Vagina: A New Biography

by Naomi Wolf

  But is what one does in bed with someone else—with all the hopes, intimacies, and possibilities for grief involved—really just “a dream you are in”? The next three decades would call this worldview’s vision of consequence-free sex and fantasy into question.

  So 1970s feminist activists were trying to express a new relationship to the vagina that quickly became decontextualized by mass-produced pornography, by libertarian sex manuals, and by sexual scientists. (Playboy centerfolds were “pink”—meaning open legs and inner labia visible—by the early 1970s.) As the so-called sexual revolution of the ’70s got under way, even feminist discourses about the vagina were framed in ways that were rather sterile or “porn-y,” since the modernist and blues associations around female sexuality—echoes of mystery that went deeper than mere carnality, and ecstasy that was more than physical—had been lost.

  The upbeat discourse about female sexuality that characterized the work of Germaine Greer and Erica Jong did not last long. Things turned dark in the 1980s. In 1985, Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse cast the vagina as being—intrinsically—a site for male sexual violence. In an argument dense with sexual pessimism, she argued that heterosexual intercourse is always about male dominance and female submission: “The small, intimate society created for intercourse, one time or many, the social unit that is the fuck in action, must be one that protects male dominance. . . . The penis needs protection of the law, of awe, of power. Rebellion here, in intercourse, is the death of a system of gender hierarchy premised on a sexual victory over the vagina.”28

  By this point the ebullient 1930s and 1940s bananas and fruit baskets, the needles and cloth, the hot dogs and buns, and the churns and butter of blues lyrics—metaphors that are about mutual dependency or mutual energy rather than about dominance and submission—had been lost to time. To Dworkin, male penetration of the vagina was always inherently an act of aggression. In her view, it was impossible for a woman freely to want to be penetrated. If she did indeed desire penetration, it was a result of her having internalized a “false consciousness” about the nature of her desire because she had internalized the norms of her oppressor. Paradoxically, just as women had been charged by misogynists in the Elizabethan era with being “wounded,” Dworkin made—from a pro-woman position—the very same claim. In Dworkin’s work, the vagina is demoted back to its Elizabethan status as an allegorical injury, a “gash,” a ready-made wound awaiting the ready-made male wounder.29

  Other kinds of advocacy did surface in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1993, Joani Blank edited Femalia, a collection of close-up color photographs of many vaginas, including those owned by some well-known women. (The book was published by Down There Press.) This was an update of activist Tee Corinne’s 1973 vagina coloring book. Both women wished to send images of the immense variation among vaginas out into the culture, as they felt that women were too often ashamed of their own unique labial and vulval shapes. The Vagina Monologues, originally a 1996 play by Eve Ensler, made a great impact: Ensler used real women’s monologues about their vaginas to call attention to still-taboo issues of female sexuality and rape. In 1998, Inga Muscio wrote Cunt: A Declaration of Independence—and sought to reclaim the word and concept, turning it from a negative to an emblem of power.

  And today? Depending on where one looks, there is a widespread movement of female musicians, artists, and writers painting, taking pictures of, narrating, championing, and “problematizing”—as they say in the academy—the vagina. E-mails have alerted me to a knitting circle in Toronto in which young women, seeking a sense of empowerment, knit woolen vulvas. A female Danish artist bikes around Copenhagen with a six-foot plaster-of-paris vagina sculpture attached to her bicycle. The young-feminist website Feministing.com runs a feature titled “I Love My Vagina.” A website called Vulvavelvet.com, rather charmingly, encourages women to post images of their own vaginas so that no woman will feel “weird.” The range of labial diversity that women send in to the site is truly astonishing, and the wide range of what is “normal” for women certainly challenges the surgical uniformity, as well as the creepy childlikeness, of the pornographic vagina. Like Tee Corinne and Joani Blank, the site’s founders, too, want women to accept in themselves the very broad range of normal variations and complex symmetries and asymmetries in labial arrangements. (Vulvavelvet.com also has a fascinating page in which women write in with tricks and tips for satisfying masturbation. Suggestions range from the use of varieties of vegetables—not the usual suspects—to creative ways to sit on washing machines and complex arrangements involving showerheads. With its chatty, informative tone—try this at home!—it feels much more like “Hints from Heloise,” the housekeeping tips column, than like “Penthouse Forum.”)

  It is as if the zeitgeist is at work, and women in the public eye and all over the cultural map want to join an inchoate and unspecified movement toward a new kind—a funnier, or tenderer, or gentler kind—of reclamation of the vagina.

  This is all positively motivated, no doubt. But is it a reclamation that is profound enough?

  Three

  Who Names the Vagina?

  10

  “The Worst Word There Is”

  “What is cunt?” she said. . . .

  “It’s thee, dost see: and tha’rt a lot besides an animal, aren’t ter? Even ter fuck? Cunt! Eh, that’s the beauty o’ thee, lass!”

  —D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

  Our self-contempt originates in this: in knowing we are cunt.

  —Kate Millet, Sexual Politics

  If we understand the vagina-brain connection, and how liberated vaginas relate to potentially liberated female minds and spirits, we can also start to see why words, when deployed in relation to the vagina, are always more than “just words.” Because of the subtlety of the mind-body connection, words about the vagina are also what philosopher John Austin, in his 1960 book How to Do Things with Words, calls “performative utterances,” often used as a means of social control. A “performative utterance” is a word or phrase that actually accomplishes something in the real world. When a judge says, “Guilty,” to a defendant, or a groom says, “I do,” the words alter material reality.1

  Words about the vagina create environments that directly affect women’s bodies. The words women hear being used about their vaginas change, for better or worse, what they purport to describe. Because of their effect on the female autonomic nervous system (ANS), words about the vagina can either help or hurt actual vaginal response. New studies, as we saw, show that the autonomic nervous system in women is directly connected to optimal sexual arousal functionality in vaginal tissue, circulation, and lubrication itself—so verbal threats or verbal admiration or reassurances can directly affect the sexual functioning of the vagina. Another new study, which we explore below, suggests that a stressful environment can actually negatively affect vaginal tissue itself. This “bad stress” affecting the vagina can also, as it inhibits orgasm, lower the levels of women’s confidence, creativity, and hopefulness overall.

  Women react strongly to male verbal abuse of their vaginas or to implied threats of rape, even when these are “just jokes,” for these very reasons—though most of us are unaware of the science behind our “gut reactions” that this kind of abuse is somehow really bad for us.

  This tactic is common: The film North Country (based on the 2002 book Class Action: The Story of Lois Jenson and the Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law, by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler, which chronicled the case of Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Company) centers on male coal miners in a Pennsylvania mine who resisted female miners’ incursions into their world. At one point, the women miners entered their locker room to find that the word cunts had been spray-painted in massive letters on the wall of lockers. In Oxford University in February of 2012, a college club established a “game” in which young men hunted down young women scantily dressed as foxes (in British foxhunts, riders on horseback chase the fox with packs of hounds; whe
n the fox is captured, the dogs destroy it). On a UK college humor website, in 2012, the editors posted a joke pointing out that few rapes get prosecuted and so “your odds are good.” “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” Clarence Thomas was alleged in 1991 to have asked Anita Hill, something which he denied. But if true, then it surely would have made her uneasy. Comedienne Roseanne Barr described male TV writers’ behavior when women made inroads into their profession: she noted that she hated going up to the writers’ house because there would be a “ ‘stinky-pussy’ joke” within three minutes. When a woman faces a workplace in which her male peers want to show her she is unwelcome, similar words or images targeting or insulting the vagina will often surface: centerfolds with legs spread, for instance, and the face of the woman in question superimposed on the naked body, will appear somewhere in public.

  Of course, cultural and psychological motivations play a part in this form of harassment. But the role of manipulating female stress in targeting the vagina should not be ignored. This behavior—ridiculing the vagina—makes perfect instinctive sense. These acts are often impersonal and tactical—strategies for directing a kind of pressure at women that is not consciously understood but may be widely intuited, and even survive in folk memory, as eliciting a wider neuropsychological “bad stress” response that actually debilitates women.

  In 2010, male Yale students gathered at a “Take Back the Night” event, where their female classmates were marching in a group, protesting against sexual assault. The young men chanted at the protesters, “No means yes and yes means anal.”2 Some of the young women brought a lawsuit against the university, arguing that tolerating such behavior created an unequal educational environment. Ethically they are in the right, and neurobiologically they are right as well. Almost all young women who face a group of their male peers chanting such slogans are likely to feel instinctively slightly panicked. On some level they are getting the message that they may be in the presence of would-be rapists—making it impossible to shrug off immature comments, as women are often asked to do. They sense there is a wider risk to them that is being threatened, and indeed there is, but it is not just the risk of sexual assault. If they are stressed regularly in this way, they will indeed depress the whole subtle and delicate network of neurobiological triggers and reactions that make them feel good, happy, competent, and as if they know themselves.

  In many cases of sexual harassment in school settings or in the workplace, the vagina is targeted, threatened, or ridiculed. Why should this be so uniform a tactic, appearing in elite universities and blue-collar labor settings, crossing class and other boundaries?

  It is common because it is a form of verbal aggression against women with effects—actual physical effects—that go deeper than other kinds of name-calling. Dr. Burke Richmond, as we saw, pointed out the mind-body connection in terms of lasting damage to some women’s sensory perceptions as a result of sexual trauma. Even more research is identifying new kinds of lasting damage or dysfunction to many other female body systems as a result of sexual “bad stress”—what one recent study called, using a new nomenclature for what is emerging as a newly recognizable medical pattern in some women—“multisystem dysregulation.”

  The female body reacts in the same way to “bad stress” whether the context is the birthing room or the university or the workplace. If the female brain senses that an environment is not safe, its stress response inhibits all the same organs and systems, regardless of setting. Many of the signals that either stoke or diminish female desire have to do with the female brain’s question: Is it safe here?

  So if a woman goes to work or to study in a sexually dangerous or threatening atmosphere day after day, she risks—because of the cumulative, long-term effect of that “bad stress”—having the letting-go, creative “relaxation response” inhibited even outside her work or school environment. A woman’s reproductive and mothering life can be affected by chronic sexually threatening stress; stress inhibits not just a woman’s ability to become aroused and to lubricate and reach orgasm, but also her ability to give birth effectively and to nurse her child, and so on. Over time, if her vagina is targeted verbally, her heart rate, blood pressure, circulation, and many other systems will suffer chronically. Sexually threatening stress releases cortisol into the bloodstream, which has been connected to abdominal fat in women, with its attendant risks of diabetes and cardiac problems; being on the receiving end of sexually threatening “bad stress” also raises the likelihood of heart disease and stroke.

  If you sexually stress a woman enough, over time, other parts of her life are likely to go awry; she will have difficulty relaxing in bed eventually, as well as in the classroom or in the office. This in turn will inhibit the dopamine boost she might otherwise receive, which would in turn prevent the release of the chemicals in her brain that otherwise would make her confident, creative, hopeful, focused—and effective, especially relevant if she is competing academically or professionally with you. With this dynamic in mind, the phrase “fuck her up” takes on new meaning.

  H. Yoon and colleagues, Korean researchers who published “Effects of Stress on Female Rat Sexual Function” in the International Journal of Impotence Research in 2005, concluded that “chronic physical stress modifies the sexual behavior of female rats through a mechanism believed to involve complex changes in sex hormones, endocrine factors, and neurotransmitters.”3 They point out that “Many women with stress experience some forms of sexual difficulty, such as a decreased libido, arousal difficulty, or orgasmic difficulty. However, no research has been conducted related to changes in the clitoris and vagina when female subjects are subjected to prolonged stress. Is it that only a psychological phenomenon occurs at the cerebral cortical area controlling sexual activities? Or are there any significant changes in the vagina, clitoris, or other sexual response organs that lead to arousal or orgasmic difficulties?”

  This first study to look at the effect of “bad stress” on female rat arousal—though many studies had looked at how stress inhibits the sex lives of male rats—found the chemical “smoking gun” that explains why women need to relax to become aroused. Evidently nitric oxide (NO) and nitric oxide synthase (NOS) play important roles in vaginal and clitoral engorgement—helping the smooth muscle of the vagina relax and the vaginal tissues swell in preparation for arousal and orgasm—and these chemicals and their actions are inhibited when females are negatively stressed.

  “In this study, we undertook to investigate the effects of physical stress on sexual function by measuring changes in sexual behaviors, serum hormonal levels, and in neuronal NOS (nNOS) and endothelial NOS (eNOS) concentrations in vaginal tissues, both important mediators of smooth muscle relaxation and vascular engorgement, and therefore sexual arousal,” the authors explain.4

  They divided sixty-three female rats into three equal groups, all of them in estrous (that is, under ordinary circumstances, eager to mate). A mucosal smear was taken from every rat’s vaginal tissue. “A male rat was then gently introduced into the cage and sexual behavior was observed. All sexual behavior tests were recorded on video camera and the results were scored and analyzed by one observer who was blind to the study details.” The researchers checked the female rats’ “receptivity” by recording their responses of “lordosis”—the arched-back, paws-up signal that a female is interested in mating. “Any defensive kick, push, run or roll onto the back was considered as a rejection response.” Fair enough.

  All the way down the mammalian ladder, scientists such as the Yoon team are confirming that getting females “in the mood” is scientifically a more complex and more “mind-body” process than is the analogue in males: “In general, sexual response in the female requires mental–physical reciprocal reactions, which are more complicated than in the male. Therefore, the effects of psychological and physical stress on sexual activity could be much larger in female than male subjects. . . . We hypothesized that chronic physical stress may affect female sexual function an
d aimed to identify pathophysiologic changes induced by chronic stress. Furthermore, we investigated how these changes could bring about arousal and orgasmic difficulty.”5

  Well, the scientists found exactly what they were looking for: the stressed-out female rats were not nice to their mates, and did not want to make love: “female rats under stress showed significantly decreased receptivities to their male partners,” wrote the scientists; the female rats also displayed measurable “aggression” and “irritability.” Stress diminished the female rats’ physical ability to get aroused; it decreased their genital blood flow:

  In animal model studies, mental or physical stress increases the level of serum catecholamines, thereby causing vascular contraction, which in turn reduces blood flow and leads to sexual dysfunction. . . . Since stress is concomitant with an increased output of catecholamines in blood . . . it is reasonable to assume that blood flow to the genital organs reduces during periods of stress. . . . [W]e measured norepinephrine as an indirect index of catecholamine level and found that it increased in the stress group and decreased in the recovery group. This result indirectly supports the suggestion that stress affects female genital blood flow.6

  Stress messes with the sex hormones of female rats, and, the authors hypothesize, causes interference in the baseline vaginal actions—neurotransmission, smooth muscle relaxation, and blood vessel engorgement—necessary for female sexual arousal: “[E]stradiol level was significantly reduced in the stress group. It is widely known that sex hormones play important roles in sexual response in males and females. . . . Our data show that vaginal nNOS and eNOS expression in the stress group reduced compared to the control group. . . . Therefore, it is postulated that reduced nNOS and eNOS levels cause reduced neurotransmission, less smooth muscle relaxation, and a lowered vascular blood flow in response to sexual stimuli in the vaginal tissue. Furthermore, this is clinically expressed as a difficulty in arousal response and orgasmic response.”7