University President Won’t Take Down “Vagina Billboards”

Twelve billboard-sized photographs of vaginas will be placed around the University of Cincinnati this week as part of a student project seeking to create a dialog on the respect of the female body.  The billboards will be accompanied by posters sharing quotes from the models and from others about decisions that are made by us or taken from us concerning our bodies in areas of health care, queer sex, birth and abortion, and in stories of abuse and survival.  The student groups say the “Re-Envisioning the Female Body” project is their way of countering an abortion protest that happened on campus last year comparing abortion to the holocaust.

“Our hope for this project is to combat social inequalities and abuses through the use of our vaginas as a form of collective resistance to oppression and to claim our positions as individuals with unique experiences, perceptions, and needs,” a post on the group’s Facebook page explained.

The university president received pressure to Remove the exhibit from campus but he refused.

“We are, first and always, an academic community where ideas and images, however complex or controversial, are carefully analyzed and debated,” Ono said in the statement. “These intellectual exchanges, while invigorating, can also be challenging and at times polarizing, but at a university like ours they cannot be extinguished, for they are part and parcel of who we are and what we do. Furthermore, as the Ohio Attorney General has reiterated, we are a public institution obligated to protect the First Amendment, even—perhaps especially—when that protection results in disagreement.”

Read more at theindychannel.com.  You can also visit the project’s facebook page.