Vaginas, Vulvas and Vicissitudes
The Vagina Museum Untangles the Social, Political and Religious Systems which have Undermined Women and their Bodies for Millennia
Burrowed under railway arches, with the sound of trains thundering overhead, The Vagina Museum (VM) in Bethnal Green is ‘the world's first bricks and mortar museum dedicated to vaginas, vulvas and the gynaecological anatomy’. In paying reverence to women’s sexual organs, this small charity sets out to correct systemic misconceptions surrounding the female body.
Perusing the museum’s exhibitions, one recognises that, despite representing half of the population, the fight for equal rights for women and their bodies is a prodigious task. The museum notes that, despite approaching 15 arts and heritage funders to assist with its exhibition Menopause: What’s Changed?, none were willing to help and it therefore relies on donations from the patrons and visitors. This lack of funding appears to be reflected in the curatorial considerations – paper captions, chipboard walls, and donated artwork – though the bare-bone aesthetic works within the parameters of the museum’s mission.
Though the word ‘menopause’ entered the lexicon in 1821, Menopause: What’s Changed? aims to destabilise prevailing inaccurate notions of womanhood, and scrutinise the notion that women become less ‘feminine’ as they age.
The historic material is bleak. The casting of perimenopause, menopausal and post- menopausal women as hysteric was rife until the 19th century. For those suffering from ‘climacteric insanity’, remedies included isolation, morphine, or being incarcerated in asylums. Another exhibit asks ‘were witches menopausal?’: the diagnoses for the unfortunate bear uncanny resemblance to menopause symptoms, which visitors are encouraged to underline.
Not all of this backward thinking was, well, backward. The exhibition notes Hormone Replacement Therapy’s entry to market in the 20th century, where it was presented as a cure-all – a panacea, allegedly ‘offering relief from symptoms while playing on sexist concerns regarding femininity and ageing’, all the while adding heft to pharmaceutical companies’ pockets. In the permanent exhibition, From A to V, the curators are at pains to demonstrate that burgeoning for-profit industries continue to thrive on women’s insecurities, pedalling snakeoils under the rubric of ‘empowerment’.
The VM champions the positive role middle-aged and older women can have in society. A caption notes that during menopause, the brain adapts, which can cause women to react less to negative stimuli (‘not suffering fools gladly’), become more empathetic and take on a supportive role in helping family members to increase the number of surviving grandoffspring. In a reading nook, a study notes how, in killer whales ‘grandmothers increase the survival of their grandoffspring, and these effects are greatest when grandmothers are no longer reproducing’. The study attributes killer whales’ longest postreproductive lifespan of all non-human animals to this detail.
The curators have taken care to demonstrate that many of these issues are intersectional in nature. We are reminded that much of the repression still present surrounding women’s bodies today comes down to class, while upstairs, a caption notes the ubiquity of scientific racism, a pseudoscience which was responsible, among other things, for declaring that Black women have larger labia, as a justification for viewing them as more sexual, feral and animalistic. An excerpt from Pliny the Elder’s encyclopaedia Natural History from the first century CE makes spurious claims, suggestive of someone who had never encountered a real woman: ‘avoid period sex during an eclipse because the man will die’ takes the biscuit. Though amusing, these misogynistic regimes, rooted in cultural traditions or with the pomp of ‘science’ continue to excise women from true bodily autonomy. Roughly 200 million people today live with female genital mutilation (FGM), which continues even in the West. A caption notes that, a 2016 article in the Economist argued for practising FGM in hospitals in the UK ‘instead of by community elders in the home countries of girls at risk’. This ludicrous suggestion would have effectively systematised and normalised the archaic practice. UK-based charity Integrate UK released a song in response, which you can watch here.
Much of these regressive ideas come down to choice: a woman’s over her own body, but more often a man’s over a woman’s. Many in the West believe that gender equality has been achieved. Either that, or they just aren’t interested. For some, the words ‘vulva’ and ‘clitoris’ evoke a near-guttural discomfort.
With the global rise of the manosphere, the growing political influence of Protestant evangelism in the US, the rightward pivot of UK politics, and cultural institutions fearful of engaging in identity politics, we are in a present historical moment which threatens to bring these issues to the doorstep of all women.