Calico Rudasil is a feature columnist for Sssh.com, the award-winning porn site for women & couples. With over 18 years’ experience under her belt, writing about and for the adult entertainment industry, Calico qualifies as something of a Web Porn Dinosaur; similar to a tyrannosaurus, only with far more attractive arms and a less pronounced overbite.
Somewhere along the years you’ve been on this planet, you’ve likely heard someone say something to the effect of “it’s important to remember where you came from.”
Most of the time, the sentiment is expressed as a call to remember your roots, whether those roots be familial, national, cultural, economic, or what have you.
In a more literal sense, however, if we’re to remember where we came from, we might do well to recall most of us owe our existence, in some way or another, to a vagina.
There are exceptions, obviously – people conceived entirely outside of their mother’s body, in a way which didn’t require sexual intercourse come to mind, for example.
This post isn’t about the process of being born, though; it’s about the insanity of prosecuting a woman for the act of creating artwork based on her own body parts.
Cartoon Vaginas Being Penetrated By Tentacles Are Fine….
How odd is it that in a country like Japan, where some of the most unusual and otherworldly depictions in the history of erotica have been produced, we find a woman being prosecuted for obscenity in response to her “distributing 3D scans of her own genitals.”
Granted, within Japan, pornography of all kinds is heavily censored, but if what Megumi Igarashi distributed can be considered porn, I have some troubling news for Japanese gynecologists, or basically anybody who keeps handy accurate anatomical diagrams of the female body, whether for reference or other purposes.
In her own defense, Igarashi said she had created works of art which “defy the image associated with genitalia,” which is a nice way of saying “this isn’t porn, you freaking imbeciles” without overly upsetting a judge.
3D Images Of A Vagina By Itself, On the Other Hand….
Prosecutors say Igarashi “carries great criminal responsibility” in this case, which seems like a stretch, even if you’re a Japanese prosecutor suffering from gynophobia.
What Igarashi did was crowdfund her art by offering 3D scans of her vagina to anyone who contributed more than 3,000 yen towards her creation of a kayak based on the same scans. For this, she reportedly faces a maximum sentence of two years imprisonment (although those same reports make it sound like all the prosecution is seeking is a fine to be imposed).
Igarashi’s attorneys maintain the scans were distributed as “as part of her creative activities, with the aim that her supporters would use it to create new works.” While I’m sure some of her supporters just wanted a scan of Igarashi’s vagina and had no intent to create derivative works from the scans, it still seems like a pretty compelling defense, especially when paired with prior testimony from an art professor who opined the scans themselves didn’t appear to be intended to arouse – assuming this question is relevant under Japanese obscenity law, which it may not be (What am I; a Japanese defense attorney?)
Regardless Of What The Law Says, This Is Just Silly
If the Japanese really want to combat the supposed detrimental effects of being exposed to “obscene materials,” one sensible way to do it might be differentiate between depictions which are overtly, gratuitously, inarguably pornographic and images which merely depict female body parts.
When it comes right down to it, the real issue here is many cultures around the world have decided, by some absurd process or another, there’s something inherently dirty about people’s “naughty bits,” as they’re referred to in various Monty Python sketches.
The reason those Python sketches are so funny, of course, is they underline the Puritanical insanity behind feeling threatened by the very organs by which the human race has reached its current numbers. No matter how one might feel about sex, or depictions thereof, you can’t very well argue it’s not essential to our existence.
Just think how ridiculous it would be to prosecute artists for depicting someone eating food, or breathing air, or even just depicting a mouth.
Now, consider how similar those hypotheticals are to what’s actually happening to Megumi Igarashi as I type this.
Pretty silly, no?
Calico Rudasil is a Sssh.com (@ssshforwomen) columnist and Sssh will be on Peeperz for fun times again in the near future, meanwhile why not check us out:
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