Vagina Museum

📋🚨 Survey Klaxon 🚨📋

Cysters and Endometriosis UK are inviting people of colour who have suspected or diagnosed endometriosis to take part in ‘Investigating Delayed Diagnosis of Endometriosis Among People of Colour in the UK’, a survey that seeks to gather insights into the experiences of endometriosis for those from marginalised communities.

Please take part or share to help us in our mission to ensure that all voices are heard in discussions about healthcare policy and initiatives.

🔗 in our bio!

NEW VAG SWAG

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This is not a drill!

We’re delighted to unveil some new p***y pride merch this month. We have a new range of pride flag stickers in store, brand spanking new pronoun badge designs, and a menacingly lavender tote bag.

NEW - Pronoun Badges (£2 each)

✨ Designed exclusively for the Va**na Museum
✨ Come in seven different brightly coloured options
✨ 31mm wide
✨ Steel pin back

*Cuterus plushie sold separately.

"Ecstasy" by Leopold Schmutzler (1864-1940)

Beyond Silence & Stigma: a conversation about menopause

📅 27th June
⏰ 7.30pm
💸 £5/10
📍 Va**na Museum

Dr. Jill Kirby and Prof. Marie Mulvey-Roberts were two of the main contributors to our current exhibition, Menopause: What’s Changed? Their work brings this subject, which has been shrouded in silence for millenia into the light. Join us for a conversation about the cultural history of menopause, exploring how menopause has been understood, experienced and represented through time.

The evening will be moderated by Zoe Williams, the Director of the Va**na Museum.

Structure

19:30: Buffer & introductions

19:40 - 20:20: Jill Kirby & Marie Mulvey-Roberts Presentations (15 - 20 minutes each)

20:20 - 20:30: Comfort break

20:30 - 21:00: Discussion with Zoe

21:00 - 21:30: Audience Q&A

Speakers

Dr Jill Kirby is an Associate Professor at the University of Suss*x, currently working on a history of menopause in 20th century Britain. She is interested in histories of ordinary people, everyday life, health and wellbeing.

Marie Mulvey-Roberts is Emerita Professor in English Literature at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She is interested in the cultural aspects of menopause and in Gothic, gender and the body.

What’s on at the Va**na Museum in June?

The June calendar is here! As always, the schedule is packed. We’ve got all the regulars: sapphic mingling, cunty crafting, cliterature, pub(e) quizzing, writer’s gyming. on top of all that, the trans talent show is back, and we’ve got bi+ banner-making and a panel on menopause.

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▼ Saturday 7th June 2pm - Out of Hospital into Myself: Embroidered Healthcare Narratives

▼ Saturday 7th June 11am - Trans Ephemera

▼ Sunday 8th June 2pm - Writer’s Gym

▼ Saturday 14th June 2pm - Bi+ Empowerment Flag-making Workshop for Pride

▼ Sunday 15th June 2pm - Cunty Crafts

▼ Thursday 19th June 7.30pm - Monthly Sapphic Mix & Mingle

▼ Friday 20th June 7.30pm - The Va**na Museum Pub(e) Quiz

▼ Sunday 22th June 3pm - Crafternoon in the Park

▼ Wednesday 25th June 7pm - Cliterature: Bloody Hell! Edited by Mona Eltahawy

▼ Friday 27th June 7.30pm - Beyond Silence and Stigma: a conversation about menopause

▼ Saturday 28th June 8pm - Trans Talent Show

▼ Sunday 29th June 7.30pm - WIP Untitled Sexual Health Show by White Noise Theatre

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Get your tickets via the link tree in our bio!

What is a va**na? Finally, you sigh with relief, the Va**na Museum is out there answering a *simple* question.

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We regret to inform you it’s not that simple. It’s actually fairly complicated, and here’s why...

We’ll start at the place that people go for a nice simple definition which absolutely misses all nuance and isn’t a great place to learn biology: the dictionary.

Merriam-Webster gives us this: “a canal in a female mammal that leads from the uterus to the external or***ce of the v***a”

Cambridge gives us this prounoun-laden definition: “the part of a woman or other female mammal’s body that connects her outer s*x organs to her uterus”

Collins really goes hog wild on description with its definition of va**na: “the moist canal in most female mammals, including humans, that extends from the cervix of the uterus to an external opening between the l***a minora”

Now, all of these dictionary definitions have elements that we could spend days picking apart, such as “does a va**na inherently need to be moist?” and “does it cease to be a va**na after a hysterectomy?”

But what we’re really going to focus on today is something these dictionary definitions all have in common: the assertion that the va**na is a mammalian structure.

(in the interests of fairness, we’ll mention that in its secondary definition, Merriam-Webster tautologically concedes that “va**na” could mean “a canal that is similar in function or location to the va**na and occurs in various animals other than mammals”)

Now, we’re going to take a little digression to celebrate duck va**nas. Ducks, we hope we don’t need to tell you, are not mammals.

Ducks also have *fascinating* internal genitalia, which comprise of a corkscrewing maze full of blind alleys wherein an unwanted p***s can be sent into a dead end.

Is this cool bit of kit a va**na?

The thing is, va**nas, female ge****ls, spermathecae, copulatory ducts, whatever you want to call them, have been horribly under-researched. Science’s understanding of them is nowhere near as strong as it could be. And to really define “va**na”, we need to know more about them.

(Thread abridged)

Background image credit: Natalie Gordon

A little late for World Menstrual Health Day, but never too late to air a grudge against a long-dead physician.

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Meet John Maubray (c. 1700-1732), who believed men were inherently superior to women in every way, *especially* in midwifery.

Throughout history, attending births had been seen to be the domain of women. In the early 18th century, physicians - who were always men because women weren’t usually allowed to study medicine - started to get involved. They were known as “man-midwives”.

Maubray didn’t like to be described as a man-midwife, seeing it as a contradiction, so he invented a new term: “andro-boethogynist”, meaning “man helper of women”.

Incidentally, Maubray also happened to be wrong about the etymology of “midwife”. The term implies nothing about the gender of the midwife. It comes from Old English “mid”, meaning “with” and “wife” meaning “woman”: i.e. someone who is with the woman.

i.e. pretty much exactly the same thing as the new word he invented.

Maubray’s s*xism didn’t just extend to a belief that men were inherently biologically superior and therefore better at everything. He was also a proponent of “maternal impression”: that during pregnancy you are influenced heavily by the environment.

We hope we don’t need to tell you that this is not a scientifically-backed theory, but we explore it more in this thread (see full thread on X).

So strong was Maubray’s belief that pregnant women were basically vessels for any old input that he managed to fall for a hoax that a woman could give birth to rabbits. Somehow this wasn’t a career ender for him.

Despite his best efforts, “andro-boethogynist” never caught on. Male physicians who assisted with births continued to be called “man-midwives”, and later, obstetricians. Midwifery remained a heavily gendered discipline.

In the UK, when laws were passed to require midwives to undergo certification and training, a 1902 law entirely forgot to mention men. Even into the 1950s, laws pertaining to regulation of midwifery used gendered language to refer to midwives.

(Thread abridged)

Background image credit: Rogue Gr***de

It’s World Goth Day! Happy World Goth Day!

To celebrate we’re dragging one of our favourite stories out of the archives. A couple of years back, we addressed the most goth question we’ve ever heard: did Mary Shelley lose her virginity on her mother’s grave?

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It’s an often-repeated rumour that Mary Shelley lost her virginity on her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft’s. grave. (Frankly cool) rumours about historical women’s (frankly cool) s*x lives have often little basis in fact and were spread by detractors. But this one might just be true.

Circumstantial evidence item 1: Mary’s mother’s grave held great significance to Mary throughout her life.

Circumstantial evidence item 2: Mary’s upbringing was unconventional. Her late mother and her father, philosopher William Godwin, were both radical thinkers and anarchists. Both were highly critical of marriage as an institution and were proponents of “free love”.

Circumstantial evidence item 3: The grave is kind of bed-shaped (and wouldn’t have been covered in moss at the time). It wouldn’t be unfeasible to s**g on.

Circumstantial evidence item 4: Due to the significance of the churchyard, in their early courtship in 1814, Mary and Shelley would go walking there. They would, of course visit the grave.

Thanks to Shelley’s correspondence, we even have a date for when the grave s*x occurred (if it did): 26th June 1814. On that day, according to Shelley, something very emotionally significant for the couple happened.

Shelley is vague as to precisely *what* went down. He says that Mary “declared her love” for him at her mother’s grave. He also declared 26th June his new “birthday” (his real birthday was in August).

A little over a month later, Mary eloped with the still-married Shelley to Europe. Claire Clairmont went along with them. She eventually had a child with the poet Byron.

It’s impossible to say with any *certainty* that s*x occurred on Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. It’s worth noting, though, that it is very accepted among scholars and historians that the first time Mary had s*x with Shelley was on her mother’s grave.

(Thread abridged. See full thread in slides or on X.)

✨🍻📝 Highlights from last night’s Pub(e) Quiz 📝🍻✨

Thank you everyone who came down to test their knowledge of the notorious VAG. (Can you tell we’re a fan of that joke?)

This month, Sam and Anna brought the theatrical trivia, s*x ed myths, a musical round and v***a sculpting! The Pub(e) Quiz is a monthly affair, written by our gorgeous v***ateers, so who’s coming to the next one?

1668 illustration of the v***a, va**na, uterus and bladder. In this image, the va**na and v***a have a ph***ic form. This is not an accident: the general medical consensus at the time was that the va**na was the counterpart of the p***s. In fact, it's the p***s is homologous to the cl****is, but the men writing the anatomy textbooks didn't think the cl****is was especially important.

From "Les maladies des femmes grosses et accouchees", 1668, courtesy of Wellcome Images

Has a woman ever been Pope? No, but the legend of "Pope Joan" was accepted as true for centuries.

According to the story, which originated in the 13th century, a woman known as Joan or Agnes disguised herself as a man and rose through the clerical ranks to become a cardinal. She was elected as Pope in either the 9th or 11th century. At some point during her short papacy, she took a lover and became pregnant. Her secret was revealed publicly as during a procession she gave birth in front of everyone.

None of the various versions of the story end well for Joan. She was either stoned to death, sent to a nunnery to repent, it rained blood in the streets followed by a plague of locusts, or the entire city was forced to do penance for Joan's transgression. In all versions, Joan was expunged from papal records.

There are no historical records that Joan ever existed. The original legend is possibly an attempt to make sense of inconsistencies in numbering of Pope Johns in the 9th century (there were several). It also reflects paranoia about women entering the male sphere, as all versions of the story involve some kind of punishment for Joan, and sometimes broader society for allowing her to become Pope. Later, the legend was used by Protestants as an anti-Catholic tale.

Accompanying the legend of Pope Joan is a story that from then on, the newly elected Pope must sit upon a pierced chair and have his ge****ls inspected. This is, again, unlikely to be true and based on a misunderstanding of the function of some of the chairs in the Vatican.

Nevertheless, the story of Pope Joan was very popular. In early versions of the tarot, the High Priestess card was known as The Popess, and illustrated a pregnant woman in papal regalia.

1. "Pope John VII", Nuremberg Chronicle, 14932. The frontispiece for "A Present for a Papist: Or, The History of the Life of Pope Joan, From her Birth to her Death", 1675.3. "Pope Joan giving birth", De mulieribus claris, 1474, courtesy of the British Museum4. Illustration of Pope Innocent X having his genitalia examined, 1644.5. "The Popess" tarot card, late 15th/early 16th century. Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, USA.