Inside the winding alleyways of London’s Camden Market, past walls of combat boots, money exchanges and bustling food vendors, a small white sign announces the presence of the complex’s newest tenant: the Vagina Museum.
On Saturday, during its grand opening, the humble brick space — dedicated to understanding and appreciating the vagina, vulva and gynecological anatomy — was packed, mostly with women but from all generations. I heard visitors exchange confessions like “I didn’t know what a period was until I had one” and “I used to think that all vulvas look the same.” Topics of discussion that are often reduced to hushed tones in public spaces, if they are brought up at all, were thrown around with ease and enthusiasm.
“It’s almost like there’s an embargo in society around having very open, frank, honest and educational conversations around vaginas,” said Marissa Conway, 30, who is a founder of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy and who attended the opening. “I didn’t expect to have a visceral reaction of gratitude, but there’s an element of relief that we can talk about this.”
The museum is the first of its kind, an answer of sorts to Iceland’s Phallological Museum. With nearly 300 penises and penile parts from local animals, the specimen-rich institution ranks among Reykjavik’s top tourist attractions. While this monument to male genitalia is in many ways an orthodox museum that revolves around a permanent collection of “marvels,” the Vagina Museum is not. Like the city’s Migration Museum, which is focused on the country’s immigrants and refugees, and the Museum of Transology, which purports to be the largest collection dedicated to the lives of transgender people, the Vagina Museum is an institution whose mission is driven by social justice and public health initiatives.
Those expecting to see ancient fertility sculptures, medieval chastity belts or Victorian-era vibrators on display should know that the young, crowd-funded venture includes no such artifacts. At the Vagina Museum, visitors will discover informational posters and sculptures, a small shop with vaginally themed products, and an events calendar that includes a dinner for Trans Day of Remembrance and “Cliterature” (book club) meetings.
“It was much smaller than I anticipated, which was disappointing,” said Seren Mehmet, 28, a technical recruiter at Amazon. “I wanted to see more vaginas!”
The museum has secured a two-year lease on its Camden Market lot, but after that, there are plans for expansion. “The ultimate goal is to build a permanent museum, but that takes a lot of time and resources. This is like our starter home,” said the museum’s founder and director, Florence Schechter, in a phone interview before the opening. The debut show, “Muff Busters: Vagina Myths and How to Fight Them,” is intentionally general and instructive. “I think it’s especially useful for younger people, because most of the time we have to figure this stuff out ourselves,” said Jade Dagwell Douglas, 22, who is a student in London.
“The anatomy has such complex politics around it, that we found it was best to first engage people through what they know, so we can teach them things they don’t know,” said Sarah Creed, the museum’s curator. “Menstruation, cleanliness, sexual activity and contraception are things that a majority of people have discussed in some format, or experienced in some way.” The exhibit addresses all of those topics.
“We can talk about cold, hard facts all we want, but that’s not going to change people’s minds. It’s all about unpacking social constructs and changing perspective through engagement,” Creed said.
Charlotte Wilcox, who illustrated the posters in the exhibit, said it was her job to “be as inclusive as possible” in bringing these myths to life. Rini Jones, 25, a policy and advocacy adviser in London, was “pleasantly surprised” by the exhibit. “I was really skeptical of the show as an activist, queer woman and woman of color,” she said. “There’s a really pervasive and unhelpful equation of women’s rights with often exclusively pink and, by association, white vaginas, in a way that is really trivializing and exclusionary.”
Despite outraging some trolls, team members say they have been pleasantly surprised by the Vagina Museum’s reception. Their biggest challenges are on the internet, where their content is often censored for violating community guidelines.
“It’s not a human problem as much as it is an issue with algorithms, which are set to assume anything with the world vagina in it is adult content or porn,” said Zoe Williams, the museum’s development and marketing manager. “Our emails go to spam and our online ads get rejected, and it’s all because of stigma,” Schechter added. “We’ve had to rely on organic reach.”
My most pressing memory of the visit is not the information gleaned but rather how comfortable I felt in the space. It’s evident the Vagina Museum is striving to make male, transgender and intersex visitors feel just as welcome and included. The word “woman" is used sparingly in wall text, and “Muff Busters” eagerly states that a vagina does not a woman make. One of its central messages is that dismantling gynecological taboos is not a gendered issue.
“This is everyone’s dialogue,” Creed said. “By segregating the issue, we only perpetuate it.”
2019 The New York Times Company
source: news.abs-cbn.com
You’ve probably heard of lichens, complex organisms consisting of a fungus and an alga (and sometimes a bacterium) that break down rocks to create soil.
Though lichens vary widely in color and form, most often seen are the white crusty varieties that colonize the surface of trees, rocks and barren soil. This type has lent its name to a little-known skin disease — lichen sclerosus — that typically manifests as white crusts on genital tissues and is often undiagnosed or misdiagnosed before it wreaks havoc on people’s lives.
A related disorder, lichen planus, more often affects the skin and inside of the mouth but can also affect genital membranes, where it can be more challenging to treat than lichen sclerosus.
Although lichen sclerosus can form on any skin surface, it has a predilection for a woman’s vulva and, less often, a man’s penis, and it can so disrupt people’s sex lives that divorce or celibacy is sometimes the outcome.
Lichen planus generally has broader targets, but an erosive form can affect the anal-genital region and other body parts and be as destructive as lichen sclerosus. In addition to pain, both conditions can cause intense itching that, lacking an accurate diagnosis, patients may mistreat with creams and other substances that only make matters worse. Doctors, too, may mistake the problem for a yeast infection and prescribe the wrong treatment.
Furthermore, people rarely talk freely about diseases that attack the vulva or penis, even to their doctors, which delays a correct diagnosis and effective treatment. But even when patients overcome their embarrassment, they often run up against medical ignorance and mistreatment until affected tissues become irreparably scarred.
“When gynecologists do a pelvic exam, they may not even look at the vulva,” said Dr. Anuja Vyas, a gynecologist at Baylor College of Medicine who specializes in these disorders. “Doctors often treat the vulva like a small Midwestern town that you drive through without noticing it.”
And when a woman past menopause complains that vaginal pain has made intercourse impossible, doctors may dismiss it as normal age-related changes and miss the presence of a treatable disease, she said.
Thus, it is often up to patients to make sure they get to a knowledgeable health care provider and get treatment that relieves symptoms and halts progression of their disease.
As two nurse practitioners, Nicholas Wedel and Laura Johnson, pointed out in The Journal of Nurse Practitioners, “Vulvar health is one aspect of women’s health that is often not discussed,” even though “up to 20 percent of all women will experience significant vulvar symptoms at some point in their lives.”
Yet, they added, “when left untreated, vulvar lichen sclerosus can cause significant physical, emotional and sexual discomfort.” It can also result in irreversible destruction of genital tissues and, in rare cases, squamous cell carcinoma.
Women with lichen sclerosus who responded to an international survey had this to say:
“I love my husband and want to be with him sexually and when we try, the pain is unbearable. It feels like cut glass is inside me.”
“My late diagnosis at age 58 was devastating. So much marital heartbreak could have been avoided.”
“Sex is not in my vocabulary anymore. The pain is unbearable and is increased when urinating or defecating.”
A mother whose daughter from age 4 had splits and tears in her skin from lichen sclerosus said her child was “unable to sleep due to intense itching and burning,” and was terrified to use the restroom lest she experience another tear and more pain.
An affected woman echoed the girl’s plight. She said, “It makes me not drink the fluids that my body needs because I don’t want to pee. I have literally screamed when I go.”
Here’s what is important to know about these two chronic diseases.
Neither lichen sclerosus nor lichen planus is a deadly condition. Nor are they contagious or transmitted sexually. The conditions do not have an established cause or definitive cure. Lichen planus may disappear spontaneously or following treatment, but lichen sclerosus rarely improves without proper treatment that should be continued indefinitely.
Both are inflammatory skin conditions likely autoimmune in nature. That is, the body mistakes the skin and mucous membranes for foreign tissue and launches an attack. About 1 woman in 5 with lichen sclerosus is likely to have another autoimmune condition, like thyroid disease, vitiligo or alopecia areata.
Lichen sclerosus can occur at any age but most commonly affects girls before puberty and women after menopause, suggesting that low levels of sex hormones may play a role in its onset. It also seems to have a genetic component. Over the course of a lifetime, as many as 1 woman in 300 may be affected, Vyas said.
Several symptoms of the two conditions overlap, and both can change the architecture of genital tissues, narrowing openings to the vagina or urinary tract.
Lichen planus, which often affects younger women, may start with very itchy purplish bumps on the skin — often the wrist, shins or ankles — that can spread over the body. When it affects the mouth, painful lacy-white lesions form that can make eating a challenge. Vaginal symptoms may include discharge, pain, burning and itching.
Symptoms of lichen sclerosus include smooth white patches on the skin, intense itching, tearing of the skin, discomfort or pain that can be extreme, and in severe cases bleeding, blisters or ulcerated sores.
While neither disorder is common, vulvar lichen sclerosus can affect as many as 1 woman in 30 after menopause. Genital lichen disease is estimated to be 10 times more common among women than men, who are more likely to get it if they are not circumcised.
The most effective treatment for lichen sclerosus is a potent corticosteroid ointment called clobetasol (Temovate), applied in tiny amounts several times a day at first, then less and less often as symptoms improve. Vyas said that “even if the condition is advanced, it will get better if treated properly and treatment is continued indefinitely.”
Also helpful is routine use of skin moisturizers, like vitamin E suppositories, hyaluronic acid or a product called Revaree, she said. To reduce sexual discomfort, she suggested using a water- or oil-based lubricant: food-grade oils like coconut, olive, grapeseed or avocado oil, or a personal lubricant called Slippery Stuff. If scarring limits sexual penetration, dilators can be used to gently stretch the vaginal tissues to make intercourse more comfortable.
Although the risk of cancer is low, women with either lichen disease should be examined regularly for evidence of a malignancy.
2019 New York Times News Service
source: news.abs-cbn.com
RIO DE JANEIRO - Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday expressed horror over the 1,000 penis amputations that occur each year in the country including those due to a lack of basic hygiene, a figure he called “ridiculous and sad.”
Speaking with reporters in Brasilia after visiting the Education Ministry, the former army captain despaired at the number and said his government must work with vulnerable men to make them more aware of the dangers of unhygienic behavior.
“In Brazil, we have 1,000 penis amputations a year due to a lack of water and soap,” he said. “We have to find a way to get out of the bottom of this hole.”
Bolsonaro did not specify the source of the number. A spokeswoman for the Brazilian urology society said the figure is based on official data for penis amputations.
The society said the amputations were necessitated by untreatable infections along with cancers and complications from HIV.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
BANGKOK -- A Bangkok clinic that has drawn 100 men a month to its penis whitening service has caused a stir in Thailand, with social media users both baffled and alarmed by the phallic fad.
The Lelux Hospital, renowned for its body whitening expertise in a country obsessed with skin color, began offering the unconventional treatment six months ago after a male customer complained of "dark parts" on his groin.
"These days a lot of people are asking about it. We get around 100 clients a month, three to four clients a day," Bunthita Wattanasiri, a manager for the Skin and Laser department at Lelux Hospital told AFP.
The procedure, which uses laser whitening, got wide play on Thai television and social media on Thursday after the hospital released images of a man undergoing the treatment.
"We have to be careful because it's a sensitive part of the body," Bunthita said, adding most clients were aged between 22 and 55-years-old with many from Thailand's LGBTQ community.
The same hospital stirred controversy last year for touting beautification treatment called a "3D Vagina" in which the customer's own body fat is used to make genitalia more plump.
The whitening service costs around $650 for five sessions.
"I think it's a good market to enter so we offer the ultimate body treatment to our clients, either men and women," Bunthita said.
Whitening and bleaching are not uncommon in other parts of the world and are widely offered online.
But they are particularly sought after in Thailand, where skin-whitening ads have caused outrage and accusations of racism.
"The obsession... people nowadays can't embrace their own skin color," said one Facebook user.
Another user Parin Ruansati posted: "Oh god... what ever happened to the world?"
Another had a lighter response, writing "why not?".
source: news.abs-cbn.com
