The Cutprice Guignol

When artist Megumi Igarashi took to the Tama River in Tokyo in March 2013, she did so in a vessel unlike any other: a kayak constructed from a 3D scan of her own vulva. The Pussy-Boat, as she nicknamed it, would serve as the centrepoint of a series of arrests and an eventual court case regarding Igarashi’s yonic work – and a reminder of the weird relationship the art world has with the vagina.

Igarashi began her artistic career in the late 1990s, after studying philosophy in Tokyo; she was awarded a New Artist’s prize by manga publisher Kodansha, where she briefly worked as a manga artist, but soon found herself disillusioned with the industry’s focus on reader surveys. Moving on to her own artwork, she started going by the pseudonym Rokudenashiko – good-for-nothing girl, or bastard girl, depending on your translation – and turned her attention to work of a more yonic nature.

Megumi Igarashi’s canoe was not her first foray into vulva-centric art; she had first begun to explore the idea of using yonic imagery several years before, during the development of her 2012 Deco Man exhibition. The idea for the Deco-Man (an amalgamation of “decoration” and “manko”, a Japanese slang term for vagina) project was inspired by the lack of realistic depiction of such genitalia in art and pop culture in general – the taboo around vulva in Japanese culture was such that Igarashi had developed severe insecurities about her own, with vulvae being blurred or mosaiced out in their pop culture depictions while penises were treated far more neutrally.

Using a disposable sushi tray and alganite usually employed by dentists for taking moulds of teeth, Igarashi took an impression of her own vulva. From the mould, she took various casts of her own genitalia and used it as the basis for a number of detailed pieces – from dioramas of astronauts exploring the moon and detailed and almost pastoral depictions of a day at a girl’s school to reimaginings of classic artwork such as Van Gogh’s sunflower series with her vulva at the centre. Alongside this exhibition, she released the Deco Man manga, which explored her relationship with her genitals and what drove her to feature them so prominently in her art – it follows the development of the Rokudenashiko character as an artist and her relationship with her body in general and genitals in particular, formed by careless sexual partners, a beautiful older sister, and surgeons willing to enact medical alterations on her labia. Her approach to vulvae in her work was decidedly playful and exploratory, not limited by specifically sexual interpretations of the body part, but curious and witty in a way that would come to define much of Igarashi work going forward. During this period, she developed Manko-Chan or Miss Pussy, a small mascot modelled on her vulva, who is, and I cannot state this more clearly, the cutest thing I have ever seen. I mean, look at her little clitoris hat!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, due to the taboo nature of the subject matter, Igarashi earned some backlash for her exploration of the vulva as a focal point of her exhibition – “I thought it was just funny to decorate my pussy mould and make it a diorama,” she wrote on her blog. “but I was very surprised to see how people get upset at seeing my works or even to hear me say manko”. However, it didn’t keep Igarashi from diving deeper – quite literally – into the possibilities of pussy-centric art.

The following year, Igarashi was inspired to continue her exploration of the vulva in a her art, but this time on a larger scale. She considered a few different possibilities – a door, perhaps, or even a full-sized car – but eventually settled on the development of what she called Man-Boat (pussy-boat), drawn to the idea in part because of cultural and folkloric connections between women and the sea. She set up a crowdfunding campaign in the summer of 2013, and, by September that year, it had pulled in nearly twice the original goal amount from more than one hundred supporters – a total of one million yen (around $6000 or £4000), because voyaging the seas by vulva doesn’t come cheap. With the project funded, Igarashi began work on her Man-Boat, documenting much of the process on her blog.

Starting with 3D scans of her vulva, Igarashi shaped the scans into a mould that would be shaped to fit over the top of a kayak – the scans were also shared with anyone who donated more than three thousand yen to her crowdfunding campaign, in the hopes that they could be used for other projects to destigmatize the inclusion of the vulva in art. The process was documented on her blog, culminating in March 2014, when the Man-Boat was finally completed and took its maiden voyage across the Tama River in Tokyo.

The Man-Boat’s maiden voyage went off without a hitch – but, within months, Igarashi would face arrest by Japanese authorities as a result of the project. On July 12th, 2014, Igarashi was arrested at her apartment by ten police officers for distribution of obscene materials as a result of her sharing the 3D scans of her vulva with a number of her crowdfunding supporters, and was swiftly placed into a hold at a women’s prison while she awaited trial.

Her arrest sparked almost instant backlash in both the local art community and internationally – no doubt due, in part, at least, to the scandalous nature of Igarashi’s work, ironically enough. A Change.org petition soon gathered more than 20,000 signatures calling for her release, demanding that local police “should spend their time arresting real sex crime offenders who actually hurt people. Not arresting artists!”; Igarashi, for her part, denied the charges, indicating that she had not directly sold the scans of her vagina and vulva and therefore could not be prosecuted under obscenity laws. A successful appeal of her arrest led to her release less than a week later, on July 18th – but it would not be Igarashi’s last vulva-related tangle with the law. A few months later, in early December of the same year, Igarashi was arrested for a second time while displaying several of her vulva-inspired diorama pieces at an adult store owned by activist Kitahara Minori, this time on three separate charges related to Japan’s obscenity laws –  “obscenity display”, “obscenity electromagnetic record”, and “obscenity electromagnetic recording medium distribution”, for both her display of her vulva-inspired work, her public voyage of the Man-Boat, and the digital sharing of the scans of her genitals. Pleading not guilty, she was released on bail on 28th December, and, by April of the following year, Igarashi’s work – and vulva – would go on trial.

The case against Igarashi was no small matter – she faced up to two years in prison and a large fine if found guilty, and a significant portion of her work, including the Man-Boat itself, was seized as evidence leading up the trial. Authorities pursued a fine of 800,000 yen, and, on 9th April 2015, the court case went ahead.

Igarashi argued that her work was focused on “fun, cheerful things that attempt to overturn prevailing perceptions of female genitalia… If there continues to be no fair criteria, museums will be less inclined to hang challenging art or work by similar artists, and the arts as an institution will become closed minded”, and shared some delightful sketches of her time in the courtroom. However, in less than a month, her case would come to a close, with mixed results – while the Man-Boat was deemed abstract enough not to look like female genitalia to a casual viewer, Igarashi was fined for sharing the 3D scans of her vagina, the data of which, the judge claimed, could be used to replicate her vagina and cause sexual arousal. Minori, the owner of the shop who had been arrested alongside Igarashi, was also fined for her involvement in the incident.

And, while the censorship of vulvae in art had rarely before reached such an extent, the backlash against Igarashi’s work was far from the first time that the art world found itself in an uneasy relationship with the vagina. Judy Chicago’s iconic 1979 The Dinner Party – a large-scale piece that featured, amongst other things, yonic ceramic plates placed at settings laid for various iconic women throughout history – was described by contemporary critics as “ceramic 3D pornography“, while French artist Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du monde, which depicts a reclined woman’s vulva, was the centre of a censorship debacle on social media in 2011.

During the 2010s, in fact, there was renewed interest in the vagina and vulva as a focal point for artistic expression, with Igarashi’s work far from unique in the scrutiny it came under. In Sydney in 2013, an exhibition based on the Philip Werner photography collection 101 Vaginas (which very much is exactly what it sounds like – just over a hundred pictures of vaginas) was monitored by police after complaints, with even posters including the word “vagina” earning the ire of the local community. Performance artist Casey Jenkins was the target of disgust and dismissal online after her 2016 piece Casting Off My Womb, during which she inserted a skein of wool into her vagina and used it to knit for the following twenty-eight days, drew attention online – “I think I just threw up in my mouth a little”, one commenter remarked, while another suggested that Jenkins was in need of psychological help. Milo Moire, a Swiss performance artist, was dismissed as “absurd, gratuitous, trite and desperate” for her piece entitled PlopEgg in which she painted a canvas using paint expelled from her vagina. In 2013, in protest of the sexualized depictions of women’s bodies, Sydney University’s student newspaper published an edition which featured the censored vulvae of several students on the cover, only to have it recalled days after publication for obscenity. The same magazine, twenty years earlier, had featured an uncensored penis on the cover without issue (though perhaps that’s not the best choice of words on my part).

Which brings us to another related matter – namely, the phallus. How is the penis being treated in art in comparison to the vagina and vulva? It’s difficult to make one-to-one comparisons, but, broadly, the penis is far more acceptable in both classical and modern art as compared to the vulva – many ancient Greek and Roman statues that are still displayed in prominent museums and galleries today feature male nudes with visible penises, while the female nudes usually have smooth, featureless areas where their vulvae should be. Some of the most iconic male figures in art – perhaps most notably Michelangelo’s David – have visible and relatively realistic penises. Contemporaneous to Igarashi’s work, Russian art collective Voina won a state-sponsored art prize for their graffiti of an enormous erection on a bridge in St Petersburg in 2011, while Turner prize-winning artist Grayson Perry in 2016 created a piece criticizing gender inequality in the world of finance with a large, glazed penis. Perhaps most gallingly, Kawasaki, a city not far removed from where Igarashi herself was tried and fined for her art, holds a yearly Festival of the Steel Phallus celebration, during which a number of penis-shaped decorations and statues are paraded around, including a glowing black phallus that stands at several feet tall.

I don’t think it’s possible to make one-to-one comparisons between the depictions of penises and vulvae in art – when it comes down to it, there is too much art being created by so many artists who bring so many different perspectives to their work to make definitive statements on those matters. But, broadly speaking and based on the research that I’ve been doing for this article, it seems clear that there is a notable difference between the way that penises and vulvae are treated as a focal point for art – one more broadly accepted as both a part of classical and modern art, the other often diminished, dismissed, or even litigated.

If I had to take a swing at guessing why, I’d say that there’s a comfortability in seeing vulvae as something inherently and inescapably sexual, an extension of the sexualization of women’s bodies as a whole, as opposed to subjects of artistic or creative expression. And, when the vagina is viewed as inherently sexual, it makes sense that depictions of it in art would be written off as pornography or obscenity as a result. It was the erotic potential – real or imagined – of Igarashi’s 3D scans that ultimately led her to losing her case, the assumption being that any reasonably realistic depiction of a vagina was inherently arousing and therefore obscene. While penises and depictions of them are downright mundane, often steeped in comedy – there’s a reason that cock-and-balls graffiti is amongst the most populous and well-documented historical artwork in the world, after all – vaginas are still taboo, barely existing in art or culture beyond their sexual application. Of course, they are sex organs, but they are also mundane and average parts of life for more than half of the population on earth, as well as serving as vessels for birth, menstruation, and many other manners of non-sexual activity, and, as a result, I think should be acceptable subjects for art beyond the erotic. While Igarashi appealed the ruling against her the following year, on the basis that “the ruling explained my artwork was OK because it didn’t look like real female genitals…it still says genitalia are obscene objects”, her appeal was rejected and the fine upheld – the obscenity of that body part, even in art, defined by its perceived erotic nature.

In writing this piece, it struck me how unused I was to seeing vaginas and vulvae depicted in the manner of Igarashi and other artists like her – as the owner of a vagina myself and someone who has been in physical relationships with other vagina-owners, these specific depictions of that genitalia through the lens of practicality, artistic expression, and even humour were new to me. In looking around Igarashi’s virtual museum (which I would thoroughly recommend – you can check it out here), I was struck not only by her creativity and wit, but with how rarely I had ever seen the vulva presented with such curiosity in a non-sexual setting. I’ve come to fall in love with her work, not just because it’s brilliant, but because of the way it unabashedly celebrates something so often veiled in the very obscenity that she was prosecuted for.

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Sources and Further Reading

What Is Obscenity?: The Story Of A Good For Nothing Artist And Her Pussy by Rokudenashiko

At the Source (Code): Obscenity and Modularity in Rokudenashiko’s Media Activism by Anne McKnight