put on them because of the fact they have a penis. Penises have caused a lot of men a lot of grief. My books Bare Reality: 100 women, their breasts, their stories, Manhood: The Bare Realityand Womanhood: The Bare Reality attracted worldwide media coverage and critical acclaim. I gave a TEDxtalk about the series. A Channel 4 documentary based on Womanhoodcalled 100 Vaginashas now been aired around the world. That led to being commissioned by The Guardian to direct another documentary, SCARS. This is the heart and soul of the book. While there were a few quotes that reinforces “traditional manhood” concepts, they were shared by men who had their penises photographed a few minutes earlier and were sharing some of their deepest and darkest moments in their lives. (As I was typing this, I really had to wonder – were the interviews taped while they were still naked or did they get dressed first?) We can celebrate the differences without placing one sex above the other. Respecting differences and promoting equality for all gender identifications is important, especially in today’s world. It’s truly the only way we can progress as a human society. It’s ok for men to have feelings and share them, and it is ok for women to stand up for what they believe in when something isn’t right. At the end of the day, as the above quoted man said, we’re all human; we shouldn’t assign certain ‘tasks’ to certain genders. These days we are all less bound by gender and traditional roles, but is there more confusion about what being a man means? From veteran to vicar, from porn addict to prostate cancer survivor, men from all walks of life share honest reflections about their bodies, sexuality, relationships, fatherhood, work and health.