Oh, Look! A Giant Vagina! I’m Gonna Climb Inside!

by Coleen Singer at Sssh.com

Well you’ve probably already seen this story: an American student studying abroad in Germany saw a giant stone sculpture that was shaped a bit like a vagina ( it’s by a Peruvian sculptor, whose title for the piece translates as “Making Love”), found it hilarious, decided to climb inside so his friends could take a picture, and got stuck. No, he got REALLY stuck. So stuck, it took twenty two firefighters to remove him. Neither sculpture or student were harmed, but it did take a lot of effort to remove the guy.

Not something that happens everyday...or does it?

Well, naturally your intrepid blogger had to take to the interwebs to find out just how unusual such occurrences are. But first she had to determine the answer to a rather obvious question: so giant penis sculptures outnumber giant vagina sculptures? Because it seems very likely that would be the case.

The scientific evidence is very telling and somewhat unexpected! A Google search for “giant penis sculpture” has just over 82,000 results; while “giant vagina sculpture” yields a whopping TWENTY TWO AND A HALF MILLION RESULTS! YOWZA?

How do we explain this? (Also: did ya notice: twenty two million results; and twenty two firemen? Coincidence??)

Two words: social media.

The vast majority of results for the “giant vagina sculpture” search string are all pointing to some version of this same article, which, given its general goofiness and hilarity and the entertaining photos accompanying most of them, has been shared far and wide across the internet for the last two or three days. And not just by snarky bloggers on TMZ or Bustle either; international news outlets like the Guardian and the New York Times carried the story, too.

But some articles weren’t just reporting the situation itself: they offered lighthearted commentary about the student’s silly prank. Mentioning Freud; describing how the sculpture “gave birth” to a small man; how the student found it a “tight squeeze”--ha ha, REALLY?

Maybe it’s just me, but aren’t some of the most famous sculptural structures in the world just big giant penises? The Eiffel Tower; The Washington Monument; the World Trade Center (RIP); the big green glass gherkin in London; that huge skyscraper thing in Dubai; I could go on. I mean, they’re everywhere! Poland, Spain, Michigan!

But I find it odd; for all our cyber-obsession with giant vaginas, their artistic presence in public spaces is woefully scarce. Why aren’t there more giant vaginas?

Are they gross? Do we find them scary? (Hey, some guy just got trapped in one, and it took twenty two guys to get him out!) Are they more difficult to render in stone or metal than giant phalluses? Or do people simply not want to see them in public places.

A book on the subject by Emma L. E. Rees, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, explains: “There is a peculiar paradox – unlike any other – regarding female genitalia. Rees focuses on this paradox of what is termed the ‘covert visibility’ of the vagina and on its monstrous manifestations. That is, what happens when the female body refuses to be pathologized, eroticized, or rendered subordinate to the will or intention of another? Common, and often offensive, slang terms for the vagina can be seen as an attempt to divert attention away from the reality of women’s lived sexual experiences such that we don’t ‘look’ at the vagina itself – slang offers a convenient distraction to something so taboo.”

So is that it? We don’t like to LOOK at it? (Unless it’s a stylized stone curve and we can take a picture of ourselves in it and post it on Instagram, oh look, LOLZ! I’m in this giant coochie and I. Can’t. Even.)

Or is it that looking at it forces us to confront some uncomfortable truths? Like, we all emerged some one of these things. Like, half the humans in the world have one of these things. Like, wow, these things are kinda weird and mysterious and how would anyone figure out how to make it happy? (Cue sexual anxiety in all but the most stalwart red-blooded males.)

Of course, there are some artists who like to portray genitalia: this clickbaity little article gives us a dozen or so, about evenly split between male and female naughty bits. And there was the amazing Georgia O’Keeffe and her many paintings of flowers celebrating, in sometimes subtle and sometimes blatant ways, the most intimate whorls of the female form, in pastel desert colors.

Let’s hope some dumb college kid doesn’t decide to get himself stuck in one of her paintings.

Visit Coleen at Sssh.com for more sex news, commentary and hot entertainment for women and couples!