Igarashi has made a name for herself with her Decoman “Decorated Vagina” series of sculptures. The titles of the works incorporate the word “man”, from manko, the Japanese for vagina.Manko is a great word — and I don't know if it really means "vulva" or "vagina" or both — but I'm not ready to accept English-speakers saying "vagina" when they mean "vulva." The linked article is in The Guardian.
By the way, Igarashi's artwork isn't very good, but she shouldn't be arrested for that. She seems to be more of a pop-performance person than a creator of objects worth looking at. Arresting her only magnifies the performance and wrecks the whole project of condemning and suppressing it, which is a project that can't even be bullshitted into respect with the claim that it's an art project.
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I prefer the woman who drops eggs from her snatch.
Oh, you, Vulva, mother river,
Mighty stream so deep and wide.
Vulva, Vulva, on the river.
Yo, heave ho!
Yo, heave ho! - Song of the Vulva Boatmen
It seems to feminists that vagina corresponds to penis, as a power grab.
So it's used for vulva, which has the advantage of being the actual attractor.
I sure seems that a lot of women are mighty impressed with their genitals.
Sigh. "Man in the boat" jokes as art.
I think that in this case she sent an actual picture but it did inspire a thought:
Suppose she had sent the code for a 3D printer to print her vagina? The code consisting solely of numbers, letters and symbols.
Would that be pornographic?
In the US, would someone sending the code for an illegal statue, say child porn, be illegal?
They are not sending the statue, only the code. Seems like it might be protected under the 1st Amendment.
Or maybe not.
I need to find something to do. Too much time on my hands.
John Henry
By Japanese law, the genitals of actors and actresses must be censored and up the mid-1990's so was the depiction of pubic hair. This type of censoring also extends to comics, video games, and anime made for adults. In the attempts of circumvent this type of censoring (and to cater to particular fetishes), actors and producers have featured subject matter unseen or rarely depicted in western pornography. Bukkake, Gokkun, Omorashi, and tentacle erotica are few uniquely Japanese genres known to western viewers...
...The publication of Waterfruit and Santa Fe by Kishin Shinoyama marked the first widely distributed publications to feature pubic hair... Recent controversies have frowned upon both pubic hair and even genitalia itself being displayed in works of art and in educational settings.
Just making a Love Boat doesn't really count as performance art. You then have to perform canoelingus on it.
Considering the number of images of fighting men in the cunny ditch, I take it that she lives near MCAS Iwakuni.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
- Krumhorn
@EDH,
I've followed anime from a distance.
That has given me just enough experience to gather that Japan's cultural boundaries on decency-vs-pornogrpahy are very different from the cultural boundaries we have in the United States.
I've also gathered that anime for broadcast often has censoring, but the DVD-version is released uncensored.
@Ann,
I have learned (from Japanese expatriates I've worked with) that Japanese culture is very big on symbolism, consensus, and following cultural rules.
This may make the way that this affair is handled opaque to us in America.
And it may make Japanese behavior (with respect to pornography, and the rules about what can be published and what can't) very odd to American eyes.
I don't know how much you care about the difference between cultures; but I find it intriguing that Japanese culture is one that doesn't have many defenders here in the U.S. (Or many people who want to spend time in the media trying to explain the differences between Japanese and American culture.)
What? Nothing about the Kawasaki Penis Festival that was linked at the bottom of the article? Those Japanese are very, very strange.
American Culture has former a Teen Mom trying to make a buck in a similar way
NSFW
Wanna see where she developed the mold?
oooof!
-Krumhorn
Manko is an obscenity and most definitely not socially acceptable, except among low-life Japanese.
thefriskydotcom adds a little spark.
"Igarashi was in the midst of a campaign to make a boat shaped like her hoo-hah — which she planned to sail across Switzerland’s Lake Geneva — when her legal troubles started. With the help of a crowd-funding site, she raised over 1 million yen (around $9,800) for the project, which was more than double her initial goal. As a perk of the fundraising campaign, backers who donated 10,000 yen or more were to receive an email link to the data file of her bits that she’d created for the 3-D print. Apparently, over 30 people received the email, and shortly after sending off the data, she was arrested because of Japan’s laws requiring that junk be blurred in images — even in porn.
Obviously, the email recipients were consenting to the situation and cool with receiving a vagina in their inbox. On top of that, the image wasn’t even a real photograph, just a digital 3-D mock-up. Igarashi denies the allegations against her — she didn’t send the data in exchange for money, and didn’t consider it to be obscene when she sent it. Her supporters are livid and are pushing for the charges to be dropped. Things aren’t looking optimistic for the sailing voyage, which she’d hoped to film as an art performance and create cartoons about. Who knew celebrating ladyhood could be so controversial? Are dick pics punished in the same way?"
"By the way, Igarashi's artwork isn't very good, but she shouldn't be arrested for that."
Two things you can be confident of in modern life 1) A person who trades in art on the subject of genitalia isn't a very good artist and 2) being arrested is most likely their highest and best goal.
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