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A Vagina Museum for the UK

By on January 22, 2018

SCIENCENSEX

Written by Joseph Dunsay. After earning a Masters of Science in Ecology and Evolution, Joseph Dunsay became a science writer for international audiences. Find more Jewrotica writing by Joseph here.

Rated PG-13

A Jewish woman plans to open the world’s first vagina museum in the UK. Florence Schechter saw the need to open the museum for the sake of gender equality when she learned that Iceland has a penis museum but no nation hosts a vagina museum. The rude comments people made upon hearing her plans strengthened her resolve to make a museum that would portray the vagina as a healthy part of a woman’s body rather than a source of shame.

Schechter wants the museum to fight injustices associated with vaginas such as sexual assaults, female genital mutilation, laws against homosexuality, and shaming. Exhibits will also educate the public about the anatomy and diversity of vaginas, an important task in a nation where half of women aged 26-35 could not find a vagina on a diagram of the female reproductive system.

Although the vagina museum will break modern taboos about depicting vaginas, inhabitants of the British Isles had no problem displaying women and their vaginas a millennium ago. A Sheela na gig is a traditional European carving of a woman and her spread vagina. Experts believed that that the style arrived in the British Isles from continental Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries. Sheela na gigs adorned medieval churches, tower-houses, and holy wells. Some theories said they were a warning against the evils of lust, but newer interpretations attribute them to pagan concepts of female power, fertility, and the cycle of life and death.

Attitudes towards vaginas and the women who posses them change over time. Modern jokes about vaginas reflect cultural norms, not biological facts. There is nothing inherently embarrassing about a woman’s reproductive parts. Plenty of cultures viewed vaginas and female sexuality positively. The vagina museum will promote that viewpoint in the UK.

After earning a Masters of Science in Ecology and Evolution, Joseph Dunsay became a science writer for international audiences. His LGBT erotic e-book launched in the summer of 2015.
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