Vagina: A New Biography

by Naomi Wolf

  While we are told we live in a time of sexual liberation, this may only mean more sex, or even just more images of sex—and not better or “freer” sex. For there is a good case to be made that in fact the sophistication of skill sets, and the skill level overall, taught to men, generation by generation, by their culture and by their peers, about how to please women in bed, has gone precipitously downward since the middle of the last century, when public porn became widespread, and when male sexual education went from peer stories and their own experiences with real women to the model presented in the new mass-market medium.

  John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, written and published as pornography in 1748, is full of “the Goddess Array”: it was clearly considered a guide to eighteenth-century men on how to turn women on, and the vagina could not be described with more appreciation in both male and female voices: “[t]hat now burning spot of mine,” Fanny Hill says, describing her own vagina; sexual love “inflamed the center of all my senses . . . the curling hair that overspread its delightful front . . . the powerfully-divided lips of that pleasure-thirsty channel . . . so vital a part of me . . . so strict a fold! A suction so fierce! . . . that delicate glutton, my nether-mouth . . .”

  On beholding a lover’s vagina, the male narrator describes

  That delicious cleft of flesh . . . a moist inviting entrance . . . delicately soft and pouting . . . Now with the tenderest attention not to shock, or alarm her too suddenly, he, by degrees, rather stole . . . up her petticoats. . . . Then lay expos’d, so to speak more properly, display’d the greatest parade in nature of female charms. The whole company . . . seem’d as much dazzled, surpriz’d, and delighted as any one could be. . . . Beauties so excessive could not but enjoy the privileges of eternal novelty . . . no! Nothing in nature could be of a beautifuller cut than the dark umbrage of the downy spring-moss that over-arched it . . . a touching warmth, a tender finishing, beyond the expression of words . . . with one hand he gently disclos’d the lips of that luscious mouth of nature . . . the soft laboratory of love . . . he awaken’d, rouz’d and touch’d her so to the heart . . . till the raging stings of the pleasure, rising toward the point, made her wild with the intolerable sensations of it . . . as she lay lost in the sweet transport. . . .16

  Eighteenth-century and early Victorian erotica—which was the equivalent of porn in its day, designed for men, without literary or moral pretensions, for the purpose of arousing them to orgasm—is striking in terms of how much of “the Goddess Array” you naturally find within it. Even though the vagina had been downgraded in public discourse, in private male-consumed erotica, it was still receiving plenty of positive attention. The women in these anonymously published illicit novels are continually deeply kissed, sensuously stroked, passionately caressed and fondled; their breasts and nipples are admired; their vulvas are touched and manually penetrated, kissed, and licked; they are gazed at and described in admiring tones; their own arousal is carefully noted, and their own climaxes are described, with great delicacy and attention. About a third of the description of the sexual activity in general consists of attention to “the Goddess Array” and the pacing does not cast that attention as being part of the dreaded concept of “foreplay,” but as a sensuous, lingered-over and delicious part of the sexual feast itself. Men, writes Cleland, should ply the beloved with a “thousand tender little attentions, presents, caresses, confidences, and exhaust them with invention . . . what modes, what refinements of pleasure have they not recourse to. . . . When by a course of teasing, worrying (stroking), handling, wanton pastimes, lascivious motions . . . they have . . . lighted up a flame in the object of their passion. . . .” Only then may the men seek their own satisfaction. And the female voice in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure confirms this attention to female arousal: “Kissing me in every part, the most secret and critical one so far from being excepted . . . his touches were so exquisitely . . . wanton, and luxuriantly diffus’d, and penetrating at times, that he made me perfectly rage with titillating fires.”17 But on PornHub or Porn.com, there is little of this kind of touching that, two hundred sixty years before the “sexual revolution,” drove Fanny Hill to “perfectly rage with titillating fires.”

  The sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s, including advocates for “adult” material such as Hugh Hefner and Al Goldstein, represented porn to us as a great social radicalizer. But a nation of masturbating people who are looking at screens rather than at one another—who are consuming sex like any other product and who are rewiring their brains to find less and less abandon and joy in one another’s arms, and to bond more and more with pixels—is a subjugated, not a liberated, population.

  It is no wonder that advanced corporate capitalism, which truly liberates neither men nor women, likes porn so much, and allows porn to colonize public space. Virtually nude images that would have been considered fit for Playboy in the 1980s are now five stories high in Calvin Klein ads in Times Square, fairly graphic sex scenes are not elided in R-rated movies on planes where children are seated, and porn is visible to children passing newsstands. Internet filters are difficult for parents to understand and install. Porn thus intrudes on the imaginations of children and seeps systematically into mainstream entertainment. Parents are not really free to instill a model of sex into their children’s education that is not this model, which got there first and more graphically. There is a great deal of money at stake, but part of the reason that almost no backlash has taken place against the colonization of public space by porn—even though until the 1960s active community debates set limits on obscene material—is that porn addiction abundantly serves the status quo. Porn puts people to sleep, conceptually and politically as well as erotically.

  Social conservatives have always feared real sexual awakening because erotic aliveness has the power to lead people into other kinds of resistance to deadening norms and rigid political, class, and social oppressions. Eros has always had the potential to truly rouse people, spiritually and politically as well as physically. Porn really is a drug, but it is the kind of drug that diminishes individuality, imagination, and pleasure rather than releasing it. Porn, it turns out, eventually takes the sexiness—that is, the wildness—out of sex.

  The sexual “revolutionaries” of the 1960s branded porn as being a great liberator of libido—a lifter of repression, a great demystifier of the “shame” of sexuality. But—in the greatest of great ironies—we are discovering that porn diminishes rather than heightens libido over time; that its effect on the phallus is ultimately unmanning and depressive; and that its effect on the vagina is a short-circuiting of the intense erotic potential—which means, also, the intense creative potential—inherent in every woman.

  Four

  The Goddess Array

  13

  “The Beloved Is Me”

  Seated upon a lotus, with lotus in hand, is Lakshmi, the goddess . . . riding in chariots the goddesses appear . . .

  —Devyah Kavaçam, Hindu sacred scripture

  How answer you, la plus belle Katherine du Monde, mon très cher et divin déesse?

  —William Shakespeare, Henry V

  Let’s look back again at the 1970s, where the feminism of a Betty Dodson and a Shere Hite, and the market opportunity grabbed by Hugh Hefner and his fellow pornographers in the following decades, “set” our model in the West of female sexuality.

  This model of the feminist vulva and vagina—joined eventually by pornography’s elaboration of this model—was the one that was formative for women of my generation. The vagina and vulva were primarily understood as mediating sexual pleasure. What was important was technique—one’s own masturbatory technique, and the skills one taught to a partner. Feminists and pornographers alike defined the vagina and vulva in terms of the mechanics of orgasm.

  But while technique is important, this model leaves a great deal out of the “meaning” of the vagina and vulva. It leaves out the connections to the vagina of spirituality and poetry, art and mystici
sm, and the context of a relationship in which orgasm may or may not be taking place. It certainly leaves behind the larger question of the quality of a masturbating woman’s relationship to herself.

  The Dodson model of the empowered female did a great deal of good, but also caused some harm. The good is that feminism of that era had to break the association of heterosexual female sexual awakening with dependency on a man. The harm is that the feminism of this era successfully broke the association of heterosexual female sexual awakening with dependency on a man. “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” as one seventies-era feminist bumper sticker insisted. The feminist model of heterosexuality—that straight women can fuck like men, or get by with a great vibrator and no other attention to self-love, and be simply instrumentalist about their pleasure—turned out to have created a new set of impossible ideals, foisted, if through the best of intentions, upon “liberated” women. Feminism has evaded the far more difficult question of how to be a liberated heterosexual woman and how to acknowledge deep physical needs for connection with men. As nature organized things, we ideally have a partner in the dance. If we don’t have a partner, there is attention we should give to self-love as self-care. It does not solve straight women’s existential dilemma, the tension between our dependency needs and our needs for independence, simply to declare that the dance has changed.

  The harm of this model of female sexuality is that it reaffirms a fractured, commercialized culture’s tendency to see people, including “sexually liberated women,” as isolated, self-absorbed units, and to see pleasure as something one needs to acquire the way one acquires designer shoes, rather than as a medium of profound intimacy with another, or with one’s self, or as a gateway to a higher, more imaginative, fully realized dimension that includes and affects all aspects of one’s life.

  Recent data collected in 2009 by sociologist Marcus Buckingham, drawn from multicountry surveys, show that Western women report lower and lower levels of happiness and satisfaction, even as their freedoms and options have grown, relative to men.1 Both feminists and antifeminist commentators sought to find answers for this broadly confirmed trend: feminists sought to argue that it was inequality or wage differences in the workplace and the “second shift” at home—but the surveys were adjusted to account for sex discrimination. Antifeminist commentators argued, of course, that this was all the fault of feminism, making women seek fulfillment in professional spheres unnatural to them.

  I think it is very possible, judging from the tremendous amount of data we have seen about what women need psychologically, which they are generally not getting, that they are saying they are dissatisfied because the “available models of sexuality”—the post-Dodson, post-Hefner, post-porn, married, two-career, hurried, or young and single drunk-with-a-stranger-in-a-bar-or-dorm-room models—are, long term, just plain physically untenable. These models of female sexuality—left to us by a combination of pressures ranging from an incomplete development of feminism in the 1970s, to a marketplace that likes us overemployed and undersexed, to the speeding up of sexual pacing set by pornography—doom women eventually to emotional strain caused by physiological strain. These models of female sexuality are simply extremely physically, emotionally, and existentially unsatisfying. (This model of sex may well doom Western heterosexual men in other ways, deserving of their own book.)

  Now that we know that the vagina is a gateway to a woman’s happiness and to her creative life, we can create and engage with an entirely different model of female sexuality, one that cherishes and values women’s sexuality. This is where the “Goddess” model comes in, a model that focuses on “the Goddess Array”—that set of behaviors and practices that should precede or accompany lovemaking. But where is a “Goddess” model to be found in contemporary life?

  My search to locate a working “Goddess” model led me first into the past, into the historical differences between Eastern and Western attitudes toward female sexuality. Of course, women were subjugated in the East as well as in the West, but in two cultures in particular—the India of the Tantrists, about fifteen hundred years ago, and the Han dynasty of China about a thousand years ago—women were, for a time, elevated and enjoyed relative freedom. These two cultures viewed the vagina as life-giving and sacred, and, as I noted, they believed that balance and health for men depended upon treating the vagina—and women—extremely well sexually. Both cultures appear to have understood aspects of female sexual response that modern Western science is only now catching up with.

  Tantra, from the Sanskrit, best translated as “doctrine,” emerged in medieval India. Tantra sees the universe as a manifestation of Divine Consciousness in a state of joyful play, as expressed through the balancing of feminine and masculine energies: Shakti and Shiva. A subset of Tantra developed, which used sexuality as a path to the realization of the Divine. In Tantra, the vagina is the seat of the Divine, and the fluid (kuladravya) or nectar (kulamrita) that helps initiates reach transcendence is perceived as flowing naturally from a woman’s womb. Tantra even sees the source of female vaginal fluid (especially female ejaculatory fluid, or amrita) as originating in heaven.

  From the second century CE until as late as the 1700s, a Taoist tradition of related sexual practices, and a related sexual philosophy, developed in China. In Tao, the vagina was also seen as life-giving and divine. Men were encouraged to bring women to orgasm with great skill and care, in order to benefit from their energizing “yin” essences. The penis was seen to draw life-enhancing qualities from women’s vaginal juices. Men were trained in the classic sexual Yoga texts (“the education of the penis”) to ensure that they sexually satisfied their wives and concubines with long foreplay and carefully timed thrusting, since personal and cosmic harmony, as well as healthy offspring, were all seen as being dependent on female sexual ecstasy.

  As historian Douglas Wile describes it in his book Art of the Bedchamber: The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics, “At the very least, a man must delay his climax to adjust for the difference in arousal time between ‘fire and water’ and to ensure the woman’s full satisfaction.” Wile elucidates the Taoist philosophy further: “The woman was said to love slowness (hsu) and duration (chiu), and abhor haste (chi) and violence (pao). . . . The woman expresses her desire through sounds (yin), movements (tung), and signs (cheng or tao). In her sexual responses she is compared to the element water, ‘slow to heat and slow to cool’. . . . Prolonged foreplay is always presented as the precondition for orgasm.”2 The Taoist sexual texts take it for granted that female sexual intensity is stronger than its male counterpart, and so the sexual training of men was necessary to harmonize those innate disharmonies. Learned techniques cultivated male sexual control and the eliciting of a woman’s health-giving “jade fluid.”

  In Taoist sexual texts, women were understood to emit medicinal fluids from various parts of their bodies, including from under their tongues, from their breasts, and from their vaginas. The man’s goal for the sake of his own health was to stir the release of these precious fluids: the Taoist sacred text The Great Medicine of the Three Peaks explains that a woman’s breasts issue “jade juice,” which, if a man sucks on them, nourishes the man’s spleen and spinal cord. By sucking her nipples, he also opens “all of the woman’s meridians” and “relaxes the woman’s body and mind.” This action penetrates to the “flowery pool” and stimulates the “mysterious gate” below, causing the body’s fluids and chi (energy) to overflow. “Of the three objects of absorption,” writes the author, “this is your first duty.” When intercourse takes place, the woman’s emotions are voluptuous, her face red, and voice trembling. At this time her “gate” opens up, her chi is released, and her secretions overflow. If the man withdraws his “jade stalk” an inch or so, and assumes the posture of “giving and receiving,” he then accepts her chi and absorbs her secretions, thereby strengthening his “primal yang” and nourishing his spirit.3

  These terms, so alien to our culture, bear thinking abou
t. A woman who experiences her vagina and her sexuality in this framework—one in which the very essences that flow from her during oral sex are considered health-giving to her partner; one in which it is that partner’s first duty, he has been taught, to relax her body and mind in his lovemaking with her—would be liberated from the pressures many Western women experience when they receive sexual attention, from anxiety about how long it takes to reach orgasm to anxiety about sexual selfishness. And the ensuing relaxation, as we’ve seen again and again, is the key to sexual opening for women.

  Islam, which the West stereotypes as being repressive to women, has a rich tradition of erotic literature and of careful attention to the vagina: the sixteenth-century erotic classic The Perfumed Garden recounts at least twenty different kinds of vaginas: El addad is “the biter”; El aride, “the large one”; El cheukk means “the chink,” or “the hard yoni of a very lean or bony woman” with “not a vestige of flesh.” El hacene is “the beautiful,” or a vagina “that is white, firm and plump without any deformity” and “vaulted like a dome.” El hezzaz, or “the restless,” is “the eagerly moving” vagina “of a woman starved for sexual play.” El merour, or “the deep one,” “always has the mouth open.” El neuffakh is “the swelling one.” El relmoune is the vagina of a virgin who is experiencing her first act of lovemaking. El taleb or “the yearning one,” means the vagina of “a woman who has been abstinent for too long, or, who is naturally more sexually demanding than her partner.” El keuss, or “the vulva,” is “usually used for the “soft, seductive, perfect” and pleasantly smelling organ of a young woman; plump and round “in every direction, with long lips, grand slit.” In this culture, when one dreamed of a woman’s vulva, it was a positive omen: The Perfumed Garden asserts that the person who dreams of having seen the vulva, feurdj, of a woman, will know that