In case you thought modern feminism couldn’t get any weirder: This month a liberal Lutheran pastor presented Gloria Steinem with a vagina sculpture “as a thank you gift.”
Nadia Bolz-Weber, a religious feminist growing in infamy for her publicity stunts, collected purity rings from women across the country to melt them down into a golden vagina. She gave it to Steinem, feminist icon and author, at a women’s conference in early February and the trick would’ve fit in with Steinem’s Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions. But rather than a rebellion, it was a repackaging of the same reductionist symbolism.
Most epic moment EVER. ? Nadia Bolz-Weber melted down women's purity rings to make a vagina sculpture, which she presented to @GloriaSteinem at the #MAKERSConference ✊@Sarcasticluther @SweetBirdStudio pic.twitter.com/NPikZcrxJs
— MAKERS (@MAKERSwomen) February 15, 2019
Feminists such as Bolz-Weber and Steinem make their careers on cheap antics like this. While real feminists fight for the end of female genital mutilation, they craft NSFW “art.”
The stunt was a reaction to the evangelical purity movement, as part of which young women wore rings to indicate their commitment to virginity until marriage. Eventually, many women felt the rings turn from a pledge to an indictment. One of the rings sent to Bolz-Weber, for example, came with the note: “I wore the ring to college, kept sleeping around and feeling like it was this burning eye judging my every move.”
Bolz-Weber chokes up while reading stories of the shame with which these women wrestled. But surely, responding to these stories with a gross and garish sculpture spurns the dignity they deserve.
Just as a woman’s value doesn’t come from her sexual history, it also doesn’t come from the sum of her parts. With pink pussy hats and vagina pants, feminists act as if a woman’s power comes from her physicality. But just as her identity isn’t wrapped up in her past, neither is it tied merely to her private parts. The vagina fails as a symbolic representation of feminism because it’s reductionist, just like a ring diminishes the idea of purity as it reduces it to a single act.
Steinem and Bolz-Weber may think they’re reclaiming purity culture, but their statue is only as valuable as the rings that made it.
