by Naomi Wolf
The Masters and Johnson model is being challenged as too reductive when it comes to women, on several fronts. The latest science—including from such researchers as Rosemary Basson, M.D., at the University of British Columbia, Irv Binick at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and Barry R. Komisaruk, at Rutgers University in New Jersey—is confirming that there are many variations, for women, on what now looks like a far too basic model.10 It is more accurate to say, based on the newer science, that though female sexuality has some superficial analogues to male sexuality, additional levels of experience and sensation are also often involved.11 Female sexuality is very far indeed from being merely a female version of what has traditionally been understood, often from a male perspective, as “just sex.” They are finding that the vagina and brain cannot be fully considered separately: Basson found that women’s subjective sense of arousal must be measured in mind, not just body; Komisaruk and his team found arousal and orgasms only, for injured female subjects, in the mind.12
My journey finally led me to conclude that, with the exception of a few healers, teachers, and practitioners, we are indeed, for all our “liberation,” constraining the vagina in sexual ideologies that are actually much less than liberating and that are sometimes new, “hip,” or “sexy” forms of old-style enslavement and control. Or else we are actively ignorant of the true role and dimensionality of the vagina. I came to conclude that the vagina is not nearly as free today in the West as we are led to believe—both because its full role is seriously misunderstood, and also because it is disrespected.
3
Confidence, Creativity, and the Sense of Interconnectedness
The sister didn’t even get the watercolors—they puzzled her—looked several times—always seeming to question—The man on horseback she liked . . . I’ll take it to school tomorrow—showing it to folks that can’t see hurts but I’ll do it anyway— . . . Is it because there is more animal in me than brain—that I want to be near you to tell you how much I like it—No—it isn’t animal at all—it’s touch—Touch may be God or the Devil with me—I don’t know which— . . .
—Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz
Around the same time that I was stuggling with my medical situation, I went back to graduate school to work toward a degree in Victorian and Edwardian women’s literature.
I began to notice that many women writing between 1850 and 1920 articulated aspects of female sexual experience that did indeed often suggest a connection between a sexual awakening and a creative awakening. These pre–sexual revolution, pre–Second Wave feminist writers such as the British Victorian lyric poet Christina Rossetti, turn-of-the-twentieth-century American novelist Kate Chopin, and Anaïs Nin, the memoirist writing in France in the 1930s, wrote about female sexual passion as if it were an overwhelming force that made short work of will and self-possession. They often seemed to connect sexual self-knowledge or sexual awakening in women with the growth or awakening of other aspects of female creativity and identity. Unlike those women writers and artists of the post-1960s era, they did not ever portray female sexuality as being “merely” about physical pleasure.
I found something else quite surprising: though misogynist commentators had often suggested that brilliant women could not be sexual—versions of the sexless, intelligent “bluestocking” have surfaced since the medieval period—and that highly sexual women had no brains, the biographies of creative artist after creative artist suggested the very opposite. In life after life of women writers, revolutionaries, and artists, a particularly liberating sexual relationship or affair—or hints of sexual self-discovery, even if the artist was unpartnered—would precede a luxuriant stretch of creative and intellectual expansion in their work. And, judging from their private letters, I saw that some of the most creative and most intellectually and psychologically “free” women of their eras—from Christina Rossetti to George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Emma Goldman, and Georgia O’Keeffe—were also, evidently, remarkably sexually passionate women.
George Eliot described her heroine Maggie Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss (1860), “throwing herself under the seductive guidance of illimitable wants.”1 According to her annotator, novelist A. S. Byatt, Eliot herself “too had fears that she might because of her passionate nature become demonic. . . .” In a letter to friends, Eliot wrote of her own fear of becoming consumed with sensual desire: “I had a horrid vision of myself last night becoming earthly, sensual and devilish. . . .”2
Poet Christina Rossetti wrote exquisitely about the torments of female sensual temptation: the heroine of “Goblin Market” (1859), Laura, “sat up in a passionate yearning / And gnashed her teeth for baulked desire, and wept / As if her heart would break. . . .” Laura’s sister Lizzie, who has eaten “goblin fruit,” in contrast, is intoxicated and evidently addicted to wanting more: Lizzie cries, “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you / Goblin pulp and goblin dew. / Eat me, drink me, love me; / . . . make much of me. . . . / She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.” The “wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men” in “Goblin Market” pressed upon the two girls fruits that were “like honey to the throat / But poison in the blood.”3
The young painter Georgia O’Keeffe wrote to her love object, Arthur Whittier McMahon, in 1915, “It seems so strange—not to give myself—when I want to. Love is great to give. . . .” To photographer Paul Strand, whose sexual relationship with the artist coincided with a period of tremendous artistic growth for her, she wrote—conflating the excitement of a new foray into abstraction with the excitement of thinking about kissing a man: “Then the work—Yes, I loved it—and I love you—I wanted to put my arms around you and kiss you hard. . . . It’s so funny the way I didn’t even touch you when I so much wanted to. Still am telling you that I wanted to. . . . Take me out on the Drive some nights with you—will you?” Her biographer notes that she concluded this letter “provocatively,” referring to Riverside Drive, where lovers sought darkness in the evenings.4
For many of these creative artists, apparent sexual awakening and creative surges had at certain key times in their lives seemed to fuse together, and seemed to elicit a phase of work that reached a higher level of insight and energy than had the just-previous work in their oeuvres. These arcs of accomplishment—these creative “high points”—seemed as if they might help confirm further my growing conviction that women experience the vagina as integral to a core self, and that it can also serve as the trigger or entry point to an awakening of sensibility that can at fortunate moments fuse the creative and the sexual.
Women writers often describe such sexually awakened moments in terms of a kind of mist falling away, heightening a sense of the female self. In their private letters, they often describe a startling, intoxicating discovery of self through the catalyst of the sexual love they are experiencing. As the young Hannah Arendt wrote to her lover Ernst Blucher after their affair began—an affair that was described as intensely intellectually engaged and intensely erotic, for a young woman who had never been especially physical before—“I . . . finally know what happiness is. . . . It still seems to me unbelievable, that I could achieve both—a great love, and a sense of identity with my own person. And yet I achieve the one only since I have had the other.”5 Often, no matter what they suffer for their passion, these writers’ heroines refuse to regret the sexual awakening that has brought them the suffering: in Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening, Edna Pontellier muses that “among the conflicting sensations that assailed her, there was neither shame nor remorse.”6
Edith Wharton’s letters and novels, in particular, made me eager to pursue this line of inquiry. For most of her adult life, Wharton was married to the conventional, upper-class dilettante Teddy Wharton, a man to whom she was not suited. By her own account, and others’, their sexual life was almost nonexistent. But in 1908, she experienced a dramatic sexual awakening when she entered into an extramarital affair with the handsome, seductive, and provocat
ive bisexual journalist Morton Fullerton. In her private love letters to him, published for the first time in the 1980s, she writes of this sexual awakening as threatening a dissolution of her self, a loss of her control. She writes—reverting to French, the language in which she addresses sexual pleasure—that his touch leaves her with “no more will”: “je n’ais plus de volonte.”7 She speaks of Fullerton’s sexual love as “a narcotic”—a metaphor echoed in the fiction by other women writers of this period. (Edna Pontellier, in The Awakening [1899], also describes her lover Robert’s touch as “a narcotic”—a metaphor that would become more scarce after the Second Wave of the 1970s made such admissions of perceived dependency by omen on men politically incorrect.)8
In one letter, Wharton describes a conversation with Fullerton in which, after she conveyed to him the effect on her of her having become orgasmic, he responded that she would write better as a result of that experience. Fullerton, as it turned out, was right: Edith Wharton did indeed do some of her best work after her sexual awakening. Interestingly, in The House of Mirth, published in 1905, there is virtually no language of physical passion in relation to her women characters, so their attachments and motivations seem incomplete.9 Suppression is well expressed, but not fulfillment. Female sexual passion, however, in many manifestations, suffuses her Summer (1917) and The Age of Innocence (1920).
After 1908–10, Wharton’s prose becomes richer and more tactile; the world of pleasure and the senses enters into it more fully, as does a sense—a tragic sense, at that time, necessarily—of feminine longing for ecstasy, life, and sensation at all costs. The theme of a woman who is changed and awakened by her own sexuality—and who does not regret the consequences, though she suffers as a result—is consistent in Wharton’s fiction after 1908–10.
I looked at biographies of these and other great women artists, writers, and revolutionaries from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and into the early twentieth: Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Sand, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Georgia O’Keeffe, Edith Wharton, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein—all women whose lives, letters, and choices, even at great risk or sacrifice to themselves, revealed their intense, often sexually passionate natures.10
In life after life of this now-expanded circle of women artists, writers, and revolutionaries, the same arc appeared: a flowing of creative insight and vision seemed to follow a sexual flowering. One can often see a shift in perspective chronologically for these writers, artists, and revolutionaries: their palettes suddenly broaden, or possibilities of another world swerve into view.
George Eliot, after she began her illicit relationship with her lover George Lewes, wrote her first important piece of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857). Soon after Georgia O’Keeffe began a highly erotic relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, her daring experimentation with form and color, represented by her flower paintings, revolutionary for their era, began. As she wrote to him in 1917, conflating artistic and sexual excitement, “I feel as though I have lots to do—lots—and one thing to paint—It’s the flag as I see it floating—A dark red flag—trembling in the wind like my lips when I’m about to cry— [. . .] There is a strong firm line in it too—teeth set—under the lips—
“Goodnight—My chest is very sore and I’m tired—couldn’t sleep or eat for excitement down there—and hurt—and wonder—and realizing—”11
Emma Goldman’s radical critique of existing social norms intensified sharply after the start of her passionate affair with Ben Reitman in 1908. She also took stands that led to her arrest. Typical of such a muse, Reitman did not just seduce Goldman, he also offered her his “hobo hall” for her lectures, when she could not secure another forum. When Gertrude Stein met and began living with Alice B. Toklas—which allowed her to explore her inner life as a lover of women—her work leaped forward in terms of the level of its experimentation, as well as in terms of its sensuality.
Even recent women writers sometimes seem to make this connection—and sometimes in surprising detail: in “A Conversation with Isabel Allende,” which reporter Melissa Block conducted for National Public Radio on November 6, 2006, Block asked Allende about the genesis of the vividly realized seventeenth-century Spanish character Inés Suárez, heroine of Allende’s novel Inés of My Soul: “The first sentence just popped out of my womb,” Allende replied, to a perhaps startled interlocutor. “I wouldn’t say my head—but my womb. It was, ‘I am Inés Suárez, a townswoman of the loyal city of Santiago de Nueva Extremadura in the kingdom of Chile.’ And that’s how I felt. I felt that I was her and that the story could only be told in her voice.”12
In the biographies I read, the lover is often a kind of muse figure—not always a staid partner, but often a man or woman who respects the creative artist or revolutionary intellectually, while stirring her erotically. For so many of the great women artists, writers, and revolutionaries, it seems, a sexual awakening coincided with risk-taking on other levels—social and artistic—and with other kinds of awakening: of mastery, expression, and creative powers.
I began to wonder: Was there, perhaps, some connection we were missing between freedom and creativity, and an awakening to women’s own most passionate natures?
Could something deeper, I wondered, be going on here?
THE TINY RAT-PLEASURE BRUSH
After my spinal surgery and its attendant restoration to me of joy, color, confidence, creativity, and a sense of connection between things, there was no way for me to ignore the fact that the injury to my consciousness that I had suffered before my operation had to be related to some physical causation, as the changes in consciousness correlated so strongly to injury to and recovery of my pelvic nerve. What had happened to me? And what did it mean? Was this cause and effect a freak of my own weird subjective neurology and biochemistry—or was this an insight potentially generalizable to all women?
About four months after I had mostly recovered from spinal surgery, I was invited to speak to a group of brilliant young women at a university. To conceal identities, I will place this event in rural Canada, and locate it at a state university. Many were biology or neuroscience students, and they had decided to put together a conference. Their goal was to have some conversations about the issues they might face as women when they left the school setting and entered the “real” world.
It was a warm, breezy day as we gathered to talk in the living room of a cottage on an old farm. There were deep soft couches covered in scarlet fabric, faded crimson rugs, and baskets of dried flowers in the massive fireplaces. Through the windows, the honeyed sun poured in: we could see a deep-green river valley before us, and beyond it, the blue, mounded hills.
After a conversation about their projects and their future lives, we all decided to go for a walk in the warm bright air. One of the young women, who knew the area, led us on cow paths and through hedges, over muddy bends in the dirt road, and then up and over a hill. As we crested the hill, I saw that it was as if we were in another ecosystem. The domestic coziness was suddenly far away. Wild gray-green fields dropped away from all sides, and a strong, steady wind blew. I decided to put directly before them what my puzzle was.
“I think that there might be a connection between the vagina and the brain that most of us don’t fully understand. I’m finding that there may be some relationship between female orgasm, and confidence and creativity. There may also be a relationship between the vagina—and orgasm—and the ability to see the connections between things.”
The young women were silent for a moment. Then one young woman, an historian, spoke up. “That is absolutely true for me,” she said definitively. “When I have really good sex. But I mean, really good sex”—everyone laughed, quite aware of the difference—“I feel like I can do anything. I feel great about myself. My confidence goes through the roof. And I am not always like that. But also it shows up in my work for a while afterward: I see things I did not see before, connections I might ha
ve missed. I do feel more of a sense of mastery about my perceptions.”
Another young woman, a political scientist, agreed: “It makes me feel invincible. It makes me feel like running a marathon. Totally happy about myself.” There was the silence again, the silence of intense thinking.
“I used to work in a lab where my job was to give female rats sexual pleasure,” said a young scientist. She had a mischievous smile.
“What??” we all exclaimed.
“It’s true!” she laughed. “I had a tiny brush.” She made a gesture with her fingers, as if painting a tiny point in the air. “After a while it is just part of the job.”
“I didn’t even know female rats could experience sexual pleasure,” I marveled, struck by my own ignorance.
“All female mammals have clitorises,” she explained, in the calm tone of a scientist for whom this was interesting, but also just another data point. “They all have clitorises,” she repeated. A cow tilted her head and glanced quizzically at the creature to her right. (Indeed, I was to learn that two-thirds of mammalian clitorises are on the anterior wall of the vagina—like the human G-spot; at that time I had no idea that mammals generally had clitorises.)
It was quite a remarkable moment. A fog had started to drift in over the rounded hills that extended away from us; the wind was softly blowing. The women were talking quietly about orgasm, insight, and energy. I was amazed that I had never known that fact, obvious though it should have been. All female mammals were designed by the process of evolution to experience great sexual pleasure.
“Female rats, when they want sex, go like this.” She held up her hands like little paws and arched her back. We all laughed. It was a gesture I would learn later was called “lordosis.” She described the lab and its results further, and I agreed to find out more about it.