Vagina: A New Biography

by Naomi Wolf

  “From my own experience,” he said, “that theory makes perfect sense.”

  Before he went on, though, he cautioned me: “When I am seeing a client for sexual healing, I am seeing them on two levels: physical and spiritual.” I assured him that I understood that.

  He confirmed that what I wondered about was indeed true: that there were in fact physical differences between women with no experience of sexual violence and those with a history that included rape or sexual abuse. “How could that be?” I asked. “What was the mechanism?” Lousada answered, “The vagina is designed partly for pleasure. Then our life experiences come along. It is as if the tissues of the vagina receive emotion that is poured into them. With more experiences, the emotion becomes compacted, especially if you have had pain. Pain eventually turns into vaginal numbness; which is, actually, desensitization, which is very common.”

  I asked him to put this process into more basic terms. “When I am doing yoni work, if the vaginal tissues have reached some level of numbness, in order to help my client with her own healing process, I must take her back from numbness, to pain, to emotion, to pleasure.” He also spoke about something that he acknowledged was hard to describe: an “energetic disconnect” in the bodies of women with rape or sex abuse in their pasts—their vaginas seemed “energetically” disconnected from the rest of their bodies, even if they were orgasmic. (A male physician, who reviewed for me Lousada’s perspective on the “desensitized” vagina, pointed out that while there’s no “single cell” of the tissues of the vagina, “rather, there are a multitude of different cells arranged into the various tissues that form the organ as a whole—exactly analogous to the pharynx. Mucus-secreting and highly sensitive cells line the ‘cavity,’ underlain by the powerful ‘constrictor muscles’ that are in constant communication with the mucosal surface, the spinal cord, and the brain. Blood flow, cell membrane permeability, fluid and pheromone secretion, and a host of other ‘local’ biological processes all interact with one another and with the central nervous system. It is no surprise to me that Lousada, with his wealth of experience, should be sensitive to changes in this symphony, to dissonant notes, or to sections of the orchestra that have gone silent.”)

  I asked Lousada how common a state of relative desensitization of the vagina is in our culture. Very common, he repeated. “For some women, the lightest touch from a feather can be orgasmic. But most women in this culture need a lot of friction-based stimulation, which suggests that there is a loss of sensitivity for them.” I reminded him about women’s varying neural wiring, but he clarified that this diminution of sensitivity he referred to can take place when there is nothing unusually challenging about a woman’s neural wiring. He also said that vaginal sensation in these women improves after the work he does with them (which involves healing-oriented vaginal and vulval massage, often to orgasm, and other practices such as meditation and visualization). Lousada noted that studies have shown that virtually every woman can, theoretically, be orgasmic; because of this, he believes that the relative numbness or desensitization of many of the vaginas that he encounters in his work is the result of a woman’s lifetime accumulation of negative experiences, ranging from ridicule of her sexuality in childhood, to sexual abuse itself.

  How do these women describe their situation? I wondered. Did they think their somewhat dulled sensations were normal? Or did they show up in his living room describing this desensitization as a problem?

  “They don’t generally say, ‘I don’t have a lot of sensation,’ ” he emphasized. “They may say, ‘Do you know what: I’ve never had an orgasm.’ They might say, ‘I have vaginismus [painful, involuntary tightening of the vaginal muscles before or during sex].’ Or they may often say, ‘I just don’t enjoy sex.’ ”

  I pushed Lousada to be more specific about the differences he had observed in the emotionally traumatized vagina. “Some lack lubrication,” he said. “Some feel physically tight—not ‘tight’ like before having a baby, but rather, the quality of the tissue itself feels denser and tighter than other women’s vaginas. If you massage these women’s vaginal walls, there are knots of muscles there, in their vaginas,” he repeated. “Vaginismus, in my experience, is almost always the result of sexual trauma.”

  I struggled to process Lousada’s narrative—that many, maybe even most, women in our culture just didn’t feel as much, vaginally, as they might, because of awful things that had happened to them emotionally.

  I knew from having worked with rape and sexual abuse survivors that many such women had difficulties with even loving, consensual sex they wished to have with caring partners. They found themselves, again and again, up against an implacable, enduring wall between their intentional selves and their own sexual pleasure.

  They were in loving, safe, supportive relationships. But they still struggled with their bodies’ sexual resistance and refusal, which often lasted for years—or even a lifetime. Was this emotional “wall” possibly, for some women, also a physical wall—of tightened or knotted muscle?

  If some of these effects of emotional trauma in the vagina were actually physical, and they were left untreated, then of course these life-damaging, relationship-damaging physical aftereffects in the vagina would persist and persist. Asking him to restrict himself to defining sexual trauma in the more commonly understood narrower sense, I asked him to estimate the frequency of this phenomenon: loss of vaginal and clitoral sensation due to sex assault, rape, or childhood molestation. “Look,” he said sadly. “Twenty-five to thirty-five percent of women have had acknowledged sexual trauma.” I knew that several studies confirmed that those numbers were correct. “How they often respond is through loss of sensitivity in the vagina: vaginismus, disconnection, due to the trauma.

  “Or else they can go completely the other way: women can become totally orgasmic, though with a history of clear trauma. The attitude is: ‘Hey, I’m cool with sex. . . .’ But when we really get into yoni work, and I stimulate the vagina, she has one or two orgasms, and then huge bursts of grief or rage come up. So the body is using orgasm to mask the grief and pain.”

  I still did not get the biological mechanism, beyond the obvious point that we tighten our muscles when we are frightened. How could these effects be so physically long-lasting?

  Lousada explained his theory for this, which he said was based on the work of Dr. Stephen Porges. “Porges came up with the scientific basis for the phenomenon,” said Lousada. Dr. Porges, who is a professor of psychology and bioengineering at the University of Illinois and director of the Brain-Body Center there, developed a trauma analysis that is widely used called “polyvagal theory.” I looked up Dr. Porges’s theory.

  Dr. Porges’s “polyvagal theory” sees a connection between the evolution of the autonomic nervous system and emotional expression, including facial gestures, communication, and social behavior. He argues that through evolution the brain experiences a connection between the nerves that control the heart and the face; this connection links physical feelings with facial expression, voice, and even gesture. His practice teaches therapists to understand how “faulty neuroception” can have an impact on autonomic regulation, and how “the features that trigger different neuroceptive states (safety, danger, and life threat)” can actually be used, as Lousada uses them, within the context of treatment: the therapist’s goal is to trigger in the patient’s brain the “neuroceptive states of safety.”16

  If Dr. Porges is correct, and his treatment method has a reputable following in the trauma treatment community, it would mean that many of the 17 percent to 23 percent of women who have experienced sexual abuse or assault in their formative years would have the personality reactions that are so common to women in our culture—living in a state of continual anxiety, experiencing an inability to “just be,” struggling with various kinds of defendedness and issues of control, with a trapped voice—all of which are states that are not conducive to women experiencing their full sexuality or power.

  B
riefly, Lousada went on, we have a “triune brain”: a reptile brain, the amygdala, to deal with issues of survival; a mammalian, or emotional brain; and a neomammalian brain—the frontal cortex, where sophisticated social functions, among other processes, take place. When we feel threatened, he said, the oldest part of the brain, the amygdala, takes over. Most of us are familiar with “flight or fight,” which is one amygdala response to threat. But Porges identified two others: “freeze”—sometimes when prey freezes, it can survive, because a predator might assume it is dead already; and “tend and befriend”—“If I do something to make you like me, you may not kill me.”

  Lousada adds to this set of responses to trauma one that he calls “the detach response.” “If a tiger has his teeth in us, and there is nothing we can do, we go up out of the body into the mind,” he said.

  This “detach” reaction is well established from research on trauma. I knew from my own work with trauma survivors, especially survivors of childhood sexual abuse, how common that “out of the body” experience is during an assault. Many survivors of sexual assault I had worked with when I volunteered at a rape crisis center had described watching the assault dispassionately, especially if it was an episode of abuse during childhood, from a disembodied state, as if from somewhere else in the room. After a while, the child simply knows how to leave her body if an assault is on its way.

  The vagina “freezes,” I almost understood him to be saying, as in the common expression “freezes in terror,” and the traumatized woman will also “detach” psychologically from “the crime scene”—from that part of her body. “Doctors will tell you then that a symptom like vaginismus is in the body. But it is the brain that tells the body what to do. The brain sends messages to the vagina, saying: ‘It is not safe,’ ” said Lousada. This echoed what Dr. Richmond had said, though in a way more specific to vaginal tension.

  “So I work with the client through these stages of trauma. If the traumatized client is detached from her body—she is in her mind—she may have numbness or vaginal tension. We move through that with touch. Then I’ll move into working with her pressure points in the vagina. In vaginismus, there can be a spasming. ‘Oh f—, that hurts!’ a client might feel at that point in the healing. Then there is an energetic pulse that returns. And at that point something unblocks in the vagina. Once they feel safe enough to move from ‘freeze’ to ‘fight or flight’ they are likely to be moving also from numbness to pain or masking orgasms, to absolute rage—they may start yelling at that point, or revisit the trauma—but this time with a different outcome. They might shout, this time, ‘Get your f—ing hands off me!’ Memories may surface. They move into ‘flight’: sometimes the legs will involuntarily start kicking. Then they move into a social response: eventually they are able to engage with someone in a different way. Eventually intimacy doesn’t retraumatize them. Porges says that the traumatized nervous system can profoundly affect relationships. In a fear-based response, people actually experience, for instance, a neutral response as threatening; this has been scientifically demonstrated. So I continue to heal them, through an empathic, gentle, loving touch.”

  I asked if in his experience a traumatized vagina correlated to a risk of depression for the woman in question.

  “Yes,” he said, since, in his view, “depression is repressed anger,” and “in sexually traumatized women, the fight response has been repressed,” which would lead to suppressed rage. He said that about 10 percent of his clients had been or were on medication to treat depression. (For contrast, the Centers for Disease Control reported in 2005–2006 that the percentage of noninstitutionalized people with depression is 5.4 percent.)

  “So what happens to them sexually afterward, when they are healed?” I asked. “Do their vaginas actually change?”

  “When they are healed, there is definitely a change in that area,” he said. “Their vaginas do feel different: less rigid, more responsive. They do become more orgasmic, or they may allow orgasms for the first time. They can experience intimacy in relationships.”

  I thanked Lousada for his time. We had been talking about so much human grief and pain. But even though we had been discussing incredible sorrow, somehow the world seemed shot through with hope, and with a glimmer of something like illumination, something coming alive with light, like a cloud weighted with late sun.

  “In Tantra,” he concluded, closing the interview by bringing my attention back to what is a spiritual focus for him in this work, “this is spiritual work: a man can become enlightened just by gazing at the yoni. There are Tantric rituals in which a man gazes at but does not touch the yoni. I’ve done that ritual many times. And I actually had an experience of seeing the Divine within the vagina—an image came to me of the Virgin Mary.” He explained that he had not been raised Catholic, or particularly religious, but that the image had suggested to him an “archetypal mother energy.” “In Tantra, the yoni is not just a sacred place, but a ‘seat of the divine.’ ”17

  The image he described was indeed archetypal. I had a brief but striking memory: the previous morning, Dr. James Willoughby, a research fellow at Oxford University, who was archiving New College Library’s ancient treasures, had kindly shown me an extraordinary illuminated volume, an Anglo-Norman version of St. John’s Apocalypse, which had belonged to British noblewoman Joan de Bohun.18 It had been created in the fourteenth century. It was worth about a million pounds. It was so lovely it nearly brought tears to my eyes. I could see the follicles of the vellum on the inner binding. Elsewhere, as I later investigated, on several parchment pages, a sacred lamb was framed in what Willoughby had called a “mandorla.” Mary is shown also framed, throned in glory. Her cheeks are rosily tinted, her skin white, and her beautifully modeled hands open in compassion. She, too, is often framed in what Dr. Willoughby had called an “almond mandorla.” This mandorla, curving around her on either side, and pointed at the top and bottom, had infinitely delicately rendered gradations of rainbow colors.

  I had bitten my lip at the time in order not to ask further about the origin of the “almond mandorla,” since it was so obviously an archetypal feminine shape. This was the archetypal mother energy, I thought, from which all colors emerge.

  I had seen that shape in other works of art, including the double-pointed, double-curved, almond-shaped frames, also painted in rainbow shades, around Buddhist saints in classical Tangkas. The famous image of the sixteenth-century Mexican apparition of Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe—which, as two contemporary accounts maintained, manifested to Nahuatl peasant Juan Diego—also shows the Virgin Mother appearing within a similar, but not identical, radiant mandorla shape.

  When I looked up the origin of the almond mandorla, I found that it was indeed a vaginal symbol that antedated Christianity—going back to the Pythagoreans—but that it was also used by early Christians. Early depictions of Jesus portrayed him as an infant within the vesica, or mandorla, which represented the womb of Mary. The mandorla also symbolized the coming together of heaven and earth in the form of Jesus—part man, part god. It represents a doorway or portal between worlds. By the Middle Ages, it was part of the church’s sacred geometry. Other cultures also adapted the mandorla. In Hindu culture, the yoni is also a mandorla symbol: “the yoni is the gateway, or the zone of interpenetration, wherein two circles intersect.”19

  You can still see this symbol, now placed horizontally, in Piscean form, in stickers on cars of Christians asserting their religious identies; no doubt few realize that it was originally a schematic depiction of the archetypal womb, and related to early depictions of the archetypal divine feminine.

  As Lousada and I continued talking, the afternoon had waned. By the time I disconnected from our Skype session, the light was lower, and high white clouds towered over the darker line of the medieval college’s chapel roof. They looked like castles upon castles, like the mighty white clouds I had seen, painted with tiny brushes on vellum, through which a sacred lamb—or a beautiful, ancient Mary—h
ad ridden in from heaven, as if explaining heaven to earth, while sheltered in the perfect double inward curves of a rainbow.

  7

  The Vagina Began as Sacred

  At the summit of the world, give birth to the father; my womb is in the midst of the waters, in the ocean. Thence I extend through all the worlds and reach up to yonder sky with my greatness. . . . the Devi’s womb (Yoni), sometimes translated as “origin” or “home,” is her creative power . . . from this emanates the whole of the universe.

  —Deva Datta Ka Li, In Praise of the Goddess: The Devimahatmaya and Its Meaning

  It would take many volumes to account comprehensively for the history of the vagina in the West alone; so this is necessarily an overview, concentrating on dramatic shifts in its cultural meaning and representation.

  The vagina began as sacred. There are vagina symbols carved into cave walls in the earliest historic settlements. The earliest artifacts of human prehistory featured vaginas. Figurines such as the Venuses of central Europe, which probably represented fertility, often exhibited exaggerated pudenda. We can’t know for certain exactly what these sacred vaginas represented, but feminist historians such as Riane Eisler, in The Chalice and the Blade, and others, are sure they represented a primordial state of matriarchy.1 But the prominence given to representations of the vagina when human beings first made art certainly suggests that female sexuality and fertility were seen as sacred. From 25,000 to 15,000 BCE, “Venus figurines”—fertility images with pronounced vulvas—made of stone or ivory were abundant in Europe, and similar images crafted from the mud of the Nile were common in Egypt. Sir Arthur Evans, who discovered the Minoan civilization at the turn of the twentieth century, pointed out that the multitude of such fertility figurines in so many diverse parts of the world suggested that “The same Great Mother . . . whose worship under various names and titles extended over a large part of Asia Minor and the regions beyond” was “a worldwide fact.”2 As a number of historians, such as Rosalind Miles in The Women’s History of the World, see it, “From the beginning, as humankind emerged from the darkness of prehistory, God was a woman.”3