When Anna Ginsburg opened her talk at OFFF Barcelona with her showreel, it landed like a punch to the heart and gut all at once. Immense, emotional, awesome. That three-word review wasn't just for the reel – it set the tone for a talk that was unflinchingly honest, joyously weird, and brimming with creative intensity. Anna began her career making music videos, which she admitted were a kind of creative scaffolding: "I didn't yet know what I wanted to say about the world, so I used music as a skeleton to hang visuals on." It gave her the freedom to experiment visually and technically with rotoscoping, stop motion and shooting live-action. It was an opportunity to be playful and have fun until she had something pressing to say. Then, Anna began to move into more meaningful territory, blending narrative and aesthetic experimentation. Alongside music videos, she became increasingly drawn to animated documentaries. "It's a powerful and overlooked genre," she explained. "When it's just voice recordings and not video, people are more candid. You're protecting your subject, so they're more honest." Talking genitals and creative liberation: The making of Private Parts A formative moment in Anna's personal and creative life occurred when she saw the artwork 'The Great Wall of Vagina' by Jamie McCartney at the age of 19. It followed an awkward teenage discovery years earlier when, after finally achieving her first orgasm (post-Cruel Intentions viewing), she proudly shared the news with friends and was met with horror. "Boys got high-fived. Girls got shamed." That gap between female pleasure and cultural discomfort became the starting point for Private Parts, her now-famous animated short about masturbation and sexual equality. It began as a personal experiment, sketching vulvas in her studio, imagining what their facial expressions might be. Then, she started interviewing friends about their experiences and animating vulvas to match their voices. When It's Nice That and Channel 4 emailed her looking for submissions for a late-night slot, Anna shared a clip of two vulvas in casual conversation, and they were immediately sold. With a shoestring budget of £2,000 and a five-week deadline, she rallied 11 illustrators to help bring the film to life. "I set up a Dropbox, and talking genitals started flooding in from the four corners of the world while I was sitting in my bedroom at my mum's," she laughed. One standout moment came from an Amsterdam-based designer who created a CGI Rubik's Cube vagina, then took two weeks off work to spray paint 100 versions of it. The result of what started as a passion project is an iconic, hilarious, and touching film that still resonates ten years on. From humour to heartbreak: What Is Beauty The talk shifted gear when Anna began to speak about her younger sister's anorexia. In 2017, during her sister's third hospitalisation, Anna found herself questioning the roots of beauty ideals, particularly in Western culture. Witnessing her sister's pain reframed how she saw her own body. This sparked a deep dive into beauty through the ages, from the Venus of Willendorf, a 28,000-year-old fertility goddess, to the Versace supermodels of the 1990s and the surgically sculpted Kardashians of today. "You realise the pace of the change in beauty ideals," she says. "If you revisit the skeletal female bodies which defined the super skinny era of the 2000s and compare it to the enhanced curves of today, you realise that trying to keep up is not only futile; it's extremely dangerous." She also explored the disturbing trend of dismemberment in advertising – shots taken where the heads are intentionally out of frame – and the impact this has on self-perception. Her response was What Is Beauty, released in 2018 on International Women's Day and her sister's birthday. The short film went viral, amassing over 20 million views. "It was a love letter to her," Anna said. "Because it didn't have English dialogue, it travelled globally. The simplicity made it resonate." And despite its runaway success, it brought her zero income. "Then I made the worst advert for a bank the world has ever seen," she joked. "I made money, but it broke my creative spirit." Enter the Hag: Animation, myth and millennial angst OFFF attendees were also treated to the world-exclusive first look at Hag, Anna's new animated short, three years in the making. It's her most ambitious and most personal project yet. Made with the support of the BFI, awarding National Lottery funding, Has is a 16-minute fantasy set in a surreal version of Peckham. The main character is a childless, single, disillusioned woman with snakes for hair. "I had just broken up with a lockdown boyfriend after struggling with doubts for nearly 2 years,"' she reveals. "The next day, I was at a baby shower surrounded by friends with rings and babies who recoiled at my touch. I was surrounded by flies, and a dog was doing a poo right next to me. I just felt like a hag." Drawing on Greek mythology, Anna reimagines Medusa not as a jealous monster but as a feminist figure of rage, autonomy and misinterpretation. "I didn't know she was a rape victim until I started researching," she told me after the talk. "The story of Athena cursing her out of jealousy is such a tired trope. What if it was solidarity? What if the snakes were power?" In Hag, the character initially fights with her snakes – violently clipping them back in shame and battling with them – but by the end, they align. She embraces her monstrous self. "It's a metaphor for learning to love the parts of yourself you've been told are wrong," Anna said. "That journey is universal." Making the personal political (and funny) Telling a story so autobiographical wasn't easy. "It's exposing," Anna admitted. "My past work dealt with issues in the world. This one is about how I feel in the world." Even her ex-boyfriend plays himself. "Luckily, he's funny and cool about it. Otherwise, it would've been a disaster." She did worry about dramatising the baby shower scene too much. "None of those women were horrible in real life, but for the film, we needed to crank up the emotional tension," she says. "I just wanted to show that societal pressures make women feel monstrous whether they decide to conform or not. This is not a battle between hags and non-hags. These feelings affect us all." Co-writing the script with her dear friend and writer Miranda Latimer really helped. "It felt less exposing as we'd both lived versions of the same thing. Collaboration is liberating and makes me feel safer when being so honest," Anna explains. Sisterhood, generations and the pressure to conform It was very clear from our chat that Anna's younger sisters are a recurring thread throughout her work. "They've helped me understand the world through a Gen Z lens," she said. "Stalking my youngest sister on Instagram was how I noticed the way girls crop their faces or hide behind scribbles. It's dehumanising." That intergenerational awareness fuels many of her ideas. "I definitely wouldn't have made What Is Beauty without Maya. Seeing what she was going through just unlocked something." She's also keenly aware of the gender gap in healthcare. "So many women I know are living with pain, going years without a diagnosis. It's infuriating. If I get asked to work on anything to do with women's health, I'll say yes." Medusa, millennials, and the meaning of self-love One of Hag's most biting commentaries is about millennial self-care culture. "There's a scene in the character's bedroom – it's got a faded Dumbledore poster, self-help books, a flashing 'Namaste' sign. It's a shrine to the broken millennial." She laughs: "Self-love became a commodity. An expensive candle, a jade roller, and an oil burner from Muji. Like, really? That's it?" Her film pokes at the performative of wellness while still holding space for genuine vulnerability. This same self-awareness informs her reflections on generational shifts. "Gen Z is going through the same thing, just with a different flavour. It's all about skincare routines now – 11 steps for a 14-year-old. It's wild." Feminism with fangs (and a sense of humour) Anna's feminism is open, intersectional, and laced with humour. "My mum's a lesbian and a Child Protection lawyer who helped to make rape within marriage illegal in the UK," she shared. "She sometimes jokes that my work is a bit basic. But I'm OK with that – I think there's space for approachable feminism, too." Importantly, she wants to bring everyone into the conversation. "It means so much when men come up to me after talks. I don't want to alienate anyone. These stories are about people, not just women." What's Next? Hag will officially premiere later this year, and it's likely to resonate far and wide. It's raw, mythic, funny and furious – and thoroughly modern. As Anna put it: "I've been experiencing external pressure and internal longing while making this film. So I'm basically becoming a hag while making Hag." As far as metamorphoses go, that's one we'll happily watch unfold.

Credit: Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; Goodboy Picture Company / E+ / pialhovik / iStock / Getty Images May is National Masturbation Month, and we're celebrating with Feeling Yourself, a series exploring the finer points of self-pleasure. When I look back at pictures of myself in my early 20s, I see a confident young woman who was willing to talk about anything with anyone. But behind closed doors, I was hiding a secret shame that totally contradicted my public brand. I couldn't orgasm — not with a partner, not on my own.There had been fleeting attempts over the years to get the ol' engine rolling. I thought I could reason my way to climax: the internet, with its endless resources in the form of Reddit threads, message boards, and YouTube videos, seemed like the place to go. I turned online for information, emotional (first-person narratives from others who struggled) and practical (sex toys and tutorials). Nothing helped. In fact, all the accumulating knowledge only served to make me feel worse. For it to finally happen, at the age of 25, I had to strip everything back and take my sex drive fully offline for the first time.Failing to climaxThere's a scene in Eve Ensler's legendary play The Vagina Monologues when the audience hears from a woman who didn't have an orgasm until she was 72. "When she finally found her clitoris, she said she cried," the introduction goes. I remember hearing those words at the age of 18 and feeling a fluttering sense of recognition. Then came the chaser: dear god, please let me have one before I'm a septuagenarian. You May Also Like At that age, the inability to orgasm wasn't something that surprised me all that much. I'd read enough teen magazines, seen enough Sex and the City, to know all about the orgasm gap, and that 61 percent of men orgasm every time they have sex compared to 30 percent of women.Multiple studies have found that women are more likely to orgasm during masturbation than intercourse; a similarly consistent finding is that 10 percent of women never orgasm, no matter the circumstances.Yet as I moved through my twenties and failed to rectify the problem, I realised the friends I'd once bonded over this experience with weren't struggling anymore. I felt likeBut as a forthright young feminist on the cusp between the Gen Z and millennial generations, I was also unofficially educated under the tutelage of sex education YouTubers like Shan Boodram, Laci Green, and Hannah Witton. They taught me about the importance of people with vulvas knowing their bodies and having the confidence to tell sexual partners if they weren't getting them off. I spread their message far and wide. Female pleasure was so my brand that a close male friend once gave me a T-shirt with the words "The Future is Female (Ejaculation)" as a Secret Santa gift. I laughed, then went to the bathroom and cried, so deeply full of shame at the disconnect between my public confidence and inward inadequacy.Theoretically speaking, I knew just about everything there was to know about the orgasm…apart from how to have one myself. Very few people, beyond a handful of friends and former partners, knew about my struggle with anorgasmia (where people struggle to climax even with the application of sexual stimulation). I was scared of speaking the words "I can't come" into reality, or of feeling like even more of a failure if they checked in on my progress in the future and I had to tell them that no, I still couldn't.  Theoretically speaking, I knew just about everything there was to know about the orgasm…apart from how to have one myself. As Emily Nagoski writes in her bestselling book Come As You Are, so much of the female orgasm is in the mind. Nagoski theorises that female sexual pleasure has dual controls — an accelerator to turn you on and a brake to turn you off — and that balance is needed to achieve orgasm. But my brake was hyper-sensitive thanks toSex toys felt like a good starting point (god forbid I actually touch myself!), and my limited student budget meant I wanted a vibrator that gave a good bang for my buck, so to speak. I'd spend hours trawling through positive customer reviews for phrases like "can't come" or "never usually orgasm," hoping the same would happen for me if I purchased a clitoral stimulator or CBD lube. When it didn't, I felt more frustrated than ever. Mashable Trend Report: Coming Soon! Decode what’s viral, what’s next, and what it all means. Sign up for Mashable’s weekly Trend Report newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up! What I was searching for was a sense of recognition — an "oh, I'm not alone in this" feeling that my friends, while empathetic, understandably couldn't provide. (Yet whenever I now mention to friends that I didn't have an orgasm until I was 25, similar stories are divulged.) So I looked further afield, scouring message board threads and online articles for narratives from people who'd not been able to come either. The snatched moments of understanding made me feel less alone, albeit not necessarily always better.The next approach was more unconventional. Two friends bought me a subscription to OMGYes, the adult sex education website dedicated to facilitating female pleasure. Initially, I was embarrassed that it had come to this, but I gave it a go. A membership provided access to a library of practical (and extremely NSFW) tutorials on different masturbation techniques. I tried to follow along, but lacked perseverance and was quick to abandon the mission when things didn't happen immediately.At every stage, my attempts to orgasm were hindered by these deeply rooted feelings of shame and inadequacy, and a fear of feeling like even more of a failure should I try and not succeed. I knew I was missing out on an integral part of the human experience, but once the terrifying words "you're going to be on your deathbed never having had an orgasm" enter the mind, they're hard to shake. In order to halt this nihilistic spiral, I stopped trying altogether. It wasn't all bad. The sex, with both long-term and casual partners,So the problem bubbled away beneath the surface, rectifying it as simply not a priority. As with much of life, the arrival of COVID-19 changed things. I remember turning 25 and looking down the barrel of a new year and a third lockdown in the UK. I'm officially in my mid-twenties, I thought. If not now, when? Those interconnected feelings of embarrassment and failure were clearly holding me back. If I was going to figure out how to orgasm, that would only be achieved by removing expectation; expectation that, I realised, was coming directly from the internet aids I'd sought out for help. I needed to strip away the technological trappings and do the one very simple thing I'd been so scared to do: touch myself, and do it consistently. Related Stories What finally helped me orgasmI set myself a challenge. Every day, I would put my phone on the other side of the room and masturbate without sex toys.think these faint flutters were orgasms, and briefly returned to the message boards to see if others had experienced anything similar. Nobody described my exact feelings, but I kept at it.It was a conversation with a close friend, a doctor, that made the most marked difference. I told her about my current state, where I wasn't sure whether I was experiencing an orgasm or not. "You know if you want that to count, it counts," she told me. For the first time, someone was saying that I was on the right path, and not crashing into a wall. Without being dramatic (although said friend still laughs about how I credit her with my first orgasm), those words triggered a switch in my brain. As soon as I stopped feeling like I was foolish for even attempting to fight what I'd always perceived to be a losing battle, orgasms — proper ones, I was sure — came. I didn't cry or rush to text the friends greatly invested in my journey. Don't get me wrong, I was thrilled, but it felt like a wholly personal achievement, and one I wanted to sit in for a while. SEE ALSO: What is a ruined orgasm? Mostly, the feeling was one of relief, the lifting of a huge weight from my chest and the dissipation of so much secret shame. I remember thinking that if I never had an orgasm again, I would be happy. Given how easy I was now finding it once that bridge was crossed, though, I was pretty sure that wasn't going to be the case. I remember thinking that if I never had an orgasm again, I would be happy. If there's one thing I now know, it's that you can't intellectualise, let alone buy, an orgasm. Sure, products and internet resources may help, and in those most isolating moments, it was undoubtedly useful to see my experience reflected back in others. But over time, I found the accumulation of all this knowledge only added to my feelings of failure. I had to remove it all from my mind and do the thing I was most scared to — confront my own body — to make it happen. Given all that, I'm aware of the irony of writing my own "how I finally had an orgasm" narrative. But I know a story like mine, as long as it wasn't dwelled on too long or used as a point of comparison, would have helped my younger self. It's why I keep far less personal aspects of my life out of my work, yet have always known I wanted to write about this experience someday. There are so few narratives about a total inability to orgasm out there. If you're reading this now and see something of yourself in my story, I hope it can provide some. It can happen for you — I truly believe that — whether you're 25 or 72. You'll get there. Isobel Lewis Isobel Lewis is a freelance culture and lifestyle journalist based in London. Formerly of The Independent, she now regularly writes for The New York Times, Service95, and Time Out.