Vagina (2 page)

Most of the examples in this book, especially about the physiology of female arousal and orgasm, will have implications that are inclusive for women of any sexuality—gay, straight, bisexual, and so on. But one of my primary themes is the exploration of heterosexual women’s physical and emotional interactions with men. Some of the scientific studies focus directly on the physiology of heterosexual intercourse.

This focus on my part is not because I think that lesbian and bisexual arousal, orgasm, relationships, or mind-body connections are any less fascinating than are their heterosexual counterparts. It is because, rather, I believe (especially now) that female sexual responses, and the female mind-body connection, are so complex and so worthy of careful, individualistic attention that I do not believe that the politically correct approach of lumping all female experience together, with a nod to categories, can do justice to these variations. I believe, rather, that parallel questions about the physiology of lesbian and bisexual eros, the lesbian and bisexual mind-body connection, and the question of the vagina in lesbian and bisexual contexts, all deserve entire books of their own.

Nor are these questions directed only to women currently in relationships; while, as noted, many examples center around lovemaking, these insights apply, first of all, to women’s sexual relationships with themselves.

WHAT IS “THE GODDESS”?

Throughout this book, I will be referring to a state of mind or a condition of female consciousness I will call, for ease of reference, but also for the sake of the echo, “the Goddess.” I don’t mean to summon up in your mind crunchy-granola, 1970s images of pagan Goddess worship on all-female retreats in state parks, nor am I intending a simplistic, pop-culture shorthand for “self-esteem.” Rather, I am carving out rhetorical space that does not yet exist when we talk about the vagina, but which refers to something very real.

Psychologist William James established a school of study known as “biological consciousness”—that is, the exploration of how the physical body affects states of mind. In 1902, James brought out his classic,
The
Varieties of Religious Experience.
⁴
In this book, on which I am basing part of my argument, he explores the role of the transcendent experience—which many people have had only in hints or glimpses, but which current research shows that most people have experienced to some degree—in healing traumatized or depressed lives.
⁵
Without making claims for the objective nature of “God” or “the Sublime,” James addressed the issue of neurology as a substratum for these common mystical experiences. He made the case that when the brain experiences the states that correspond to those concepts, even though these may be physically-based experiences, nonetheless, transformation of a person is possible: “as a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced and emphatic sort are usually authoritative over those who have them.”
⁶

James believed that these mind-states—which he and we call “mystical,” and which the poet William Wordsworth described as a sense we all have, at moments, of familiarity with a “glory” that is elsewhere—are available to us through the doorway of the subconscious.
⁷
“Mystical states indeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states . . . they tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety and of rest. They offer us
hypotheses,
hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as thinkers we cannot possibly upset.”
⁸
These states are transient and passive, but James pointed out that as a result of experiencing such states of consciousness, great healing, great creativity, and even great happiness often entered people’s lives. Were many people indeed happier, more loving, and more creative as a result of even momentary experiences of “God” or “the Sublime,” whether or not those mind-states were caused by “mere” biochemistry? James made the case that they were.

Even before the latest neuroscience showed that the female orgasmic brain reveals activity that leads to a kind of loss of ego boundaries, a mystical or trancelike experience—perhaps not identical to what James was investigating, but not so different in its effect—scientists have known that there is a long-established link between orgasm and the release of opioids in the brain. Opioids—a form of neuropeptide—produce the experience of ecstasy, transcendence, and bliss. Sigmund Freud, in his 1930 book
Civilization and Its Discontents,
referred to what Romain Rolland had identified as “the oceanic feeling.” Rolland had used the phrase to refer to the emotional tenor of religious feeling, the “oceanic” sense of limitlessness. Freud called this longing infantile.
⁹

But Freud was a man; and recent science may indicate that, at least in orgasm, women may experience this oceanic feeling in a unique way. Recent MRI research, by Janniko Georgiadis and his team, showed in 2006 that regions of the female brain that have to do with self-awareness, inhibition, and self-regulation go quiet for women briefly during orgasm.
¹⁰
This can feel to the woman involved like a melting of boundaries, a loss of self, and, whether exhilaratingly or scarily, a loss of control.

Generally, many neuroscientists over the past thirty years have confirmed that James was biochemically correct: there are indeed changes in the brain that correspond to the experience of “the Sublime.” Tremendous benefits—a greater sense of love, compassion, self-acceptance, and connectedness—have been shown in people who have cultivated those states of mind, as psychologist Dan Goleman’s work on “emotional intelligence,” in his 1995 book with that name, and the Dalai Lama’s work on meditation, have shown. Western researchers have also demonstrated that meditative bliss states can involve opioid release. All women, as we will see, are potentially multiorgasmic; so the mystical or transcendental potential of female sexuality described above also allows women to connect often, and in a unique way, even if just for brief moments, with experiences of a shining, “divine,” or greater self (or nonself, as Buddhists would say) or with a sense of the connection among all things. Producing the stimulation necessary for these mind-states is part of the evolutionary task of the vagina.

Philosophers have spoken for centuries of “a God-shaped hole” in human beings—the longing human beings feel to connect with something greater than themselves, and which motivates religious and spiritual quests. As seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal put it: “What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and unchangeable object; in other words by God himself.”
¹¹

Scientists have teased out the fact that this longing, this hunger to fill an “infinite abyss,” is a neural capability we are all born with, an innate ability to experience and connect with something that feels, subjectively, like transcendence. The Dalai Lama’s work on meditation, along with that of Dan Goleman, Lama Oser, and the E. M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, suggests that specific sites in the brain light up when subjects experience a meditative state; Stanford neuroscientists, too, are finding the neurology of bliss.
¹²
Typically, in this mind-state, one feels, among other things, that all is well with oneself and with the universe, and the vexations and limitations of the ego fall away. Artists have produced some of humanity’s greatest works of music, painting, and poetry following such experiences.

So I will make the case throughout this book that there is a version of this connection with “the Sublime”—even if it, too, like Rolland’s “oceanic feeling,” is simply a neurological trick of our magically complicated human brain wiring—that women can experience during and after certain moments of heightened sexual pleasure. I maintain that this feeling is critically linked to an experience of self-love or self-respect, and a sense of freedom and drive. This is why the issue of whether or not female sexuality is treated with love and respect is so very crucial. Such moments of heightened sexual sensibility lead to a woman’s awareness that she is in a state of a kind of perfection, in harmony with and in connection with the world. In that state of consciousness, the usual inner voices that say the woman is not good enough, not beautiful enough, or not pleasing enough to others, are stilled, and a great sense of a larger set of connections—even a sense of what I will call, for lack of a better term, a Universal or Divine Feminine—can be accessed.

Major creative insights, and powerful work, can emerge after an experience of transcendence of this kind. I do believe that when women learn to identify and cultivate an awareness of “the Goddess,” defined in this way, their behavior toward themselves, and their life experiences, change for the better—because self-destructiveness, shame, and tolerance of poor treatment cannot live in harmony with this set of feelings.

But I would argue, less literally, that “the Goddess”—a gendered sense of self that is shining, without damage, without anxiety or fear—inheres in every woman, and that women tend intuitively to know when they have glimpsed it or touched upon it. When women realize the spark of “the Goddess” in themselves, healthier, more self-respecting, and other sexual behavior follows. The vagina serves, physiologically, to activate this matrix of chemicals that feel, to the female brain, like “the Goddess”—that is, like an awareness of one’s own great dignity, and of great self-love as a woman, as a radiant part of the universal feminine.

The vagina may be a “hole,” but it is, properly understood, a Goddess-shaped one.

One

Does the Vagina Have a Consciousness?

1

Meet Your Incredible Pelvic Nerve

The poetic, the scientific, the erotic—why should the imagination care which master it served?

—Ian McEwan, “Solar”

S
pring 2009 was beautiful. I was emotionally and sexually happy, intellectually excited, and newly in love. But it was a spring in which I also, slowly, started to realize that something was becoming terribly wrong with me.

I was forty-six. I was in a relationship with a man who was extremely well suited to me in various ways. For two years, he had given me great emotional and physical happiness. I have never had difficulty with sexual responsiveness, and all had been well in that regard. But almost imperceptibly, I began to notice a change.

I had always been able to have clitoral orgasms; and in my thirties, I had also learned to have what would probably be called “blended” or clitoral/vaginal orgasms, which added what seemed to be another psychological dimension to the experience. I had always experienced a postcoital rush of good emotional and physical feelings. After lovemaking, as I grew older, usually, after orgasm, I would see colors as if they were brighter; and the details of the beauty of the natural world would seem sharper and more compelling. I would feel the connections between things more distinctly for a few hours afterward; my mood would lift, and I would become chattier and more energized.

But gradually, I became aware that this was changing. I was slowly but steadily losing sensation
inside
my body. That was not the worst of it. To my astonishment and dismay, while my clitoral orgasms were as strong and pleasurable as ever, something very different than usual was happening, after sex, to my
mind.

I realized one day, as I gazed out on the treetops outside the bedroom of our little cottage upstate, that the usual postcoital rush of a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive, was no longer following the physical pleasure I had certainly experienced. I started to notice that sex was increasingly just
about
that physical pleasure. It still felt really good, but I increasingly did not experience sex as being incredibly emotionally meaningful. I wanted it physically—it was a hunger and a repletion—but I no longer experienced it in a poetic dimension; I no longer felt it as being vitally connected to everything else in my life. I had lost the rush of seeing the connections between things; instead, things seemed discrete and unrelated to me in a way that was atypical for me; and colors were just colors—they did not seem heightened after lovemaking any longer. I wondered:
What is happening to me?

Although nothing else in my life was going wrong—and though my relationship continued to be wonderful—I began to feel a sense of depression; then, underneath everything, a sense of despair. It was like a horror movie, as the light and sparkle of the world dialed downward and downward—now, not just after lovemaking, but in everyday existence. The internal numbness was progressing. I could not pretend I was imagining it. An emotional numbness progressed inexorably alongside it. I felt I was losing, somehow, what made me a woman, and that I could not face living in this condition for the rest of my life.

I could not figure out, from anything I had researched, what could possibly be causing this incredible, traumatic loss. One late night, sitting by the cold iron woodstove, alone, frantic with questions, and feeling hopeless, I began literally bargaining with the universe, as one does in times of great crisis. I actually prayed, proposing a deal: if God (or whoever was listening; I would go with anyone who was willing to take the call) would somehow heal me—somehow restore what I had lost—and if I learned anything worth knowing in the process, I would write about it—if there was the least chance that what I had learned could possibly help anyone else.