Japanese Vulva Censorship

This article on a Japanese artist recently crossed my screen, and it’s sadly sex-negative as well as ill-informed as to female body parts. In a sentence:

Provocative Japanese artist Megumi Igarashi, who has been arrested twice this year on charges related to her design for a kayak that incorporates a 3-D model of her genitals, has been indicted on charges that she distributed “obscene” data.

However, most of the article refers to the genitals in particular as her vagina, when technically the vagina is the passage between the outer female genital features (the vulva) to the cervix and uterus. And having clicked over to see a picture of the infamous kayak, I can say that it’s definitely a depiction of her vulva, since we can see the labia, the clitoris, and so on.

So, while I think this kind of censorship is utterly deplorable, and that artists should be free to explore all kinds of sexual themes in their work, I also want to remind people that accurate anatomical terminology is important too.

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