Origin of the World: Science and the Fiction of the Vagina

doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7497.970

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Virginia Braun (v.braun@auckland.ac.nz)

department of psychology, University of Auckland, New Zealand

The vagina—and here I follow the title of the book by using this term as lay shorthand for women's genitalia—is a paradoxical part of women's bodies. Reviled but also revered, it has been received in different historical and cultural contexts with revulsion, awe, fascination, denial, violence, and even entrepreneurialism.

Jelto Drenth

Reaktion, £19.95/$29, pp 304 ISBN 1 86189 210 1 http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/

Rating: Embedded Image

In recent years in the West the academy and popular culture have focused attention on the vagina. This fascinating and lively account of the “science and fiction of the vagina,” which …