An Experiment at Dartmouth

Female students at Dartmouth were surprised last month when they received a mirror in their campus mailboxes. The students were instructed by an accompanying note to use the mirror to look at their vulvas. The "experiment" is part of Mayuka Kowaguchi's senior project entitled "Orchid." As you can imagine, the mirrors have caused a lot of controversy.

Miss Kowaguchi wrote:
I was inspired to begin this project through my own personal experience of having difficulty developing a healthy relationship with my body, particularly those characteristics that make me uniquely female, due to my conservative, Japanese upbringing. I designed this as my end-of-term project proposal for Sexperts training in the Fall of 2009, and with encouragement from those around me, the project became a reality.

Dartmouth's President Jim Yong Kim endorsed the project and said of it: "[I]f this sparks a more open and honest dialogue about women's health and about how gender is really a critical issue when you think about individual health, I think that's a good thing."

Many students, however, were offended by Kowaguchi's project. In an opinion piece in the campus newspaper Dartmouth, columnist Grace D'Arcy wrote that asking students "to shift their perspectice from the expectations and limitations of belief patterns" attacked religious perspectives on campus. She goes on: "The Orchid Project's backhanded dissemination of letters insulting and urging the abandonment of faith, cannot and must not be ignored for the action that they truly represent: a liberal attack on faith."
Others on campus opposed the project for less philosophical reasons. The school's Office of Pluralism and Leadership sponsored the project. One angry alumnus wrote: "[I]n a time of budgetary famine, it defies comprehension that the [office] would pay for the distribution of mirrors to all 1,976 undergraduate women on campus."

So what do you think? Is Kowaguchi's project offensive? Should the school have better spent its resources?

Photo Credit: Lamerie / Flickr