Vagina is not a bad word
Yes, it’s 2021, but vaginas are still controversial.
The year begins with the Brazilian artist Juliana Notari being attacked on social media for her work “Diva”, a recently opened sculpture at the Artistic-Botanical Park Usina de Arte, in the city of Água Preta, state of Pernambuco.
The work is giant vulva made of concrete, with 33 meters long, 16 meters wide and 6 meters deep. It also represents the open wound caused by the violence against women that structures our society.
+ Paula Guimarães from Portal Catarinas did a great interview with the artist
+ This case was also the subject of this conversation with Cynara Menezes, Ivana Bentes, Laura Capriglione and Juliana Notari on the Youtube of Revista Fórum
This reminded me of the film Vulva 3.0 (2014), a documentary made by the German activists Claudia Richarz and Ulrike Zimmermann to discuss the image and representation of the vulva. In an interview at the time, they said: “We made a film about the interventions in the vulva, because this topic is still taboo and receives little attention. Women have no positive images of the vulva and no names for it. Even gynecologists do not learn anything about the clitoris, because as the organ does not get sick it is not a medical topic. Even more serious is the fact that doctors who are not even introduced to female pleasure organs during their training can perform cosmetic surgery in the area”.
Then I discovered that, while an image of a vulva generates a big chaos, thousands of women undergo plastic surgery to reduce their genital lips, the so-called labioplasty or nymphoplasty. According to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, labiaplasty was performed by 138 thousand women in 2017. Brazil is the world leader in female genital plastic surgery. From 2015 to 2017, the number of surgeries of this type went from around 12 thousand to 28 thousand. And it kept growing: the most recent survey, launched in 2020, shows that labiaplasty increased 24.1% in 2019 worldwide and 73.3% since 2015. This figures do not include the “vaginal rejuvenation” procedures, which include non-surgical interventions to “design your vagina”.
Images of vulvas are only welcome when they are photoshopped in porn magazines and when they are used by men. This has serious consequences for the health of girls and women. The belief in an ideal — and unreal — vulva reinforces taboos, constraints and the distance that many women have in relation to their own bodies. It is the perfect way to neglect health care and have an unsatisfactory sex life.
68% of Brazilian women are not satisfied with their genitalia. 15% of them do not look at it daily and 25% do not usually touch it (data from the survey “The Stigmas of the Vagina”, launched in 2020 by Nielsen Brasil and Intimus).
That is why initiatives that show and talk about the diversity of vulvas are fundamental, in order to deconstruct taboos and encourage education and health. One beautiful example is The Vulva Gallery, by the illustrator Hilde Atalanta. It is also important visiting the Vulvani, by Britta Wiebe and Jamin Mahmood, a platform about menstruation that includes the world’s first stock photo gallery exclusively about menstruation. And read books like “Fruit of Knowledge: The Vulva vs. The Patriarchy”, by Liv Strömquist. And spread the work of artists like Elisa Riemer.
Discover and publicize these initiatives, discover and publicize the vulvas.
We need to show more, talk more, and bring the vulva to the center of the room. Repeat, repeat, repeat until no one else has any problems with it — neither the others’ nor their own.
