The Pleasures and Perils of “Divacup”

By ALICE BUTTRICK

April 5, 2010

Spring is in the air, and that means flow­ery new ad cam­paigns bloom­ing anew. Some are sell­ing the sea­sonal sales, oth­ers are tout­ing new pub­lic ser­vice con­cerns, and one is aim­ing just slightly below the belt. On loveyourvagina.com, the “Moon­cup Men­strual Cup”– a British ver­sion of the US’s well-known “Divacup”– is encour­ag­ing women to share their favorite nick­names for the vagina.

The cam­paign caught my eye for sev­eral rea­sons. First and fore­most, it looks great. Each slang term for my gen­i­tals has its own pretty poster— rib­bons flow down from some terms, while lace and flow­ers burst from oth­ers. Dot­ing on its dirty lan­guage, the aes­thetic is a typographer’s dream. Plus, celebri­ties like Amy Wine­house have been pro­mot­ing the project by shar­ing their nick­name of choice (Ms. Wine­house unfor­tu­nately chose “VaJew Jew”), and a large poster cam­paign is being planned for the Lon­don Underground.

I’ve always been sort of curi­ous about the Divacup (and this for­eign iter­a­tion is no excep­tion). It seems like a great, albeit poten­tially gross, idea—who doesn’t feel a lit­tle guilty watch­ing tam­pons pile up in the trash­can once a month? But a quick Google search tells me that Divac­ups are largely sold at Whole Foods, which means, accord­ing to com­mon stereo­type, they mostly sell to ‘green’ obsessed yup­pies. The British Moon­cup, on the other hand, is aimed at a much wider audience.

At Mooncup’s pro­mo­tional site, you can look through the exten­sive list of euphemisms that women have shared along with their rank­ing. To be con­trar­ian, I sub­mit­ted “cunt,” cur­rently ranked third, although a num­ber of col­or­ful vari­a­tions on the phrase have also made the list. Com­fort­ingly, “vagina” has clocked in at 9th place, with the more explicit “I call it my vagina because that is what it is” ranked at 127th. “Coochie Snorcher”– pre­sum­ably a nod to the Vagina Mono­logues– has even got­ten two votes and, inex­plic­a­bly to me, “Moot” is the over­whelm­ing cham­pion of the moment.

It’s fun to con­sider how much cen­sor­ing would go on if this were an Amer­i­can cam­paign. Jezebel recently pub­lished an arti­cle on a tam­pon ad for­bid­den to use the word “vagina” on three major TV net­works, and even the ludi­crously tame “down-there” on two. The British mak­ers of Moon­cup, how­ever, are free to let their lan­guage go pub­lic. Sure, a lot of it is prob­a­bly satir­i­cal, and a few of the entries make me worry about the pre­sum­ably adult women who have filled out the sur­vey. But for the most part, the vagina on loveyourvagina.com is a pretty empow­ered place. For a long time (for all of art his­tory, some might argue), slang and innu­endo sur­round­ing the penis have been dom­i­nat­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, while the vagina sits back in its secret, inte­rior lan­guage. Female gen­i­talia had to be intro­duced aggres­sively to the public—Eve Ensler made that more than clear. Her vagina was angry, not her “wee-wee,” her “pussy,” or her “secret gar­den.” But today, this silly pro­mo­tional cam­paign swad­dled in fem­i­nine embell­ish­ments is doing some­thing sur­pris­ingly revolutionary—letting women name themselves.

Alice But­trick is a senior in Yale Col­lege. She is an asso­ciate edi­tor for Broad Recog­ni­tion.