Vagina: A New Biography

by Naomi Wolf

  When a man comes in a woman’s mouth, she may feel energized; when he comes in her vagina, it can boost her tenderness and, if Meston and Buss are right, help elevate her mood. Women’s responses to men’s ejaculate varies immensely from one man to another, and science has yet to explain why some men’s semen feels so much more “right” than that of others. Many women have told me that some men’s semen right away felt “wrong”: many heterosexual women I heard from confirmed that a turning point in any number of otherwise promising early relationships was the moment when they realized they did not like—sometimes it was could not tolerate—the semen of a new lover. It is very possible that this issue is part of what women refer to when they speak of a man who is otherwise a good potential mate having “no spark” with them, or “no chemistry.” When odors are aversive, people avoid coming into contact with them; it is the same with tastes. A first-time ejaculation without a condom, in a couples context, introduces a new smell and taste. At this point, many women may find they like or love the ejaculate, or at least its effect on them; other men’s tastes and scents are offputting.

  “So are you suggesting,” many of my interviewees asked, in one way or another, completely unprompted, “that even when things are not going that well—I should get myself some of his semen to feel better?” Many of them laughed when they asked me this, but they were understandably quite serious, too. It seems that the old folk wisdom of “just have sex till you want to have sex” may have some biochemical foundation to it. The extra opiate boost provided by an ejaculation in women, and potentially other kinds of mood elevators—if their mates are doing other nice things for them, too—may indeed help get some couples through tough moments.

  YOU WILL INADVERTENTLY DRIVE HER CRAZY IF YOU IGNORE THE GODDESS ARRAY

  In our culture, the woman is tasked with “keeping the fire alive” sexually in a relationship—showing up at the door wearing nothing but Saran Wrap, as women were counseled to do in the 1970s in Marabel Morgan’s bestseller, The Total Woman, or exhausting herself with costumes and novelties to get his attention. But practitioners of Tantra think this model is backward. In their worldview, it is the man who must tend the fire; the man who, in Mike Lousada’s terms, must “hold” the woman. Many Western men, sadly, ignore the Goddess Array unless they want sex—and often even then—and allow what Tantrists call “the fire” to subside in their wives or girlfriends to almost nothing. Then, misguidedly, they reach for their wives’ or girlfriends’ vaginas—as if that were part of lovemaking’s beginning, instead of the end result of a long and complex sexual and emotional process. A vagina eager and ready for lovemaking is the by-product of a complex and dynamic process between two people, a process that unfolds over all twenty-four hours of the day, in which the man has, in Tantric terms, done many other apparently nonsexual things to “stoke the fire.”

  A straight woman who lives day to day in close relationship to a man who attends well to the Goddess Array—who, in the midst of all the other responsibilities of his life, doesn’t forget to give her a strong, warm hug when he comes home from work in the evening, who doesn’t skip taking the trouble to tell her she looks beautiful in a new dress, who finds the energy, even when he is tired too, to stroke her hair—this woman is, even when she is just watering her garden or opening her mail, living inside a positive, exciting sexual and emotional, yet physical, environment that her mate has created for her. Because of the idiosyncracies of the female system, creating this uniquely relaxing and stimulating environment is more the task of the man than of the woman (she has other emotional responsibilities if his biochemistry is to be taken into account). In this atmosphere, she is living with a calm SNS, which allows her circulatory system to lubricate and flush with blood easily; in turn, the hormones that elevate her mood and create confidence in her and attachment to him are steadily replenished. So when the time comes to make love, she already wants to; for she is, on all the levels that are so completely interconnected in women, eager to and able to—two different things for women—open up to her husband or lover.

  Indeed, Dr. Pfaus’s lab has found evidence—at least in lower female mammals—that there is a physiological “point of no return” for females experiencing bad sex with males—a vanishing point, if you like, related to female sexual disappointment, after which a positive connection with a mate is not physiologically recoverable. Remember the experiment in which the female rats were made “horny” through hormone injections, and one group was allowed to get pleasure from mating with males, while the other group was injected with naloxone that inhibited their experience of pleasure?

  The negative results of the experiment lasted long after the actual experiment, in the reactions of the female rats who experienced disappointing sex. After the fifth experience of bad sex, the female rats begin not just ignoring the males—they start actively fighting them. They do so even if they are now injected not with naloxone, but with saline; in other words, even though now they can physically experience pleasure, they don’t want to bother with having sex at all.

  Dr. Pfaus explained: “These female rats are fighting the males, not soliciting, not showing full-intensity lordosis (meaning not arching their backs to signal a desire for sex). There is no naloxone on board, so what has happened? The female rats have formed an expectation that sex sucks—they have gone through the motions, but they won’t get off. So despite the hormone priming, they still don’t want to have sex! They have had five prior experiences of bad sex! They seem to have psychologically concluded: ‘This is just painful. Why should I do this anymore?’ (We are now looking at how long that effect lasts.)

  “So female rats can conclude: ‘He is a crappy lover.’

  “Female rats are not blaming themselves—they are looking at an external cause for their sexual disappointment. The conclusion? There is some point at which your female partner won’t want to have sex with you in the not-distant future if you give her bad sex enough in the recent past.” 47

  It is pointless for a man to wonder why his female lover climbed on top of him enthusiastically last Tuesday after the very same touch from him—but pleads a headache tonight—if he is unwilling to look at how he has attended to the Goddess Array that day or that week. But if he understands how the Goddess Array really works, he will understand that, say, his having taken a moment to look deeply into her eyes before kissing her good-bye that morning before work, or picking up the laundry off the bedroom floor that evening before he turns to her with a sexual intention—even his running the wash cycle and folding a load of the laundry—can be, later on, extremely seductive to his wife or girlfriend. If this issue has been a source of stress for her, his having taken action about it in a way that lowers her stress levels associated with it (and him) will literally make her more ready to lubricate, and her vagina will be better able to flush with blood.

  I would go further: his gazing at her, or praising her, or even folding a load of laundry, is not merely rightly thought of as highly effective foreplay; it is actually, from the female body’s point of view, an essential part of good sex itself.

  “SHOWERS OF STARS”

  The latest science, indeed, comes full circle to where we began, and shows that women themselves, given the opportunity to initiate naming, name some kinds of orgasms with language that reflects transcendental experience.

  Dr. Irv Binik at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has developed an “orgasm checklist” for women, with twenty-four descriptors; this multiplicity of available names for women’s experience has led to his team’s discovery that there are different kinds of orgasms in women, as women define them subjectively: some feel very “physiological” to women; for other kinds, women use more “all-encompassing,” “evaluative,” “subjective” terms. Binik found that women tend to use the physiological descriptors more often for masturbation—and to draw upon the emotional, subjective descriptors more often for intercourse.48

  Beverly Whipple and Barry Komisaruk took this
insight even further; they found, in 2011, that women use different kinds of language—amounting, really, to different kinds of poetry—to describe, when invited to do so, different kinds of orgasms resulting from the stimulation of clitoris, vagina (G-spot), or cervix and various combinations. This study made me recall how sex educator Liz Topp had said sadly, about the girls she had counseled who did not understand their own anatomy—“they don’t know that they have worlds inside of them.”

  Fascinatingly, Whipple and Komisaruk found that vulval orgasms are commonly triggered by the clitoris, the major nerve involved is the pudendal nerve, and the muscle response is mostly in the PC muscle; whereas uterine orgasm is commonly triggered by the G-spot, the major nerve involved is the pelvic nerve, and the muscle response is mostly uterine. “Blended orgasms”—most women’s favorite kind, statistically—involved several trigger points, and both major nerve branches, pudendal and pelvic, as well as muscle responses in both areas.49

  Perhaps it is not surprising that it is a team made up of a female researcher, working in tandem with a male researcher, that has identified one category of female orgasm that takes us back—or forward—to the language of mysticism. A Gnostic would say that when the experience of the Divine or the transcendental harmonizes what we see outside, with what we feel inside, that is “the God” or “the Goddess.”

  What new name, among many, did some women, given the chance to categorize their own orgasms in their own language, give to one kind of sexual experience?

  The name: “Showers of stars.”

  Conclusion: Reclaiming the Goddess

  It feels like home.

  —Madonna, “Like a Prayer”

  I didn’t expect to have such a shift in my own vision just from having explored dimensions of the vagina that had been unknown to me. But just as I was drawn to the subject matter because I suspected that a book about the vagina would be a book about something much greater and different than a “mere” sex organ, so the change in my understanding is not just about the vagina, but seems to include a shift in how I see the world.

  To finish the book, my children and I went, with another family, to a rented house, near the Greek town of Eressos, in a chain of what had been the Minoan islands. We were heading there for a week, at the start of a new summer. Two years had passed since I first began my journey.

  Physically, though I had a dramatic scar running the length of the small of my back, I was well healed in every way. I was able to swim and hike again, though sadly I will never again be able to turn my spine completely—so sports, such as tennis and some kinds of dancing, are out, forever. While sometimes this causes me a bit of a pang, I am so grateful to not be in a body brace—and, just as important, so unspeakably grateful to have all my neural systems working again, to have all aspects and dimensions of my consciousness back—that these are momentary flickers, overwhelmed by the joy of knowing I have regained what I could have lost forever. My gratitude to Dr. Coady, Dr. Cole, Dr. Babu, and the other physicians who helped me, is unbounded.

  Psychologically, I feel that I have discovered, through the research I did for this book, a kind of treasure for myself as well. I am surprised at how this manifests, as I keep seeing aspects of reality that had been hidden to me before.

  On the last day of the writing, I took my computer in a shoulder sack and made my way to the seaside village near our rental house. The day before, I had gone out on a sail on a little white catamaran; a British teenage girl, who was working in the village for the summer, took my friend from the other family, and me, out on the water. The morning was clear and bright, lucid with white glassy heat. The water had that quality that only the Aegean possesses, somehow—a purple tinge under the blue surface, which led Homer to call it, mysteriously to me until I saw it, “the wine-dark sea.” Hidden richness, hidden treasure, depths under depths.

  The young woman was confident with her sailing skills: she maneuvered into the wind. Within minutes we were in the center of the harp-shaped bay, looking back at the shore and the village. When we had arrived, tired and jet-lagged, busy with children’s needs and making sure everyone was settled in, we hadn’t yet acclimated to the reality that we were culturally, as well as physically, in Greece. I had not seen before how the simple housing we were staying in had been built into a hollow at what was the foot of a low range of golden hills, backed by even higher hills and, in turn, by rounded, gray-gold mountains. I looked at the landscape with a start: there was majesty all around us, and a steady soft wind was blowing. The hills undulated and yielded as if the earth itself were a feminine body.

  Looking back at the landscape in all its majesty and softness, I felt a kind of smudge in my vision—which had been there for my entire conscious adult life—lift for a moment, and suddenly things sparkled. The dark, obscuring smudge, I realized in a flash, was the shame and disrespect that we assign to the feminine, and it does not just converge on the vagina, though that is its archetypal center; it washes over the whole world, with a darkness or wrongness that colors our perception of it, and our relationship to it. How extraordinary everything looked when for a flash, an instant, it was lifted. How harmoniously I could see our relationship to one another, and to the earth, becoming, in this gentle, earlier light.

  We were due north of Crete, I realized with a start; we were close to the beginning of the journey. This bay, this island, was near the epicenter of Goddess worship of the ancient Minoan civilizations—the civilizations that antedated the ascent of the Aryan male-dominated pantheon of the gods of classical Greece, and that also antedated the harsher patriarchal worship of the Hebrews.

  The very landscape was the color of the clay out of which dozens of Minoan snake-goddesses I had seen—sex goddesses—had been crafted. Indeed, I realized, I had unconsciously registered aspects, hints, traces of that goddess throughout the island; a schematized version of the Minoan snake-goddess, holding curled snakes out before her breasts, was the official symbol of the island—on the post office, on the town hall. On every cottage and villa, I had noticed a ruddy clay statuette of a female face, framed inside a vulval shell-like enclosure, very much like the mandorla shell that enclosed the Virgin Mary in the New College manuscript, facing outward from each roof corner, an invocation for protection. Traces of the acknowledgment of the sacredness and power of the feminine energies were still here, on this island.

  Earlier in the week we had visited Molyvos, a beautiful hillside town. As we explored a Byzantine castle on the crest of the hill, my friend had said, “Look!” Across the valley great plumes of scarlet and orange flame leaped hundreds of feet into the sky, and massive sheets of white and steel-gray smoke, fissured at times with coal-black smoke, poured skyward. It was a forest fire, threatening the neighboring town of Petra. We ran down to the harbor, where we watched planes pour water on the licking, devouring wall of flame. The townspeople told us that the fires had begun to recur every summer; they could not be easily subdued. Dozens of people had died in the fires the summer before. It was so dangerous now, they said, because it was the driest summer in years, for the weather was extreme; it was changing.

  In an instant, I realized that original sin did not, as the Judeo-Christian tradition has it, originate in human sexuality. Our species’ original sin was in deviating from our earliest tradition of reverence for the feminine and for female sexuality, and all that it represented for us. Our original sin lies in five thousand years of shaming it, stigmatizing it, controlling it, subduing it, splitting it off from women, from men, compartmentalizing it, insulting it and selling it. Great dislocations and alienations in civilization and in human development have followed from that original sin, and the results are everywhere around us. In a flash I saw waves of tragedy—for women, for men, and for a now unbalanced, now plundering civilization that followed from this original alienation.

  All these moments and insights now seemed connected to me.

  I remembered educator Liz Topp, who had described the teenage gi
rls in the high school in Manhattan. These girls had told her that they were so fed up with the disrespect accorded to them sexually, and with being so kept in the dark and silenced about their own desires and development, that one day they went to the school assembly in a group, and asked for a chance to speak. They then stood up, and shouted, in unison:

  “Vagina vagina vagina!”

  I smiled when I thought of this, and of these girls’ impulse: that their own strength and development depended on this reclamation—as impulsive a gesture as it was.

  They were right.

  The final day of my writing, I stole away by myself into the center of Eressos, farther down the bay. She-goats lay peacefully under the olive trees, and their kids butted horns in the shadows. The path I followed wove parallel to the Aegean, which was on my right; the great soft hills were to my left. My path led over a small bridge; dozens of fish and turtles swam in the green river that ran beneath it. Beside the path, many-colored flowers bloomed in abundance: bright pink oleander, orange trumpet-vine flowers, soft purple thistles. In every other flower, it seemed, a bee was busily working. Flowers, of course, are the sex organs of plants; I had eaten this honey at breakfast, every morning of our stay.

  I smiled. Wherever I looked around me I saw the undimmed, unsullied feminine energy, creating and giving. Female sexuality was everywhere, doing nothing less than nurturing and sustaining the entire world; doing nothing less than nurturing and sustaining us, humanity.

  Vagina vagina vagina, I thought with amusement.