The way things are going, we’re on track to living in a world with AI long before we live in a world where we don’t need a Vagina Museum.

The museum is the first of its kind and opened in Camden in the UK this past weekend.

While the penis museum in Iceland pays homage to penises from 280 animal species, the crowdfunded Vagina Museum is more about education.

The Daily Beast spoke to the museum’s founder, 28-year-old Florence Schechter:

Its goals are to end stigma, to highlight cervical health, and to promote feminist and trans-inclusive rights. And they are very real issues. “According to a recent poll, more than half of women couldn’t label the vagina on a diagram,” Schechter said, before condemning “thousands of years of patriarchy.”

Her intimate museum space is one room with exposed brick walls and wooden floors—very warehouse chic. Its first exhibition is Muff Busters: Vagina Myths and How to Fight Them, and comprises rows of coloured boards declaring myths alongside their corresponding fact. It first defines the vagina—not the “entire external genitalia, but… the area between your external vulva and cervix.”

Sarah Creed, the museum’s curator, talks more about the first exhibition:

Yes, that was a crochet clitoris.

Apparently, confusion about female anatomy and a lack of proper sex education has led people to make some very poor life choices.

Visitors can inform themselves with a 3-D drawing on layers of perspex. Other myths include “Douching with Coca-Cola after sex will prevent pregnancy”, which, it turns out, is “completely untrue”.

It was, however, a popular belief in ’50s and ’60s America, when it was hard to get contraception.

I remember an idiot or two in high school telling everyone that particular myth, so it has persisted long after the 50s and 60s.

Schechter talks more about what motivated her:

A noble enterprise, and a necessary one.

[source:dailybeast]