Photo by Mickeyono2005
Honi Soit is a weekly student newspaper from the University of Sydney. It’s been in circulation since 1929 and is distributed around campus as the free, go-to guide for relevance. They’ve been known to cause a bit of a stir in the past thanks to their often controversial approach to journalism. Most recently, their decision to feature the uncovered vulva’s of 18 University of Sydney women on the front page of the magazine was met with a feisty mix of criticism, praise and confusion. The end result saw the censoring of the vaginas, with big black strips deemed more satisfying to the eye than the natural reveal of a woman’s most sacred garden.
The premise behind the concept was to depict vaginas in a natural light, rather than the aesthetically-beefy hybrids that porn and advertising convince us exist. The vaginas on display were supposedly desexualised (apparently there is a criteria for this), un-manicured and without photoshop; simply a raw statement of unabashed honesty. Furthermore, the project aimed to break down the stigma around the vulva itself, and in turn, give a sense of liberation to women who feel like showing their vagina to the world shouldn’t subject them to that naughty four letter S word (rhymes with cut… ends in T… SLUT. I mean slut). I love the concept, and it’s true that the naked female body needn’t always be sexualised, but I don’t see how this differs from the issues faced by men.
The feminist-laden rebuttals to the censoring of these vaginas revolve around a lack of equality, but the concept itself was a female-specific attempt at fixing a problem that isn’t actually gender-specific. A penis is no more or less accepted than a vagina on a billboard in a public, thanks to that systemic issue so many folk have every time they see something that they deem crude. As a male, I for one live under the constant pressure of not being able to have my penis printed on sheets of paper and handed to randoms in public places. In addition, have you seen a male porn-stars penis? Those things are closer to my arm than they are to my manhood. Females aren’t the only ones getting jibbed in the whole ‘that’s not what they really look like’ debate. I ain’t no Mandingo either.
I’ve written plenty of pieces advocating the deserved rights of women, and when I first heard of these poor ladies being denied the right to express themselves in a public forum, I felt their injustice. Though the more I researched the topic, the more I struggled to justify displaying nudity on the front page of a magazine that’s read by university students as young as 17. It’s not the best possible medium to educate the general public on the reality of the vagina, and trying to combat porn’s skewed take
on what it looks like ‘down there’ could be delivered in a far more effective manner. I mean, it’s not simply about the vagina either. Of course, like I’ve already said, the editors wouldn’t run an uncensored image of a flaccid penis on the cover either, would they? Wait. What? They did? Fucking hell. And here I was trying to argue that this time, perhaps, the feminist movement was asking for just a little too much.
That’s right. Somehow a big glob of man-junk was deemed an appropriate aesthetic for the front cover of the very same magazine back in 1993. Unlike the vaginas, it wasn’t censored, and happily turkey slapped the universities cohort across their young, naive faces. It’s sad that 20 years later a complete lack of societal progression resulted in such disgust over the female version. It’s a painful reminder of gender inequality and another notch in the bedpost of society’s consistent ability to fuck up.
I don’t feel like floppy penises or unkempt vaginas belong on the front cover of a student magazine, but if you’re accepting of one, you need to be accepting of the other. To rub salt in the wounds of this X-rated clusterfuck, even after big ugly black strips were placed over the ‘offensive’ content, the magazine was pulled from the shelves because the opacity of said strips wasn’t sufficient in covering these monstrosities. God help all the sorry souls that peered into the darkness only to get a horrifying glimpse of one of the most beautiful elements of the female body. I hope they eventually recover from the mental scarring that comes with seeing a woman’s vagina. We all know it’s far more nightmarish than those floppy, dangling sacks of meat us blokes call penises.
Stupid, stupid, humans.
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