The Vagina-As-Protest-Symbol May Not Be Helping Feminism

If women couldn’t agree on a moderate Democrat to become the nation’s first female president, what was left? Well, there were vaginas.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy makes a case for abandoning the vagina as the lowest-common-denominator symbol for feminist protest. She does give the vagina-as-image its historical due, given how it has been appropriated from the patriarchy by feminist movements through the last century. And yet today, when feminisms are as fractured as ever and when a man who wants to literally grab our vaginas—so much for activist appropriation—sits in the White House, Bovy writes that the “gesture of solidarity” divides us more than it unites.

Subversive though it can be, vagina protest reinforces the very phenomenon it’s meant to mock.

Most importantly, she points out, “not all women have vaginas, and not all vagina-havers identify as women”. Any movement that purports to be intersectional and inclusive (much less universal, which I would argue shouldn’t and can’t be the goal) simply can’t exclude those marginalized groups. And vagina-toting, which at one point was a way of demonstrating bodily pride, at this point clearly reduces women to their anatomical parts. Any image, anatomical or otherwise, that can be weaponized to confront bigotry, fear, or simply squeamishness should be utilized—but its applications aren't universal.