We Need to End the War on Vaginas

Mankind has stepped up the war on the holiest of holies.

I don’t know about you but I really like vaginas. I don’t have one myself but I’m a huge fan of them; they’re the portal through which most human life enters the world, they provide endless pleasure to both men and women and are, in general, a lot of fun. Sometimes they can look a bit weird (the closest visual comparison I can think of is the underside of the Facehugger from Alien) but that’s a small price to pay for countless hours of enjoyment in and around the ol’ silk funnel.

And yet, despite the inherent awesomeness of love pockets, they seem to be getting an extra-hard time recently. This week, Tokyo-based artist Megumi Igarashi said she will contest obscenity charges after being arrested. Her crime? Sending data to her fans that would enable them to make 3D printed replicas of her honey pot. The authorities sent 10 police officers to her home before the 42-year-old was taken to jail. All this in a country that only got round to making child pornography illegal last month.

And Igarashi isn’t the only one who’s having to worry about a crackdown on the pink fortress. Last month, a woman in the United States was told that Apple wouldn’t engrave ‘vagina’ onto her iPad on the grounds that the word was deemed inappropriate. At first glance this doesn’t seem entirely out of the ordinary until you discover the words ‘penis’ and ‘dick’ are deemed perfectly acceptable for engraving on devices made by the computer giant. Whoever keeps things kosher at Apple HQ clearly has a thing for schlong, which is hardly a crime in and of itself, but there has to be some give and take at the company when it comes to genital representation.

And it gets worse. Last year, American biology teacher Tim McDaniels faced both an outcry from parents and an investigation overuse of the word ‘vagina’ in a 10th grade biology lesson. The year before that, US State Representative Lisa Brown was banned from speaking in the Michigan House of Representatives after using the word in a debate on abortion. A lot of people, it would appear, have some serious issues with the magical cave of wonder.

So why are people so uncomfortable with vaginas? They’ve been around long enough for us to get used to them, not to mention the fact that most of us came out of one, and yet they are facing abysmal treatment across the globe. Megumi Igarashi, Tim McDaniels and Lisa Brown are troubling case studies, not least because they are all in so-called ‘developed’ countries. In other parts of the world, sexual violence in war zones and female genital mutilation are a horrifying reality of everyday life. What hope do women in developing nations have when companies like Apple are displaying the sort of gender bias that defies all logic?

There’s a nasty double standard at work here. Female bodies, naked or otherwise, are currently plastered across mainstream media. Game Of Thrones, the most popular TV show in the world, seems to have a quota of at least one nude woman per episode. Hot womanly bods are everywhere when it suits us, but anytime the v-word makes an appearance, even when someone just says it out loud, the general consensus is one of severe discomfort or outright shock.

Megumi, a woman who made her very own vagina-themed kayak, has said she wants to challenge this double standard through her art. We could do with more like her. It’s only through challenging established norms that we have any chance of dissolving the perceived stigma around female anatomy.

In the long-run, no-one benefits from a mindset that discriminates against women’s bodies. It severely hampers any progress we make as a species towards more equality between the sexes and better sexual health.  We need people like Megumi Igarashi. We need more vagina art. We need better sex education in our schools. We need Apple to lead by example and stop acting like idiots. In short, we need to end the war on vaginas. Because they’re awesome.