Hello

That’s a very good question and thank you for asking so politely. 

The word feminism was coined by Charles Fourier in 1837, a French philosopher who advocated for the emancipation of women because he believed society treated women as slaves. We weren’t allowed to vote, own anything, or work a real job. Women were ruled by their fathers/household patriarch until they married at which time they’d be under the rule of their husband. If a woman did not belong to male household she was shunned by society and had very little means to make money, most of them unsavory. You know the idiom “rule of thumb”? That comes from a running joke that started in the 1600s, and was still around in Fourier’s time, that said it was okay for a man to beat a woman with a stick as long as it wasn’t any thicker than his thumb. 

This is Megumi Igarashi

She’s a Japanese artist

Japan, the country with some of the most fucked up pornography and the penis festival

Where the vagina is basically illegal to talk about 

So she did a bunch of art featuring 3D sculptures of her vagina, including this kayak, and was put in jail for it

She was indicted again in December on obscenity charges for selling vagina art to crowdfund for the kayak and could spend two years in prison

In Japan, women’s vaginas are treated as though they are men’s property. The trains here usually display pornographic advertisements. As a woman, I find that blatant objectification to be humiliating. I’m disgusted by it. My body belongs to me. So, with this project I wanted to release the vagina from the standard Japanese paradigm. Japan is lenient towards expressions of male sexuality and arousal, but not so for women. When a woman uses her body in artistic expression, her work gets ignored, and people treat her as if she’s some sex-crazed idiot. It all comes back to misogyny. And the vagina is at the heart of it. The vagina is ridiculed. It’s lusted after. Men don’t see women as equals—to them, women are just vaginas. Then they call my vagina-themed work “obscene,” and judge me according to laws written by and for men. [x]

She plans to turn her trial in to a manga comic. She seems pretty sure she’s not going to do any jail time but if you’d like to help her pay for her inevitable fine and court fees, you can check out her online store. There are little glow in the dark vagina characters.