Vagina (26 page)

The 1970s also saw a great deal of feminist reclamation of the vaginal complex—that is, the vagina, labia, and clitoris. Germaine Greer, who had garnered international attention with her feisty manifesto
The Female Eunuch
(1970), understood the vagina-freedom connection implicitly. She devoted a chapter in her book
The Madwoman’s Underclothes
(originally published in 1986) to “The Politics of Female Sexuality,” published in 1970, to the vagina and the politics of its derogation, and exhorted, in a much-mimeographed essay in
Suck
magazine, “Lady, love your cunt.”
²⁴

Assertive and self-defining feminist vaginas debuted in literature as well in this key feminist decade. Erica Jong, of course, published
Fear of Flying
in 1973, coining the famous term that she jokes will be inscribed on her tombstone: the “zipless fuck,” which, she argues in the novel, is the fantasy goal of every liberated woman: hot sex with no emotional entanglements and no baggage. Jong’s heroine, Isadora Wing, also links her vagina’s awakening to her own creative awakening, and to her individuation as an agent of her own life rather than as the passive hanger-on to various men. Jong’s novel was published in fourteen countries. It was so popular precisely because it was the first female
bildungsroman
to identify in parallel terms a journey of female sexual awakening with a journey of psychological and creative awakening. The dry, physically repressed Dr. Wing, Isadora’s husband, whom she flees at length for more sensuous male lovers, can never, we understand, awaken the latent adventuress/writer in Isadora. The final scene of the book, in which Isadora—now deeply engaged with her own sexual and creative journey—contemplates her own blond pubic hair as she lies in the bathtub, is a trope for the vagina’s connection to the imagination: “I floated lightly in the deep tub, feeling that something was different, something was strange. . . . I looked down at my body. The same. The pink V of my thighs, the triangle of curly hair, the Tampax string fishing the water like a Hemingway hero, the white belly, the breasts half floating. . . . A nice body. Mine. I decided to keep it. I hugged myself. It was my fear that was missing . . . whatever happened, I knew I would survive it. I knew, above all, that I’d go on working. . . .”
²⁵
The newly liberated and creative heroine contemplates her own body, her own vagina—and thinks about a rededication to her creative work: this scene is a metaphor for a sexual awakening that is creative as well as physical, and a creative awakening that is as sensuous as it is cerebral.

In the visual arts, Judy Chicago took her exhibit
The Dinner Party
to museums around the country in 1974. Chicago portrayed thirty-nine mythic and real women from throughout history by depicting different vaginas painted on dinner plates and placing them on a triangular dinner table—the triangle being an archetypal feminine or vulval shape. She spoke of the “butterfly-vulva” motif as a trope of women’s creativity. The various vaginas were meant to convey these women’s individual characters and to represent their work. She published the collection of plates as a book of photographs in 1979. This exhibit and the book were shocking at the time, drawing a range of virulent critical responses. These portraits of the hypothetical vaginas of Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Dickinson could not have portrayed the vagina-creativity connection more literally—even if the nature of that connection still remained intuitive.

So it was a pretty good decade for the vagina, if one that superficialized its importance as a locus of pleasure strictly defined. The results were positive for women: in the late 1970s,
Redbook
magazine reported that 70 percent of female respondents self-reported “satisfaction with the sexual aspect of their marriage”; 90 percent reported taking an active role in sex at least half the time, and often “always”; 64 percent said they regularly reached orgasm during lovemaking; most of the subjects said they often initiated sex, and that they felt they could communicate their sexual needs clearly to their partners. (The numbers of women who reach orgasm during lovemaking have not gone up in the subsequent decades of “sexual revolution” and the proliferation of pornography; and the data for women who self-report that they are honest in expressing sexual needs to their male partners has actually gone down.)
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The feminist movement to reclaim the vulva and vagina was not restricted to literature, painting, and nonfiction prose. The marketplace also stepped in enthusiastically: the culture saw “sex-positive” consumer attention to the vagina in woman-centric erotica such as Vive productions, which made (slower-paced, more emotionally involving, more romantic) pornographic videos for women—a genre soon to become almost obsolete, as women acclimated to masturbating to conventional porn—and woman-friendly sex toy emporia opened, such as New York City’s Babeland boutiques and San Francisco’s pleasant, brightly lit store Good Vibrations. (A manager at the Brooklyn branch of Babeland—formerly Babes in Toyland—reports that new sex-play products designed to stimulate the G-spot and to encourage female ejaculation are being designed continually, and that the stock is flying off the shelves. Why the trend, I asked? She replied that pornography had begun to focus intensely on female ejaculation, leading women to wish to explore stimulation of their G-spots.)

But there was a real difference in tone between this mode of reclaiming female sexuality and that of the early twentieth century, which had, as we saw, also witnessed a stirring of women’s voices and imagery around female sexual pleasure. Loie Fuller, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Georgia O’ Keeffe, and Edith Wharton were writing or painting or dancing as ways to express truths about female desire; but sexual desire, in their work, is not separate from female transcendence, inspiration, and joy in other areas of women’s lives. It is a means to a larger, fuller, all-encompassing transcendence and creativity. The post-1970s “reclamation” of female sexuality, in contrast, is quite mechanical. It is not about the spirit. It is much debased. It is about what vibrates how. It is diminished, I believe, by the influence of medical discourses such as Masters and Johnson’s, which reframes female and male sexuality as “just flesh,” and it is also distorted by the pressures of the porn industry that boomed alongside the sexual revolution.

Historian of sexuality Steven Seidman notes that the 1960s and 1970s introduced the notion of “fun”—not just pleasure—as an important part of sexual life, especially in best-selling sex manuals.
²⁷
He cites David Reuben, M.D.’s
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)
(1969), Alex Comfort’s
The Joy of Sex,
and “M” ’s
The Sensuous Man
(1971) as recasting consensual sex as “an adult form of play”; all sexual practices, including flagellation, aggression, and fetishism, he writes, were now seen as equally valid, and any kind of fantasy—no matter how “wild or bloodthirsty”—was to be valued and explored. This of course is a radically different model than the gateway to heaven or hell of the Renaissance, or the sober duty of the Victorians, or the connection with the Divine of the Aesthetic sexual transcendentalists. “This sex ethic may be termed libertarian,” he writes persuasively.

This is our sex ethic. There is nothing wrong with “fun,” of course; but this model of what sex is for—what the vagina is for—has left many with deeper questions about the role of sexuality as a medium of profound intimacy or profound alterations of consciousness. And the “sex as play” model also raises all the questions that any “anything goes” ethic raises—why not, even if one is in a relationship, get hooked on porn? Why not go to a strip club, or frequent sex chat lines? Why not have a threesome, or share details with one’s mate of a fantasy involving someone else? What, in a libertarian model of what sex is, is the rationale for drawing any kind of line keeping sexual energy “sacred,” in a sense, between two people?

This “libertarian,” “sex as play” view of sexuality and the vagina’s role in it is our complicated inheritance. Sexual libertarianism may not be the same thing, as it turns out, as true sexual liberation. “These manuals [such as
The Joy of Sex
],” Seidman continues, “encourage the reader not to resist [any kind of fantasy] since the sexual sphere represents an ideal setting for probing tabooed wishes and fears. . . . [D]on’t block [your own fantasy] and don’t be afraid of your partner’s fantasy; this is a dream you are in.”

In these manuals, Seidman notes, “to put the reader at ease,” he or she is assured that sexual behavior is not a marker of a person’s true nature. This ideology—descending from Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, via, in debased form, Friedrich Nietzsche—argues that sensation, even extreme sensation, is good for its own sake alone. This sexual “will to power,” adorned with a dollop of Freud’s argument that the individual gets a “pass” for whatever the subconscious comes up with—since one can have no responsibility for, and hence no guilt about, subconscious desires—fit perfectly with the heady, consumerist postwar economy in the West. It prepared a fertile ground for the entrenchment of the pornographic experience of sex and of the vagina in particular. It came to be how we thought “sex was”—rather than letting us understand that this way of thinking about sex is just one of many possible sexual ideologies. And it cleared the way in the minds of both women and men for the rise in the next few decades of wider and wider acceptance and then internalization of the moral flatness, distractedness and fixatedness of pornography.

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.”
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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.”)