UD well remembers her early aesthetic encounters with the vagina. There was, naturellement, Courbet’s L’Origine du monde; there was Humbert Humbert’s description of the heavy lifting involved in doing Charlotte (“I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.”); there was Henry Miller’s hymn to a whore (“All the men she’s been with, and now you, just you, and the barges going by, masts and hulls, the whole damned current of life flowing through you, through her, through all the guys behind you and after you…”)…
The language of the University of Cincinnati student group currently displaying vagina photographs on campus (students modeled for them) is much less pretty (“Our demonstration serves to call attention to the vagina as a site of conflict in medical, legislative, domestic, and representational arenas.”), but then this is about politics, not art. In response to an anti-abortion group that’s been on campus displaying lurid photos of fetuses, this group intends to reclaim some symbolic territory from them.
Yes, things are muddled here – vagina, womb, fetus – but I think that’s okay. If you’re going to go there (see Governor Vaginal Probe) others will too.