By Manasi Nene
“There’s a penis museum in Iceland, which is pretty cool,” says YouTube vlogger Florence Schechter, “but there’s no vagina museum… anywhere, in the whole world”.
She’s got a point.
“There’s no place dedicated to the female anatomy, and I was pretty upset about this,” she continues. So she decided to make her own vagina museum.
Schechter is trying to raise funds for it via Patreon – you can contribute too! After making a video dedicated to weird animal penises – no, seriously – she wanted to make a video about vaginas and female organs in the animal kingdom. Except, there wasn’t that much to write about, because there wasn’t, and still isn’t, a whole lot of documentation.
Schechter is a London-based science communicator, and the co-founder of Collab Lab, a video production company. She is best known for her YouTube channel, where she tries to make science (and especially biology) easier for those of us that gave it up after twelfth grade. Once she found out that only half of UK’s women – between the ages of 26 and 35 – are able to correctly label the vagina on a diagram, she knew something had to be done about it.
She hopes that this will be a starting point for breakthroughs in sex education as well. According to the Patreon page, she hopes to conduct events that will discuss tough issues like sexual assault, genital mutilation, and under-representation in science and politics; but there will also be comedy nights, plays, workshops, and collections and exhibits of work related to the science, culture and history of vaginas. And, of course, she plans to have a gift shop with vagina merch.
There are a few attempts at this sort of work already – there’s a travelling exhibit, there’s a virtual museum; podcasts like Sex Nerd Sandra, and works of art like The Vagina Monologues and Cliteracy that have been taking tough discussions to a wider audience. In India itself, our avenues are related to either half-assed measures in school textbooks, or television shows like DD’s Main Kuchh Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon.
We agree, there definitely isn’t enough discussion around our sexual health, and sex-positivity is something we can only hope to find in the discourse today, if we’re really lucky. Will a museum on the other side of the world really change much? We don’t know, but we can’t wait to find out.