Sometimes I wonder just how far we’ve progressed as a culture. You’d never see an American city celebrating body parts as they do in Japan. Children cradling penises, walking through the street with reverence as they bow down to genitalia. Giant penises are the item of the day there. In our society we do worship body parts but in a different fashion…as I wrote about in an earlier post you can buy penis items for almost any occasion.
Are there equal opportunities for the vagina? Sure you can get lollipops and there are most definitely other kitschy or porn-ish type representations. But dare I point out that when the Japanese chose to celebrate fertility and renewal they worshipped the penis… not the vagina. The whole man versus woman debate is another whole topic. Not today!
The celebration of the vagina became the ‘in’ thing during the 60’s and 70’s and became associated with the growth of feminist thought in our country. Judy Chicago is famous for her art exhibit, The Dinner Party, a dinner table set with vagina plates in honor of various famous women; O’Keefe, Woolfe, etc. Georgia O’Keefe painted beautiful renderings of flowers with genitalia themes. We now have the Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler, written in 1996.
I’ve been looking through images on Goggle; the pictures aren’t necessarily all that pretty. The vagina as a stand up piece of art is difficult for some people to look at. Finding something to use for this post that was borderline tasteful and funny.. but not crude or vulgur was impossible. I saw a button last week at my conference that I had to have. Of course by the time I found the vendor she’d sold out: “My vagina, Priceless!”
We have a love hate relationship with our body parts. We snicker about them, say crude things. We ban natural expressions, breast feeding isn’t allowed in public in some places; yet allow violent and pornographic representations of sex and body parts. I’m betting a significant number of women out here have never looked at theirs. Remember when you first grabbed a mirror and took a look? Now days women have all the hair removed, they even have surgery to trim to lips, do a little shaping! Bet that hurts like hell. Ouch! We don’t compare our hoo ha, vejay jay, bits and pieces, yum yum, coochie, box, beaver, muff, honey pot…………… We don’t walk around in the locker showing off our stuff, wondering who’s smaller, more delicate.. you just can’t see it w/o some contortionist type pose. We wash it, powder, spray, sanitize the poor thing to make sure it’s delicate enough. Who decided that it needed to be sanitized? I”m guessing that Massengil and Summer’s Eve were not developed by a woman. Do you carry around morning breeze spray in my purse and stop every hour on a hot July day to bring that fresh scent to my delicate flower? Got that morning fresh feeling?
We need to reclaim our vaginas in all their glory, unaltered, proudly unadorned and complex manifestations of the glory that makes us women! No shame, no porn. Let’s march them up and down the street on silver platters. Envision young men, reverently carrying rubber vaginas draped on red cloths, um.. maybe white cloths on large silver trays… marching down Main Street, USA. How about May Day?
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