Still, organizing—even across Fordian divisions—within a single industry may not erase the core problems of fashion—or of modeling. “I don’t know many models that have come out whole,” Meier tells me honestly. “Not many come out of it feeling empowered, or confident, or having life skills to progress with anything other than their physical attributes. Models are some of the most insecure people I know. Period. And that’s not healed by becoming a more successful model. That’s healed by getting your ass out of it, completely.”
A portion of an earlier version of this essay was published as “The Catwalk Sweatshop” in Talking Points Memo.
The re-emergence of feminism as a successful marketing strategy in late 2012 (think: Naomi Wolf, Sheryl Sandberg, Beyoncé) led to a lot of talk about vaginas, setting the stage for the most gynecologically obsessed presidential election campaign cycle in US history four short years later. Grabbing women “by the pussy” became a talking point on morning shows, as did whether or not candidates should use the ladies room at debates. Let’s not forget what the Vagenda of Manocide brought to the table!
Following years of work by community media strategists and clever social justice campaigners, it was also becoming clear in the 2010s that speaking for unheard voices was no longer acceptable; there was always a burgeoning writer or cultural producer within a marginalized community perfectly capable of outlining their own needs. “Nothing about us without us,” goes the international rallying cry, now popular among sex workers, but first brought stateside by disability rights activists in the 1990s. While neoliberal feminism certainly raised the market share of those willing to speak about vaginas, I mean to point out, not so much of this talk emanated from actual vaginas.
Very few dare to let the vagina speak for itself, and such visionaries are never whom you’d expect. Take Wolfgang Büld, whose low-budget horror film Angst of a decade earlier lays the imaginary groundwork for a genuine feminist uprising, far beyond anything hinted at in Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.
Let’s be clear: Büld is no feminist, of any variety. He’s a punk documentarian and exploitation filmmaker. However, if we define feminism as advocating for equal political, economic, and social rights for women, it’s going to be hard to define self-proclaimed vagina biographer Naomi Wolf as such, either. She seems primarily interested in building a following for herself—a quasi-religious one, even—than in establishing conditions where “following” isn’t the only way women can achieve power.
In truth, I can’t pretend I’m any more interested in Wolf’s vagina—nor, for that matter, her Vagina—than I would be if, say, anyone else I thought was a big dork wrote a book about something I had been operating exclusively without oversight or input for my entire life. Like cats. This is provable: I don’t read books about cats, either. (Although I might be compelled to read a book about a particularly interesting cat.)
Wolf’s 2012 cultural history Vagina does not interest me, but the critical debate around it has me fascinated. Take Zöe Heller’s brilliant take in the New York Review of Books, which is worth reading even if you think Naomi Wolf is a big dork. Or hate vaginas. Or have never heard of “books” and have no intention of trying to figure out what to do with them.
Heller opens her essay tallying appearances of the near-ubiquitous orifice:
“Vagina pride” is now part of the common culture. Television celebrities like Oprah Winfrey speak publicly and with cheerful affection of their “vajayjays.” (The conservative watchdog group Parents Television Council calculates that the use of the word “vagina” on television has increased eightfold in the last decade.) The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler’s theatrical celebration of the female sex organ, has become an international franchise, endorsed and performed by glossy Hollywood stars and even Michigan state representatives. More than one website now exists for the sole purpose of allowing women to share and compare pictures of their vulvas in “a supportive context.”1
However, Heller adds a moment later, this apparent flowering of love for the special flower between many women’s legs is not enough for some:
Naomi Wolf would counsel against such complacency. In her new “biography” of the vagina, she warns that her subject is in danger of being trivialized by its cultural ubiquity. The vagina, properly understood, is, “part of the female soul” and the medium for the “meaning of life itself.” In order to free female sexuality from patriarchal calumny, pornographic distortion, and some of the damaging myths of second-wave feminism, it is essential, she argues, that women reclaim the “magic” of the vagina and restore it to its rightful place at “the center of the universe.”
The critical response to Wolf’s book made one thing clear: that the self-proclaimed feminist figurehead had begun speaking out of—how shall I put this—the wrong orifice. Not the one she had titled the book after. I say this with some hesitation: I quite liked Wolf’s first memoir and feel some sympathy for a woman who is simply forging a publishing career like any other outspoken and excessively branded man. My patience evaporated, however, when Wolf fired back at critics via op-eds and social media posts with an argument cribbed from notes scrawled in Women’s Sexual Liberation 101.
“I come from the feminist school that believes knowledge is power,” she writes in the September 11, 2012 Guardian, in a screed clearly intended to paint her detractors as those who delight in ignorance. Citing Tee Corinne, Shere Hite, and other anointed feminists of yore—and operating under an unexamined transphobia—Wolf charges detractors with misunderstanding her pro-sex argument and follows this up by hinting that they might be prudes and/or illiterate.
It was a dramatic détournement from her intention to speak for the vagina: now she was chastising those who did not heed her exaltations of it. At which point her spiritual defense of the particular kind of orgasm she personally enjoys, and suggests others work toward, too, took on a tone we can only call vagsplaining.
The whiff of sanctimoniousness can be detected from a distance, although the book appears to have emerged from a less anointed platform: a crisis with the workings of Wolf’s own nether regions. After some years of truly delightful orgasms, she explains in Vagina (I gather; I’m quoting from Heller’s review), Wolf suddenly suffers inadequate ones.
“It was like a horror movie,” she describes, according to Heller. It is not clear to me that Naomi Wolf has ever seen a horror movie, of which perhaps one in a thousand is concerned in any way with women’s sexual satisfaction. Still, a real horror movie about a malfunctioning bikini area holds more opportunity for ending the oppression of women than Wolf’s Vagina.
Enter Wolfgang Büld. (Get it? Penetration joke.) His 2003 film Angst depicts horrors unimaginable, I imagine, to Naomi Wolf. For one, lead character Helen (played by Fiona Horsey) is frigid, and doesn’t enjoy either spiritual or regular orgasms. “That’s huge,” Helen scowls when her date pulls out his dong, after he abuses her emotionally for a bit. Then he rapes her. I’d soften the description with the term date rape, but we’re intended to view him as purely malevolent: he crosses the line from coercion to plain-old physical violence when he traps Helen in a car window and penetrates her from behind despite her screaming protests. Then he disappears. For rape isn’t the only horror this film explores: Helen’s vagina talks. And eats people.
It does not eat their clothes, which is awesome, if a little confusing. And the vagina’s diet is not restricted to people. Sometimes it’s perfectly content to chow down on some phallic-looking meat products from a jar in the fridge. This, however, doesn’t concern Helen much. She’s only freaked out when her vagina demands men. “Feed me!” it cries from her pants.
It’s all told in that classic 1970s sexploitation-horror manner, wherein victim tallies mount in titillating shot after titillating shot, each more elaborately pseudosexual than the last. Often a scene will be played for laughs, a moment of respite intended to deepen the coming horror, although sometimes the comedy is unintentional. Always a gory detail, an overly
descriptive color-saturated glimpse of what the imagined terror might look like, if stumbled across in lived human experience. Then a piece of sound equipment in a corner of the screen will remind viewers that, in real life, vaginas don’t eat men. Angst seems filmed in a place that is either Germany or America or England, and no one seems to know or care which. It’s impossible to get lost in, because the cast is all self-consciously self-conscious: we are acting in a film in which . . . seems to lead off every stage direction.
What viewers are supposed to feel fear for gets a little lost: Is it a vagina that eats? A vagina that eats men? A vagina that has unconventional tastes? Such an ambiguous monster does not inspire much terror, yet from my perspective, the real horror is that Helen seems disenfranchised from her own sexual needs. Every time her pussy consumes some abusive dickwad or another, leaving a fresh pile of laundry between her legs, she grows more horrified at her own body’s behavior. I’d probably need to read or call Naomi Wolf to find out what she’d think of this (neither of which am I interested in doing), but I believe she’d find Helen’s response perfectly agreeable. Of course one should find unspiritual, anti-procreative sex appalling! Someone died! I admit there is a logic there.
Still, I’m inclined to wish that lanky Helen had gotten the gist of her own body’s desires a bit more. After all, every man she meets is a rapist. Or a date-rapist, or just a jerk. Including the doctor she goes to for help. Including her stepfather. Her primary love interest, whom she shuns to protect, kills someone with an electric knife. Sort of by accident, but the act does out him as a murderer. He repents and she forgives him, the lesson being: harming someone isn’t inherently problematic. The problem is finding joy in it. Helen refuses joy, even as she learns to listen, quite literally, to the sexual demands of her body.
Helen has been gifted with a seemingly impossible situation: to satiate her physical needs, someone will always die. Imagine the masculine figures in cultural history for whom this is true, in the horror genre or otherwise: werewolves, vampires, the titular character of the television program Dexter. Every army commander in every war film ever created. Every military commander in every war unfilmed. We may not gender the act of murder as exclusively masculine, but certainly the imagined pleasures to be had from it remain the domain of men.
All of which make Angst a bit of a mess, both in terms of gender politics and in terms of character motivation. Occasional scenes—an oral sex attempt gone awry is one truly creative and stunning example—shine. Others do not: apparently I’d stopped watching the film fifteen minutes before the end and didn’t notice. (Now that I have seen the ending, I’m not sure it added anything.) Granted, a horror movie about a remorseless murdering cunt would not necessarily be improved with solid acting or logical plot development. It’s always going to be messy. I could have used a messier Angst, in truth.
Now don’t get confused—there’s another 2003 film that came out, also called Angst, about something totally different. Something related to angst, probably. Büld’s movie has little to do with angst, which is possibly why it was also released under the name Penetration Angst, but should have been released under the name Talking Vagina Movie. For Helen does not feel mere angst. She feels confusion and remorse and self-hatred and survivor’s guilt. Vagina dentata’s not much fun for anyone, in Büld’s view.
Yet Angst strives not at all toward metaphor, presenting an endless string of rapists as men being men, and Helen as one woman among many, possessed merely of a particularly unique flower between her legs. She’s ashamed, purely, of her body’s needs, but this is never drawn out to echo the shame women are generally made to feel when pursuing any of their own desires. Yes, for Helen to feel satiated, someone will always die, but even according to the logic of the film, her lady garden’s Vagenda of Manocide is a true public service. The world in which a genuinely murderous cunt is both satisfied and appreciated remains, sadly, elusive.
So Büld is no feminist hero, to be sure. Nor did he intend to become one. His film came about when someone told him he could make exploitation movies in the UK for super cheap, and if they were shot in English, they were guaranteed an audience through DVD sales. By the next day, he’d combined three bad ideas he’d previously rejected into a single story, and production began. (In an interview with horror blogger MJ Simpson, he describes the failed scripts as: “The man-eating vagina, the Siamese twins . . . and some bank robbers getting stuck in a nudist camp. Each of these ideas were not long enough for a feature film, but they had something in common: they were all dealing with the fears of sex.”2)
Angst, therefore, contains no explicit feminist agenda. In fact, Büld labels his oeuvre “intelligent exploitation.” “I like so-called B-movies,” he tells Simpson, “but most of them are made badly: weak screenplays, bad actors, boring visuals. My intention was to produce high quality in this genre.” Indeed, the filmmaker wades directly into misogynist waters when he suggests in the same interview that the film is about “a vagina that works the wrong way: instead of giving life, it absorbs life. I leave the interpretation—if it kills for real or only in Helen’s mind—to the audience.” In Büld’s view, it seems, he may simply have created another film about a crazy chick and her bloodthirsty beaver.
Limitations of both narrative and filmmaker aside, however, what Angst offers is much more than a film about a vagina that works the wrong way (meaning: one that does not do what it is supposed to do for men). Angst establishes an imaginary in which women might value their own desires and heed their unusual bodies, a point slightly further along a continuum of the ways we imagine vaginas work than we have ever seen fit to explore before. Self-proclaimed vagina biographer and vagsplainer Naomi Wolf, on the other hand, has done something far more limited and frustratingly prescriptive: she has merely established her view of the way vaginas must work. Weirder, she has established herself as their savior.
One of these directives emulates patriarchal oppression, and it’s not the one you’d expect. For what Büld suspects, that Wolf can’t fathom, is this: disrupting systems of gender oppression—or the much milder version of same, exploring new narrative forms—can only come from allowing the oppressed to speak for themselves. And that is going to get messy.
The lesson lost on both, however, remains the central concern for any feminist leader in the running. Truly disruptive anti-oppression work that tackles gender disparity must allow the oppressed the opportunity to explore their own joy, wherever it comes from. Even if it causes discomfort.
An earlier version of this essay was published on The Blog is Coming from Inside the House.
Marian is a bright young woman living in Toronto in the mid-late twentieth century, an employee at a small market research firm who spends her off-hours juggling an attractive but hard-to-please boyfriend, an irresponsible roommate, a tittering gaggle of officemates, and unenvied friends stuck in the baby-making grind. She is well-educated and able-bodied, and filled with all the hopes and dreams a woman could imagine for herself before the Feminist Revolution took hold: Marriage, she supposes, to a man, and kids, maybe, eventually? Friends to entertain, certainly, in a nice home, although come to think of it, Marian isn’t entirely sure what she wants. In fact, Margaret Atwood’s 1969 novel The Edible Woman (Atwood herself called it “protofeminist”) is primarily concerned with what Marian doesn’t want, and how her disinterest is culminating in physical symptoms. Marian, a product of—and an important cog in—consumer society, eventually finds herself unable to consume. “This is ridiculous,” she says to herself when she first encounters her problems with food.1 What, our protagonist wonders frequently, could possibly be wrong with her?
Atwood is short on details of Marian’s life before her digestive issues arise, toppling with them her status as able-bodied: the book opens with the entirely forgettable sentence, “I know I was all right Friday when I got up.” The author is similarly stingy with elements of Marian’s person, as well as with precise descriptions of her emerging ailmen
ts. Still, there are plenty of words between the opening sentence and the appearance of Marian’s consumptive failures some 170 pages later, and many of them, upon close inspection, reveal themselves to be cleverly feminized alarm bells. As Marian grows increasingly concerned about her inability to eat, she becomes alienated from her own body—reflected in a shift from first- to third-person narration between the two halves of the book—and increasingly unable to articulate her concerns: she stops being “all right” sometime after Friday, but because Marian never verbalizes her concerns, the reader doesn’t have any clues when she gets sick or what form her illness really takes.
What we gather about Marian in the first half of The Edible Woman is that she is white, Canadian, upper-middle class, and professional—“normal,” we’re given to believe, if a bit reticent to contradict the insufferables she seems surrounded by. Her character is filled out in the negative: she is “not blonde,” she disapproves of her roommate’s drinking habits, she backs away from conversations about child-rearing. Marian desires not to bring offense, clearly, but Atwood designs her inoffensively: she is Everywoman, that literary device into which Atwood’s largely white feminine readership might slot themselves. In the common parlance, Marian is “relatable.”
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