Vagina (25 page)

The great female blues singers’ lyrics sometimes mourned lost sexual pleasure. In 1936’s “If You See My Rooster,” the legendary Memphis Minnie sang:

If you see my rooster, please run him on back home.

If you see my rooster, please run him on back home.

I haven’t found no eggs in my basket, eeh hee, since my rooster been gone.
¹⁷

Memphis Minnie’s hit mourned her “empty basket.” A year later, Bessie Smith, a crossover sensation, sang “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl.” She needs sugar, but she also needs a hot dog between her buns, she needs her lover to move his finger a little, she needs something that “looks like a snake,” and she needs something to be dropped in her bowl:

Tired of bein’ lonely, tired of bein’ blue,

I wished I had some good man, to tell my troubles to

Seem like the whole world’s wrong, since my man’s been gone

I need a little sugar in my bowl,

I need a little hot dog, on my roll

I can stand a bit of lovin’, oh so bad,

I feel so funny, I feel so sad

I need a little steam-heat, on my floor,

Maybe I can fix things up, so they’ll go

What’s the matter, hard papa, come on and save your mama’s soul

’Cause I need a little sugar, in my bowl,

Doggone it,

I need a little sugar in my bowl

I need a little sugar, in my bowl,

I need a little hot dog, between my rolls

You gettin’ different, I’ve been told,

Move your finger, drop something in my bowl

I need a little steam-heat on my floor,

Maybe I can fix things up, so they’ll go.

[Spoken] Get off your knees, I can’t see what you’re drivin’ at!

It’s dark down there!

Looks like a snake!

C’mon here and drop somethin’ here in my bowl!

Stop your foolin’, and drop somethin’, in my bowl!
¹⁸

Bo Carter sang back to these assertive female voices with his own counterpoint of sexual metaphors. In contrast to the “wrongs of” or “seduction and betrayal” of white Victorian women’s ways of seeing sexuality—male dominance, female reticence—the penis-and-vagina pairings in blues lyrics play together equitably: they are interdependent and work together; each needs the other. The sexual world of the blues is one of affection and intense mutual physical need, in which neither man nor woman is necessarily “on top.” In “Banana in Your Fruit Basket,” Carter pleads with his audience, begging for a woman who will, in burning his bread, make use of his “brand-new skillet.” He swears that if the woman in question would just let him put his “banana” in her “fruit basket,” than that would be enough for him. A series of other metaphors that describe paired objects follow, objects that operate not only reciprocally, but fit together. Carter notes that he is the owner of a washboard, and that his beloved has a tub—and that when the two are put together, the couple can “rub, rub, rub”—and of course, a washboard without a tub (into which it is placed) is not useful. Carter makes a similar comparison when he continues on to sing about his “dasher”—a dasher is the staff used to churn butter. His baby, no surprise, is the owner of the churn. The song goes further in its bawdy but loving descriptions: Carter has a needle and his lover has some cloth, together they can stitch “till we both will feel it.” These series of couplets describe reciprocal relationships in which neither object is useful absent its partner; the metaphors underscore a mutual need in sex. Carter closes the song singing that whereas his baby has the “meat,” he has the “knife”—and if she will let him do “her cutting,” it will “solve” his life.

The blues singer Blu Lu wrote and performed the sensuous “Don’t You Feel My Leg” in 1938—a song so steamy, and the lyrics so obviously about sexual desire from a female point of view, that it was banned for a time.

Don’t you feel my leg, don’t you feel my leg.

Cause if you feel my leg you’re gonna feel my thigh.

And if you feel my thigh, you’re goin’ to go up high

So don’t you feel my thigh.

Don’t you buy no rye, don’t you buy no rye.

Cause if you buy some rye you’re goin’ to make me high.

And if you make me high you’re goin’ to tell a lie.

So don’t you make me high.

You said you’d take me out and treat me fine

But I know there’s something you’ve got on your mind.

If you keep drinking you’re gonna get frayed

And you will wind up asking for fine brown turkey . . .

Don’t you feel my leg, don’t you feel my leg . . . [refrain].

Don’t you feel my leg now, you know why,

Cause I ain’t goin’ to let you feel my thigh.

Yes, you might go up high . . . [refrain]
¹⁹

Some female artists made the same version of a sexually explicit song even more graphic in subsequent renditions. Georgia White recorded “I’ll Keep Sittin’ on It (If I Can’t Sell It)” in 1936. The song employs a “chair” motif to express pride and sexual self-respect as well as humor—a motif that also allowed it to pass the censors. The song describes a woman contemplating selling a chair, but only for the right price. If she can’t sell her chair, White sings, she’ll make the decision to just keep sitting on it. The listener
must
purchase the chair if he wants it so badly—White isn’t giving it away, regardless of her prospective buyer’s desire; in fact, she adamantly refuses to even entertain the possibility. The song exhorts the buyer to step up and show that he values it. White sings with bravado about the chair’s lovely bottom, built to last. She notes that if a buyer desires something of high quality in general, he is expected to part with money for it, and she promises that he won’t ever regret his decision. She stresses that she is not speaking lightly: she means to draw this line. In context, the idea of exchanging “money” for her “chair” does not read as a metaphor for sex work, for a literal exchange of sex for money, but a statement, rather, of the value White places on her own sexuality—she is not going to treat it as if it were worthless.

Ruth Brown’s rendition of four years later is much more explicit.

I own a second-hand furniture store

And I think my prices are fair.

But this real cheap guy came in one day

Saw this chair he wanted to buy

But he wouldn’t—claimed the price was too high.

So I looked him straight in the eye,

And this was my reply . . .

If I can’t sell it, I’m gonna sit down on it.

I ain’t gonna give it away.

Now darlin’, if you want it, you gonna have to buy it.

And I mean just what I say.

Now how would you like to find this

Waitin’ at home for you every night?

Only been used once or twice, but it’s still nice and tight . . .

Now you can’t buy a better pair of legs in town

And a back like this? Not for miles around. . . .

Because it’s made for comfort,

Built for wear and tear.

Where else would you find such an easy chair?

It’s lush, plush, slick and sleek.

Darlin’, a high-class piece like this at any price is cheap . . .

Now look at this nice bottom.

Ain’t it easy on the eye?

Guaranteed to support

Any weight or size.

If I can’t sell it . . .
²⁰

The African American blues tradition continued to change American popular music: its descendants include rock and roll and hip-hop. But the humorous and explicit lyrics of the blues that took for granted the essential goodness of female sexual desire did not survive into the musical traditions that descended from the blues. White producers who packaged African American music for white audiences in the 1950s cleaned up the references in the lyrics they were mainstreaming, and by the time rock and hip-hop seized their own initiatives in singing about sex, this woman-friendly lyrical tradition was long gone.

THE SELF-DEFINING VAGINA OF THE SECOND WAVE

The postwar years, as Betty Friedan documented in her 1963 classic,
The Feminine Mystique,
were years of regression.
²¹
Freudian analysis loomed large in the United States and middle-class white women, at least, and much to their frustration, struggled to fit into domesticity and sexual “fulfillment” centered around a Freudian (that is, nonclitoral) model of “maturity” and “adjustment.” Nonetheless, the ground shifted again with the 1965 discovery of the birth control pill, and the beginning of what came to be called the “sexual revolution.”

In 1976, Shere Hite published
The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality.
²²
This book created a radically different perspective from all that had preceded it, particularly the Freudian model, since it looked directly at what women experience during intercourse and presented their experiences in their own words, rather than prescribing to them what they
should
experience. What Hite found, as noted above, was that two-thirds of women could not have orgasms with penile thrusting alone. This conclusion was a revelation to millions of women who had felt themselves, having read Freud and the neo-Freudian Karen Horney, to be insufficiently mature if they were unable to reach orgasm through intercourse.

Hite’s quotes from women who do have orgasms from intercourse—versus women who need clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm—set up a political duality that is still with us. We should now understand, as I noted in the first section, that the clitoris, the vagina, and indeed all the many sexual centers in the female sexual area (for lack of a better term; it is more than an “organ” and more than just one organ) are all part of the same complex neural nexus. And the latest data show that the G-spot is probably
part
of the structure of the clitoris.

But in the 1970s, in a newly fierce argument with Freud, many feminist commentators addressed the clitoris as if it needed to be championed in opposition to the vagina. Feminists such as Anne Koedt, in the
The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm
(1970), sought to dismiss Freud’s elevation of the vagina over the clitoris. These feminists, in their reasonable championing of clitoral attention, made the case that the idea of vaginal pleasure was a sinister patriarchal plot. This plot, they argued, sought to persuade women that the vagina is the locus of true femininity, and the clitoris insignificant. If women could be persuaded of this, they maintained, then they would be brainwashed into dependency on men—and men would have carte blanche to be lazy, and to ignore women’s needs for attention to the clitoris.

Shere Hite’s 1976 success in reglamorizing the clitoris reinforced the many ways of teasing and stimulating the clitoris in Alex Comfort’s
The Joy of Sex
(1972), which also imprinted a generation. With all this rebranding, the vagina ended up, for the thirty years that followed, suffering a bit of a cultural downgrade. From the 1970s on, the vagina was recast as rather retro, housewifey, and passé—until the rediscovery of the G-spot in 1981 by Beverly Whipple. (In the twenty-first century, porn-driven interest in female ejaculation drew attention back to the vagina.) This polarization assigned to two parts of women’s sexual systems—which turn out to be part of a single network—are two very different cultural identities. For thirty years, the clitoris was seen as sort of
cooler
than the vagina, and once again women were faced with a false choice that minimized their own sexual complexity. The clitoris, if it had a persona, was a glamorous, miniskirt-wearing Gloria Steinem; the vagina was the slightly ridiculous, out-of-date-hairstyle-wearing Marabel Morgan, who wrote the regressive bestseller
The Total Woman
(1970).

Soon, Second Wave feminists were on a mission to teach repressed middle-class women to locate their clitorises, to demand orgasmic parity, and by all means to masturbate. In 1973, Betty Dodson, a feminist activist and sex educator, began to run workshops for women to help them “appreciate the beauty of their genitals as well as to explore the varied experience of orgasm through practicing masturbation skills.”
²³
Her mission was to teach “pre-orgasmic” women how to masturbate to orgasm, and she has been successful. Dodson’s is a down-to-earth, unthreatening presence; her workshops were widely covered in the mainstream press and in
Ms.
magazine, leading women to become familiar with the idea that it is empowering to sit with open legs before a mirror and become familiar with one’s own vulva and vagina.