Vagina: A New Biography

by Naomi Wolf

  Sexualized fear drives out creativity in women because fear elicits a tension response, and our creativity in particular, because of the role of the ANS, demands a relaxation response. Whenever a woman’s sexuality is insulted, her creativity suffers—because the same relaxed and focused state needs to be protected in order for the irrational wellsprings to be tapped: the same relaxation and focus supports arousal and orgasms, babies, books, artwork, criticism, and music. When you honor a woman’s sexuality and her very sex, you support the optimal functioning of the physical systems that support her intellectual creativity; when you threaten and insult her sexuality and her very sex, you do exactly the opposite.

  11

  How Funny Was That?

  Q: What’s the difference between a pussy and a cunt?

  A: A pussy is a sweet, juicy, succulent, warm, fun and useful thing. The cunt is the thing that owns it.

  —jokes4us.com, “Vagina Jokes”

  The more I understood about the vagina, and how sensitive it is to the emotional environment—and also how frankly creatively and intellectually precious its well-being is—the less able I was to screen out, dismiss, or numb myself to the casual insults and abuse that even the nicest people in our culture take for granted as normal in commonplace discussion. After I had traveled to England in the spring of 2011, had finished my interviews with Dr. Richmond, Nancy Fish, and Mike Lousada, and seen the stress research by H. Yoon and colleagues about the effect of stress on the vagina, and the research by Alessandra Rellini and Cindy Meston on how sexual trauma elevates women’s baseline nervous system responses, and the new data on sexual trauma and multisystem dysregulation and its relationship to chronic pain in many women, I felt that I had a deeper understanding of the vagina’s emotional sensitivity and its connection to emotional and intellectual sensitivity in women in general. And I was continually reassessing the meaning of rape and reperceiving its effects in an increasingly complicated and far more enduring light.

  I had been very deeply affected by my Skype interview with Lousada under the trees at the beautiful medieval college, and I felt that it had changed me, in a way. I returned to New York in June of that year feeling unusually open and free myself. I was not at all romantically interested in Lousada—I was very much in love with someone else. But there was something about his being a man who was so committed to actually witnessing the sexual suffering of women, and so dedicated to their sexual liberation, that made me feel existentially more hopeful that men and women could understand one another at last around these issues. Something about his discussion of how trauma “locks” the female body and mind had unlocked something in me. Though I have never been sexually assaulted, I have experienced the typical share of harassment and a couple of scary situations. I am surrounded, as any woman is, by a sexually (and vaginally) contemptuous culture. I had returned feeling hopeful, but also strangely vulnerable and undefended.

  One night I went down to the docks near Battery Park to join friends on the same sailboat on which I had first interviewed Dr. Richmond the year before. It was a fresh, late-spring night. Two young women were guests for that evening’s sail, and three male friends of mine, who were older than the young women, were on board as well. The young women were not dating any of the men, but that possibility was in the air. We motored out of the mooring ground by the park and sped onto the dark Hudson under a nearly full moon. I remember how I felt—renewed, in an odd way; light, rich, fertile with ideas, but unguarded.

  We sailed alongside the glittering lights of the city, past the sparkling canyons of lower Manhattan. Clouds sped across the neon-bright face of the moon. I chatted with a friend I will call Trevor, one of the three men on board. He is a kind and caring man, a solid citizen, with three kids and a lovely wife. My friend Alex was handling the ropes. I asked Trevor what he was reading these days.

  “War stories,” he confessed. “I had to stop reading modern fiction. I found that most modern fiction is written for women, and I couldn’t really get into it. I had to face the fact that that wasn’t for me, that I like war stories. I like stories about combat, and tactics, and sex.”

  “There isn’t usually sex in a war story,” remarked our friend Stephen, who was steering the boat.

  “There’s rape,” joked Trevor and Alex, simultaneously.

  Both of these men are nice men. And part of my brain immediately, routinely declared: “That was just a joke. Dismiss it.” But something had happened to me in England: I had had a glimpse of a world in which men respected what, for lack of a better language, I was starting to think of as the Sacred Feminine—or even as “the Goddess”—and I glimpsed the harm such language did, to me and to the women around me. For once, I was not numbed to those eternal jokes, those rape jokes, those pussy jokes. I felt the slashing harm of it. A great lump rose in my throat; I excused myself to go down into the hold.

  I lay down on one of the bunks. The hold swayed beneath me, as I was held over the dark, open river. I closed my eyes. I felt the pain of the words cutting again, like a scimitar, ripping into what I can only describe as my energy field; pain that I never would have even noticed before in brushing those words off, or “arguing” with the jokers, intellectually. I was in touch with my own “pelvic emotions,” I suppose, in an unmediated way, and so felt the violence of those words—words that were not even intended as malicious—a carelessness that only made it worse, in a way; words that were “merely” as insensitive to harm to the feminine as I had been myself.

  I took deep breaths—but something very odd happened. Tears started to slide from under my closed lids and down my cheeks. I wasn’t sobbing. I was just almost too full of feelings. I lay perfectly still, but the tears slid and slid from under my lids, and splashed down my neck and throat, in a way that I had never experienced before. I lay like that—relaxed, without sobbing, just tearing up again and again, welling over with tears—for fifteen or twenty minutes. I thought of the young women above deck, who had also heard those words and who now, I knew, would be ever so slightly changed by them; who would be ever so slightly more closed down physically, or ever so slightly more spiritually or creatively dampened by them. I felt the grief of it.

  The sexual threats encoded in hostile language centered on the vagina do more than trigger stress reactions in our bodies. Cultural concepts become embedded in a woman’s body and her brain perceptually. As University of Michigan psychologist Richard E. Nisbett demonstrated, in his book The Geography of Thought, the brains of people from different cultures neurally encode cultural differences in perception through daily practice over time. For example, his research showed that Westerners tend to perceive through a narrow focus on singular objects, while Easterners used a wide-angle lens and see objects as contextually embedded.

  So a woman’s cultural “take” on her vagina also shapes her brain.1

  If a woman hears about her vagina as a “gash” or a “slit” all her life, then that perception of her vagina will become neurally encoded in her brain; whereas if she hears about it, for example, as “the jade gate,” her brain shapes itself and her perceptions around that sensibility.

  In Han dynasty China (206 BCE–220 CE) or India fifteen hundred years ago or in thirteenth-century Japan, when the vagina was portrayed as the most sacred spot in the most sacred temple in a sacred universe, that was how woman’s brains experienced their vaginas. When, as in medieval Europe during the witch hunts, the culture cast the vagina as the devil’s playground and the gateway to hell, a woman in that culture felt herself to be built up around a core of existential shame. If, as in Elizabethan England, a culture portrays the vagina as a hole, a woman in that culture will feel that she is centered around emptiness or worthlessness; when, as in Germany and England and America after Freud, a woman’s culture portrays the vagina’s response as a test of womanliness, she is likely to feel herself insufficiently womanly. When a woman’s culture—as in today’s women’s magazine-type sexual athleticism in the West—casts the id
eal vagina as a producer of multiple orgasms on call, she will feel herself put to a continual, impossible test. When mass culture represents any given vagina as just one in ten million available orifices, as in today’s porn industry, a woman will feel her sexual self to be replaceable, not important and not sacred.

  And all this is not superficial: these perceptions are constructed at the level of neural synapses. In other words, the female brain changes physically over time in response to these kinds of repeated triggers in the environment.

  These triggers also affect her confidence and sense of hope. In a lecture I give on female sexuality, there’s a moment when I ask the women in the room to recall the names they first heard used in relation to their vaginas, when they were fourteen or fifteen—passing by construction sites, or while walking in the street. I can feel the deep discomfort of, say, eight hundred women all at once remembering where they were at the moment when, just coming into womanhood, they first heard—directed toward them—such phrases as “sit on my face” or “give me some of that thing” (or, as at least one young Asian American woman has recalled, “Give me some of that slanty pussy”). “How did that make you feel?” I ask. “Did it make you feel: ‘Is this what I am, this shameful—or this vulgar—thing?’ ” Then—those emotions still raw in the room—I have the pleasure of reading them a list of other terms for vagina from other cultures. “Golden lotus,” I read, from the Chinese Han and Ming dynasties’ love poetry. “Scented bower.” “Gates of Paradise.” “Precious pearl.” Chinese Taoist terms are always just as poetic: the vagina is referred to in Taoist sacred texts such as Art of the Bedchamber as “Heavenly Gate,” “Red Ball,” “Hidden Place,” “Jade Door,” “Jade Gate,” “Mysterious Valley,” “Mysterious Gate,” and “Treasure.”2

  One could go much further: in sacred Tantric texts, vaginas are classified into categories, but all the categories are fairly affectionate: the Chitrini-Yoni (the yoni of a “fancy woman”) is “rounded and soft, and easily and quickly lubricated, with little pubic hair. Her love-juice is said to be exceptionally hot, to smell sweet and to taste as honey.” The Hastini-Yoni “is large and deep, and enjoys much stimulation of the clitoris.” The yoni of the Padmini (“lotus-woman”) is “like a flower and loves to absorb the sun’s rays—that is, to be seen in daylight—and the caress of strong hands. Her juices have the fragrance of a freshly blossoming lotus flower.” The yoni of the Shankhini (the “fairy” or “conch-woman”) is “always moist . . . covered with much hair and . . . love[s] being kissed and licked.”3 Hindu vagina iconography sometimes referred to a vagina-mind connection that the West seemed determined to obscure: one Hindu synonym for vagina is “Lotus of her Wisdom.”

  “What if it were always like that?” I ask my audience. “What if the words you heard as a girl and young woman made you think of yourself—in the most intimate, sexual sense—as a source of wisdom, as precious, fragrant, a treasure?” To be surrounded by comparably reverent or appreciative language about one’s sexuality would make women not only more open sexually, but it would also make them more able to function in the world in ways that increased their creativity, strength, and sense of connection.

  I often read the women in the room a passage from the Ming dynasty–era Chinese masterpiece The Golden Lotus, and it is really erotic.4 But it’s a different kind of Eros than they are used to: the philosophers and courtiers of the Han dynasty saw gratified female sexuality as the force that kept the universe in harmonious order. They believed that men’s greatest health, wisdom, and potential could be developed only by becoming masters at pleasing women, and thus enjoying the potent yin essence that emanated only from the intimate parts of a truly aroused and ultimately fulfilled woman. When I am done with the passage—when my audience has heard the language of admiration with which the Han poets describe the art of love, and in the midst of it, their adoration of the vagina—everyone’s face is flushed, and the women tend to burst into a spontaneous cheer.

  There is certainly something steamy in thinking about our own sexuality—our own vaginas—in such a tender, admiring context; but there is also something empowering in the act. Having gone on an imaginative journey to other times, places, and contexts in which the vagina is spoken of reverentially, these contemporary women leave the room feeling different. They walk out energized and slightly giddy, as if newly in possession of a wonderful secret. You can feel that they will make different decisions, enjoy themselves in new ways.

  Language is powerful. As Virginia Woolf said, talking about another kind of arousal—intellectual arousal—“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.”5 She meant—and she was right—that the body and the imagination are interdependent.

  In our culture, the female body’s sexual imagination must ignite itself with meager linguistic kindling: the very word vagina is hard to say. It is an antierotic word, in a way (that annoyingly buzzy v, that unpleasantly soft g). When you think vagina in our culture (or search for it on Google, or look on Amazon), you get associations that are either coldly, repellently clinical (“vaginal herpes,” “vaginal discharge”) or at least tediously health related (“vaginal tone”). At the other end of the spectrum of associations, it’s just porn. It is almost impossible to daily feel one’s essence as a woman to be exciting, mysterious, profound, and complex if the language swirling around the center of our being is tacky or medicalized, hostile or reductively hard-core.

  Do your own experiment, if you are a woman. Reread the excerpts of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller earlier in the book. Observe what happens inside of you as you read the text—even if it might cause you some stress. As you compare the Nin to the Miller, note what happens to the sense of relaxation or tension in your muscles, to your heart rate—is it lowered or elevated, or is there no change? Pay attention to your vaginal pulse, if you are aware of it; pay attention to your breathing, and to whether you feel a generalized sense of calm or anxiety.

  Over the course of researching this book, I noticed that as I read texts that described the vagina in different ways, the descriptions directly affected my sense of energy and general well-being. After a morning reading Nin, for example, the world glowed. After an afternoon—in the same chair in the sun, with the same bougainvillea waving over my head—of reading Miller, I felt ill and weak, and very much like taking a shower.

  How far we have come from the honey and seashells of the female modernists. Onlineslangdictionary.com, a website that aggregates slang terms, lists the following contemporary violent slang for vagina: “axe wound,” “hatchet wound,” “open wound,” and “wounded soldier.”6 In response to the query “What are slang terms for vagina?” the answers at Yahoo.com included the violent-sounding “hole,” “gash,” “slash,” “slit,” and so on.

  The following conversation occurred on a mixed-gender discussion site when it asked for slang terms for vagina. It did not ask for “hostile slang terms for vagina.” While the respondents are self-selected, the site is a mainstream one. I repeat the discussion intact, punctuated for clarity. Listen for the language of violence and derision.

  ANDY: I saw a few nominations for best slang word for “vagina” dotted about so I thought it’d be best to put them down in one place. My two favourites are “gash” and “clunge.” The best thing about gash is you can add other words to it to describe a lady’s level of arousal . . . “frothing at the gash”; “she must have turned the temperature of her clunge up to gash mark 6.”

  . . .

  DAVID: “Meat curtain.”

  ZOE: “Half eaten steak sandwich,” “gutted rabbit,” “vertical seafood taco,” “corned beef curtains in white sauce,” . . . “motor,” “minge,” “pouch.”

  LEWIS: “Butcher’s dustbin.”

  STEVE: “V-hole.”

  STEVEN: “Cock-holster,” . . . “Poonany,” . . . “Quim,” . . . “Snatch. . . .”

  ANNA [one of the few women on th
e site, interjecting wailingly]: “clunge”: bahahah.

  JOSH [undeterred by this self-deprecating gentle protest]: “Beef eating spunk bubble.”

  KIN: “Hairy mussel,” “the Snack That Smiles Back.”

  STEVE: “Cockpocket.”

  DANIEL: Of course the normal “minge,” “tuna bap [sandwich],” “the fish plate,” “doner kebab,” “trout pouch”; but personally I think there should be more words for “fanny batter [vaginal lubrication].”

  ANDY: A “sleeping fruit bat” could be used for a lady with rather large, dangling flaps. “Pink velvet sausage wallet,” “quim.”

  STEVE: “Quim” is definitely awesome, as is “quinny” which I saw in that movie Elizabeth.

  ANDREW: I like “badly packed kebab,” for an untidy one. The old ones are the best though: “pussy,” “fanny,” and “twat.” “Hairy fish pie” is nice.

  ANDY: I haven’t seen “mott” or “motty” (or is it “motti”?) anywhere on here yet. . . . “Get motty out for us, Petal.”

  DANIEL: Oh, forgot: “flange.”

  I think most women would agree that the terms above range from kind of awful to really awful—to hear or even to think about. (Another site adds the equally repellent “ass mate” and “bearded oyster.”)

  It is striking how many of the young male slang terms for vagina on these discussion boards have to do with meat: violent images of meat prepared for consumption, as in “butcher’s dustbin” (in British usage, a dustbin is a garbage can; a “butcher’s dustbin” is where unwanted, discarded meat scraps would end up) or else low-grade, junk-food, industrialized meat, also prepared for consumption: “badly packed kebab,” “sausage wallet,” “pink taco,” “beef eating spunk bubble.” One is not invoking champagne and caviar here, but neither do these terms have the heavily socially insulting echoes (“cunt”) of the recent past. Rather, most of these half-gross, grossly half-funny terms just connote something fleshy with which it would be unappetizing to be sexual. Other sites list contemporary slang terms that are not violent or meatlike, but that are a bit silly: “bikini bizkit,” “cherry pop,” “chuff,” “furburger,” “beaver,” and “grumble.” The only even slightly positive or endearing terms that I saw on contemporary slang websites were “honeysuckle,” the Elizabethan “quim”—mentioned above—the affectionate “hush puppy” and “lick-me-please,” and the rather dear “passion fruit” and “Southern Belle.” “Map of Tassie/Mapatazi [Map of Tasmania]” is popular in Australia, apparently—the island of Tasmania is an upside-down triangle. Other sites note the wretched “panty hamster,” “vertical bacon sandwich,” and “Velcro triangle.”