The Atlas of Shopping

A vagina is a responsibility, a pleasure, and an enigma every woman is born with, but it comes with no official user’s guide, let alone a decent app. This leaves the playing field wide open for feminist bestseller-maker Naomi Wolf and her latest book, Vagina: A New Biography. In terms of the Zeitgeist, it couldn’t be arriving at a better time. The women’s website xojane.com tweets about vibrator testing, The Vagina Monologues’ author Eve Ensler just delivered a TED talk, the S&M novel Fifty Shades of Grey was the year’s biggest publishing phenomenon and Lena Dunham named the abortion episode of Girls "Vagina Panic." But in the meantime, U.S. congresswoman Lisa Brown was silenced for responding to a vote to restrict abortion access with the words: “I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but no means no.”

Despite our apparently desensitized culture, publicly and personally we’re still surrounded by misinformation, confusion and shame about this essential part of our bodies. When you got your period, maybe you had an awkward talk with your mother about menstruation suggesting that she, in spite of her obvious qualifications on the subject, didn’t necessarily have more of a handle on this stuff than you did. Or maybe she was wary of telling you too much, out of fear that, once given the keys to the car, you’d drive it like a Maserati, not a Volvo.