In her semiautobiographical feature film "Who's Afraid of Vagina Wolf?," Anna Margarita Albelo plays a struggling film director who makes ends meet by screening her movies in art galleries where she shows up dressed as a vagina. Though the story is mainly about relationships, the prominence of the female sexual organ in the title has given Albelo a certain measure of notoriety, and when the Japanese artist Rokudenashiko was recently arrested for distributing data that could produce a replica of her vagina with a 3-D printer, Albelo's Facebook wall was bombarded with notices about the incident.

"Anytime there is anything to do with vaginas, people send me stuff," says Albelo, an American who was recently in Japan to screen her movie at the Tokyo International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. She identifies with Rokudenashiko. "I used to live in Paris, and when I was bored I'd put on the (vagina) costume and walk down the street. The reactions, both positive and negative, were really strong. It provoked a lot of discussion, like Rokudenashiko's work."

Granted, Albello didn't spend five days in jail, but her point is that the word "vagina" "still has a negative connotation." At the heart of the legal argument surrounding Rokudenashiko's arrest is the term waisetsu, which means "obscenity" or "indecency" in a sexual context. She was cited by the Metropolitan Police for giving the 3-D data to someone who had donated money to her project of building a kayak in the shape of a vagina, and is using the media fallout from the episode to protest outmoded legal and social taboos against the depiction of female genitalia. The materials she was charged with distributing are streams of code. They only have the potential to be "obscene," a word the law doesn't define.