The original yOni.com site was a grandmother of the web, created in 1997 when sites were in html, modems ran at 14.4Kb and you couldn’t use images as they took too long to load!
The front page was a concrete poem shaped like a yOni with each word linking to a different page in the site. The invitation was to dive in to material in a non-linear way, following your attraction and intuition. It was designed to be a very feminine space on the predominantly masculine world wide web.
The background to the poem was a very tiny (600 x 6 px), long, thin image that only used a precious 2K of upload capacity. Of course screens were at a much lower resolution in those days.
When this background gif was ’tiled’ (ie repeated as many times as necessary to fill the screen) it created a lovely optical illusion of an inward curve behind the yOni word poem.
Giving something like this as the end result
In its heyday yOni.com had hundreds of visitors a day and the site provided a whole generation of women with an alternative view on femininity. My original focus was to create a ‘sacred feminine place’ a women’s circle in cyberspace. She served her purpose well and many women over the years have spoken to me about the nourishment and the inspiration they found in her.
Over time, in part guided by what happened within the site itself, and the people and resources that were drawn to me through it, my work and my passion has become much more focused on sexuality and our relationship with pleasure and our bodies, especially our genitals.
So 25 years on the site has finally had an upgrade to reflect what I am doing now, honing in on the specific issues, the joys and the challenges of the yoni owner and yoni lover in today’s world.
But, excitingly, the original yOni.com site can still be seen. It’s considered a national treasure and was archived by the National Library of Australia and a non-profit called The Internet Archive! Since 1997 they have archived over 750 snapshots. This link shows one of the captures from June 2000. If you follow it you can explore much of the original site over it’s many years of evolution.
Enjoy!
