by Naomi Wolf
OBJECTIVE: Animal studies have suggested that early stress is associated with alterations in the hippocampus, a brain area that plays a critical role in learning and memory. The purpose of this study was to measure both hippocampal structure and function in women with and without early childhood sexual abuse and the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). METHOD: Thirty-three women participated in this study, including women with early childhood sexual abuse and PTSD (N=10), women with abuse without PTSD (N=12), and women without abuse or PTSD (N=11). Hippocampal volume was measured with magnetic resonance imaging in all subjects, and hippocampal function during the performance of hippocampal-based verbal declarative memory tasks was measured by using positron emission tomography in abused women with and without PTSD. RESULTS: A failure of hippocampal activation and 16% smaller volume of the hippocampus were seen in women with abuse and PTSD compared to women with abuse without PTSD. Women with abuse and PTSD had a 19% smaller hippocampal volume relative to women without abuse or PTSD. CONCLUSIONS: These results are consistent with deficits in hippocampal function and structure in abuse-related PTSD.
11. R. Yehuda, 2003, and S. M. Southwick and others, 1999, cited in Thomas Steckler, N. H. Kalin, and J. M. H. M. Reul, Handbook of Stress and the Brain: Integrative and Clinical Aspects, vol. 15, Techniques in the Behavioral and Neural Sciences (New York: Elsevier Science, 2005), 251, 272.
12. S. M. Southwick, R. Yehuda, and C. A. Morgan III, “Clinical Studies of Neurotransmitter Alterations in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” in Neurobiology and Clinical Consequences of Stress: From Normal Adaptation to PTSD, ed. M. J. Friedman, D. S. Charney, and A. Y. Deutch (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott-Raven, 1995), 335–49.
13. Ibid.
14. K. Stav, P. L. Dwyer, and L. Roberts, “Pudendal Neuralgia: Fact or Fiction?” make Ms. Fish’s point. Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey 64, no. 3 (March 2009): 190–99.
15. Nancy Fish, interview, Copake, New York, April 5, 2011.
16. See Stephen Porges, The Polyvagal Theory: Neuropsychological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).
17. Mike Lousada, interview, London, UK, June 12, 2011.
18. Dr. James Willoughby, Faculty of History and New College, New College Archives, University of Oxford, interview, June 11, 2011.
19. Juan Eduardo Cirlot and Jack Sage, A Dictionary of Symbols (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1971), 381.
Chapter 7: The Vagina Began as Sacred
1. Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (New York: HarperOne, 1988), 51.
2. See J. A. MacGillivray, Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).
3. Rosalind Miles, The Women’s History of the World (London: Paladin Books, 1989), 34–37.
4. Asia Shepsut, Journey of the Priestess: The Priestess Traditions of the Ancient World (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 62–79.
5. Ibid., 16.
6. Ibid., 72.
7. Ibid., 69.
8. Catherine Blackledge, The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 30.
9. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: Analysis of an Archetype (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 168.
10. Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 239.
11. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 26.
12. Leviticus 15:19, www.come-and-hear.com/editor/america_3.html.
13. Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Kerithoth 2B Soncino 1961 Edition, 1, www.come-and-hear.com/editor/america_3.html.
14. Tertullian, “On the Apparel of Women,” www.public.iastate.edu/~hist.486x/medieval.html; see also Kristen E. Kvam, Lina S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler, Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 131.
15. Morton M. Hunt, The Natural History of Love (New York: Minerva Press, 1959), 187.
16. Ibid., 207. For a full account of the rise of sexless mariolary, see Jacques Delarun, “The Clerical Gaze,” A History of Women: The Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 15–36.
17. Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 214–15.
18. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Nevill Coghill (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 285. In “The Miller’s Tale,” one of the clerks tells Alison that “If I don’t have my wish, for love of you, I will die.” “And prively he caughte hire by the queynte, / And seyde, ‘Ywis, but if ich have my wille, / For deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille.’ ” Foreword, 88. In “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” the Wife of Bath tells one of her husbands that “For, certeyn, olde dotard, by youre leve, / Ye shul have quente right ynogh at eve.” Later she refers to her vagina as her “bele chose” (Fr. belle chose, beautiful thing).
19. “Case Study: The European Witch-Hunts, c. 1450–1750,” www.gendercide.org/case_witchhunts.html.
20. Dr. Emma Rees, “Cordelia’s Can’t: Rhetorics of Reticence and (Dis)ease in King Lear,” Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Vaught (London: Ashgate, 2010), 105–16.
21. Rees, “Cordelia’s Can’t,” 105–16.
22. William Shakespeare, The Compete Works, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958), 1546.
23. Rees, “Cordelia’s Can’t,” 110.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. John Donne, The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 85.
28. Naomi Wolf, “Lost and Found: The Story of the Clitoris,” in Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood (New York: Random House, 2003), 143–53. Also Catherine Blackledge, The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 125.
29. Laqueur, Making Sex, 4, 239.
Chapter 8: The Victorian Vagina: Medicalization and Subjugation
1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 12.
2. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, A Dark Science: Women, Sexuality, and Psychiatry in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Noonday Press, 1988), 63–65.
3. Erna Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen, eds., Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981), 5.
4. William Acton, A Complete Practical Treatise on Venereal Diseases (London: Ibotson and Palmer, 1866), cited in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973), 82–83, 84.
5. Steven Seidman, Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830–1980 (New York: Routledge, 1993), 33.
6. Hellerstein, Hume, and Offen, Victorian Women, 3.
7. Ibid., 5.
8. Ibid.
9. Masson, A Dark Science, 3.
10. Ibid., 65–90.
11. Dr. Emma Rees, “Narrating the Victorian Vagina: Charlotte Brontë and the Masturbating Woman,” The Female Body in Medicine and Literature, ed. Andrew Maugham (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 119–34.
12. Peter T. Cominos, “Innocent Femina Sensualis in Unconscious Conflict,” and E. M. Sigsworth and T. J. Wyke, “A Study of Victorian Prostitution and Venereal Disease,” in Vicinus, Suffer and Be Still, 77–99, 155–72. See also A New Woman Reader, ed. Carolyn Christensen Nelson (New York: Broadview Press, 2000).
13. See A. N. Wilson, The Victorians (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). A History of Private Life, vol. 4, From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Miche
lle Perrot (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 261–337. There were countercurrents to the Victorian and Edwardian hostility to the vagina: in Victorian and Edwardian France, a betrothed man would send flowers that symbolized vulval engorgement, in the days leading up to his wedding: “Following an oriental custom, some men chose flowers that gradually turned redder and redder until on the eve of the wedding, they became purple, as a symbol of ardent love. Manuals of etiquette declared this new fashion to be in the worst possible taste.” Ibid., 311.
14. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (London: Penguin, 1979), 318, 338.
15. Rees, “Narrating the Victorian Vagina,” 119–34.
16. Christina Rossetti, Poems and Prose, ed. Simon Humphries (Oxford, UK: Oxford World Classics, 2008), 105–19.
17. See Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Aberrations of Sexual Life: The Psychopathia Sexualis (London: Panther, 1951); Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion (New York: Arno Press, 1975).
18. Freud on Women: A Reader, ed. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 137.
19. Wilhelm Stekel, Frigidity in Woman, vol. 2, The Parapathiac Disorders (New York: Liveright, 1926), 1–62.
Chapter 9: Modernism: The “Liberated” Vagina
1. Steven Seidman, Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830–1980 (New York: Routledge, 1993), 76–77.
2. Elizabeth Sprigge, Gertrude Stein: Her Life and Work (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), 128.
3. Ibid., 94.
4. Rhonda K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 164–65.
5. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 115, 135. Sarah Greenough, ed., My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 127.
6. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, ed. Norma Millay (New York: HarperPerennial, 1981), 19.
7. Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 272, 343.
8. Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love, trans. Ezra Pound (London: Casanova Society, 1922), 205–6.
9. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 2.
10. Ibid., 24, 31.
11. Michael Whitworth, “Modernism” (lecture, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford, May 10, 2011).
12. Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), xv.
13. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (New York: Penguin, 1987), 37, 55–56.
14. Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus (New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 1977), 8–19.
15. Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 31.
16. Paul Garon, Blues and the Poetic Spirit (London: Eddison Press, 1975), 69.
17. Memphis Minnie, “If You See My Rooster,” Bluesistheroots, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxSjUmGweqg.
18. Bessie Smith, “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” www.lyricstime.com/bessie_smith_i_need_a_little_sugar_in_my_bowl_lyrics.html.
19. Merline Johnson, the Yas Yas Girl, “Don’t You Feel My Leg,” 1938, www.jazzdocumentation.ch/audio/rsrf/high.ram.
20. Ruth Brown, “If I Can’t Sell It I’ll Keep Sittin’ on It (Before I Give It Away),” 1940, Essential Women of Blues, compact disc, Hill/Razaf, Joe Davis Music.
21. See Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).
22. See Shere Hite, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality (New York: Macmillan, 1976).
23. Betty Dodson, “Getting to Know Me,” Ms. magazine, 1974, in Jeffrey Escoffier, Sexual Revolution (New York: Running Press, 2003), 698.
24. Germaine Greer, The Madwoman’s Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994), 74–89.
25. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (New York: Signet, 1974), 310–11.
26. Seidman, Romantic Longings, 150–51.
27. Ibid.
28. Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Free Press, 1997), 188.
29. Ibid.
Three / Who Names the Vagina?
Chapter 10: “The Worst Word There Is”
1. John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 12.
2. Sarah Forman, “Yikes! . . . Yale Edition,” Yale Daily Herald Blog, October 24, 2010, blogdailyherald.com/tag/yale/.
3. H. Yoon and others, “Effects of Stress on Female Rat Sexual Function,” International Journal of Impotence Research: Journal of Sexual Medicine 17 (2005): 33–38.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. See Kate Millett, The Prostitution Papers: A Candid Dialogue (New York: Avon Books, 1973).
10. Matthew Hunt, “Cunt: The History of the C-Word” (PhD), abstract, www.matthewhunt.com/cunt/abstract.html; see also www.matthewhunt.com/cunt/references.html.
11. Ibid. See also encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/657/Cunt.html for an additional history of the word cunt.
12. Hunt, “Cunt.”
13. Ibid.
14. Christina Caldwell, “The C-Word: How One Four-Letter Word Holds So Much Power,” College Times, March 15, 2011.
15. Cited in Hunt, “Cunt.” www.matthewhunt.com/cunt/abstract.html; see also www.matthewhunt.com/cunt/references.html.
16. Ibid. www.matthewhunt.com/cunt/abstract.html; see also www.matthewhunt.com/cunt/references.html.
17. Ibid. www.matthewhunt.com/cunt/abstract.html; see also www.matthewhunt.com/cunt/references.html.
18. See Gordon Rattray Taylor, Sex in History (New York: Vanguard Press, 1954).
19. Russell Ash, cited in Hunt, “Cunt,” www.matthewhunt.com/cunt/abstract.html; see also www.matthewhunt.com/cunt/references.html.
20. “Egypt Bans Forced Virginity Tests by Military,” Al Jazeera, December 27, 2011, www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2011/12/20111227132624606116.html.
21. Vanessa Thorpe and Richard Rogers, “Women Bloggers Call for a Stop to ‘Hateful’ Trolling by Misogynist Men,” The Observer, November 5, 2011. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/Nov/05/women-bloggers-hateful-trolling.
Chapter 11: How Funny Was That?
1. Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . And Why (New York: Free Press, 2003), cited in Marcia Beauchamp, “Somasophy: The Relevance of Somatics to the Cultivation of Female Subjectivity” (PhD diss., California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, 2011), 301–3.
2. Douglas Wile, Art of the Bedchamber: The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics, Including Women’s Solo Meditation Texts (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 9.
3. Sunyata Saraswati and Bodhi Avinasha, Jewel in the Lotus: The Sexual Path to Higher Consciousness (San Francisco: Kriya Jyoti Tantra Society, 1987), 180–81: “Only through woman can man come to enlightenment as she is the divine principle. And so in Tantra, female energy, symbolized by the Divine Mother, is worshipped.”
4. See Clement Egerton, The Golden Lotus, trans. Lanling Xiaoxiaosheng (London: Tuttle, 2011).
5. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Mariner Books, 1989), 18.
6. Onlineslangdictionary.com/thesaurus/words+meaning+vulva+(‘vagina’),+female+genitalia.html.
7. Blackchampagne.com/wordpress/.
Chapter 12: The Pornographic Vagina
1. Naomi Wolf, “The Porn Myth,” New York magazine, October 20, 2003. nymag.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437.
2. Dr. Jim Pfaus, interview, January 29–30, 2012.
3. Ibid.
4. See Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1998).
5. Dr. Helen Fisher, The Anatomy of Love: A Natural Histo
ry of Mating, Marriage and Why We Stray (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), 182–84.
6. Dr. Pfaus interview, Montreal, Quebec, January 29–30, 2012.
7. Marnia Robinson, Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow: From Habit to Harmony in Sexual Relationships (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2009), 133–66.
8. Ibid, 137–66. For more on porn addiction, see J. M. Bostwick and J. A. Bucci, “Internet Sex Addiction Treated with Naltrexone,” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 83, no. 2 (February 2008): 226–30. See also Marnia Robinson and Gary Wilson, “Santorum, Porn and Addiction Neuroscience,” Psychology Today, March 26, 2012, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-poisoned-arrow/201203/santorum-porn-and-addiction-neuroscience.
9. Naomi Wolf, “Is Pornography Driving Men Crazy?” Project Syndicate, June 13, 2011, www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/is-pornography-driving-men-crazy.
10. Reuniting.info/science/articles/sexual_neurochemistry#reward.
11. Ibid.
12. www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cupids-posioned-arrow/201107/porn-induced-sexual-dysfunction-is-growing-problem.
13. Jason S. Carroll and others, “Generation XXX: Pornography Acceptance and Use Among Emerging Adults,” Journal of Adolescent Research 23, no. 1 (January 2008): 6–30.
14. In Britain, the number of labiaplasties carried out on the National Health Service rose by 70 percent in 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/nov/20/cosmetic-vulva-surgery.
15. Dr. Basil Kocur, interview, New York City, February 26, 2011.
16. John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 116–17.
17. Ibid., 139.
Four / The Goddess Array
Chapter 13: “The Beloved Is Me”
1. See Marcus Buckingham, Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently (New York: Thomas Nelson, 2009).