Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The vagina fad

A puerile modern obsession with the V-word

In the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, there’s a picture that, last time I looked, was curtained off. A couple of Japanese girls came out from behind the curtain, stuffing their hands into their mouths to stop the giggles. I went in to see the cause of the girly mirth and there it was, Gustave Courbet’s ‘Origine du Monde’, a painting of a woman’s open legs, with dark pubic hair and a glimpse, but only a glimpse, of th e labia. It’s obviously provocative: you could say that Courbet has cut to the chase as far as male viewers are concerned. He’s got his Mount of Venus, lots of hair and a bit of bottom and, further up, there’s some uncovered breast.

In other words, everything about the woman that doesn’t relate to sex has simply been topped and tailed; there may or may not have been humour intended. But the thing about the picture is what you don’t see: it’s not explicit in an anatomical way presumably because, to make it so, the model would have had to put herself into a less relaxed and inviting posture. And that’s the obvious thing about women’s genitals: they’re not on show, not the way men’s bits are. Nature is, if you like, reticent about vaginas: unlike breasts, which are both useful and showy.

But that reticence is, and not for the first time, about to be broached, only in a more high-minded way than Courbet’s. Naomi Wolf, the attractive feminist and author of The Beauty Myth, has written a book, Vagina: a New Biography. A copy is on its way to me, but the embargo from the publishers Virago (owned by Little, Brown) is so prescriptive, I had better confine myself to the description of it in the public domain:

‘A medical crisis resulted in sending Naomi Wolf on an unexpected journey — to tease out the link between sexuality and creativity.

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