Vagina (29 page)

I heard a sizzling sound. I looked to the kitchen: the sound was coming from several dozen enormous sausages, ranged in iron skillets on the big industrial stove. I got it: ha, sausages, to go with the “cuntini.” I noticed that the energy of the mixed-gender crowd was now not simple. The room had become more tense—the tension that I was familiar with by now, as I was recognizing those moments when women feel demeaned but are expected to “go with it” and have a “sense of humor.” My heart contracted further.

Finally, someone called my attention to the final featured item on the evening’s menu. On the back burners of the stove, several immense salmon fillets were arranged on another platter. Again: I got it. I got the joke. Women are smelly. Fish-smelling. I flushed, with a kind of despair that was certainly psychological—depression that a friend would think this was funny—but which also felt physical.

But that was not what was really interesting to me about that night. I can deal with a misfired joke, if that was all that the event entailed. What is really interesting to me is that after the “cuntini” party, I could not type a word of the book—not even research notes—for six months, and I had never before suffered from writer’s block. I felt—on both a creative and a physical level—that I had been punished for “going somewhere” that women are not supposed to go.

Because of the evidence of physical consequences to women of sexualized stressors, I understand better now what constituted the connection between the visual “comedy,” the olfactory public insult, and my fingers being unable to type. But at the time, the six months of writer’s block was a mystery.

The theme of the “uppity woman” having her vagina targeted in lieu of her brain is a universal theme still—both in emerging democracies and in the “advanced” West. In Egypt, once part of the British Empire, this practice had an echo: women protesters have played prominent roles in the “Arab Spring” and the uprising in Tahrir Square in 2011–12—and these “unruly” women are being targeted by the state for forced vaginal exams.

Samira Ibrahim, twenty-five, a young Egyptian protester, brought suit against that country’s military in 2011, asserting that after the army had arrested her in Tahrir Square during a protest, she was forced to undergo a vaginal examination against her will. And human rights groups report that this is systemic: many women protesters, they confirm, have been forcibly vaginally “examined”—that is, assaulted—by the Egyptian military upon being taken into custody. Ibrahim posted a moving account of her ordeal on YouTube, describing how she and other female protesters had been first beaten, electrocuted, and accused of being prostitutes (echoes again of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864–66 in Britain); then forced to undergo a vaginal exam, a “virginity test,” performed by a soldier in army fatigues in front of dozens of strangers. An army spokesman defended the forced vaginal “exams”: “We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove they weren’t virgins in the first place,” a military source explained to the news site Al Jazeera.

“When I came out, I was destroyed, physically, mentally and emotionally,” Ibrahim said.
²⁰

Could that, given the delicate workings of the ANS in women, and the connection of vagina to brain, of emotional sexual trauma to the biology of chronic suffering—have been the point? Is this not a sign of random brutality—but a technique to suppress revolution, and tamper with the very chemical makeup of potential revolution?

In the West, where actual vaginal assault or traumatic sexual “exams” are not legal, female verbal insurrection is also routinely met with threats against the vagina and verbal rape. (Though the United States may be moving toward physical aggression by the state against women’s decision making, via violation of the vagina, in the form of recent American states’ proposals to legislate a mandatory invasive transvaginal ultrasound if a woman is considering choosing an abortion.)

Women in the West who “speak out” experience this sex-directed aggression: Vanessa Thorpe and Richard Rogers, in the UK newspaper
The Observer,
reported that female commentators regularly receive threats of sexual assault. Caroline Farrow, a blogger for
Catholic Voices,
reports that she receives “at least five sexually threatening emails a day,” which she sees as the result of her taking responsibility for her own views by posting under her own name, with a photo that, she says, seems to make her harassers see her as “a legitimate sexual target.” She notes, “One of the ‘least obscene’ emails read: ‘You’re going to scream when you get what you’ve asked for. Bitch.’ ”
Guardian
commentator and novelist Linda Grant and feminist nonfiction writer Natasha Walter both report that, as a result of sexually violent comments directed at their writing, they now write less often online. The
New Statesman
journalist Helen Lewis-Hasteley confirms that rape threats are the most prevalent form of online harassment of women writers in Britain: “I know many people will say that every commentator on the Internet gets abuse, but what really came through to me when I was looking at this [in the experience of other female journalists] was the modus operandi of the attackers, which was to use the rape threat.” “The threat of sexual violence is an attack in itself,” concludes the
Observer
article.
²¹
The science is now in as to why that is correct.

Sexualized fear drives out creativity in women because fear elicits a tension response, and our creativity in particular, because of the role of the ANS, demands a relaxation response. Whenever a woman’s sexuality is insulted, her creativity suffers—because the same relaxed and focused state needs to be protected in order for the irrational wellsprings to be tapped: the same relaxation and focus supports arousal and orgasms, babies, books, artwork, criticism, and music. When you honor a woman’s sexuality and her very sex, you support the optimal functioning of the physical systems that support her intellectual creativity; when you threaten and insult her sexuality and her very sex, you do exactly the opposite.

11

How Funny Was That?

Q: What’s the difference between a pussy and a cunt?

A: A pussy is a sweet, juicy, succulent, warm, fun and useful thing. The cunt is the thing that owns it.

—jokes4us.com, “Vagina Jokes”

T
he more I understood about the vagina, and how sensitive it is to the emotional environment—and also how frankly creatively and intellectually precious its well-being is—the less able I was to screen out, dismiss, or numb myself to the casual insults and abuse that even the nicest people in our culture take for granted as normal in commonplace discussion. After I had traveled to England in the spring of 2011, had finished my interviews with Dr. Richmond, Nancy Fish, and Mike Lousada, and seen the stress research by H. Yoon and colleagues about the effect of stress on the vagina, and the research by Alessandra Rellini and Cindy Meston on how sexual trauma elevates women’s baseline nervous system responses, and the new data on sexual trauma and multisystem dysregulation and its relationship to chronic pain in many women, I felt that I had a deeper understanding of the vagina’s emotional sensitivity and its connection to emotional and intellectual sensitivity in women in general. And I was continually reassessing the meaning of rape and reperceiving its effects in an increasingly complicated and far more enduring light.

I had been very deeply affected by my Skype interview with Lousada under the trees at the beautiful medieval college, and I felt that it had changed me, in a way. I returned to New York in June of that year feeling unusually open and free myself. I was not at all romantically interested in Lousada—I was very much in love with someone else. But there was something about his being a man who was so committed to actually witnessing the sexual suffering of women, and so dedicated to their sexual liberation, that made me feel existentially more hopeful that men and women could understand one another at last around these issues. Something about his discussion of how trauma “locks” the female body and mind had unlocked something in me. Though I have never been sexually assaulted, I have experienced the typical share of harassment and a couple of scary situations. I am surrounded, as any woman is, by a sexually (and vaginally) contemptuous culture. I had returned feeling hopeful, but also strangely vulnerable and undefended.

One night I went down to the docks near Battery Park to join friends on the same sailboat on which I had first interviewed Dr. Richmond the year before. It was a fresh, late-spring night. Two young women were guests for that evening’s sail, and three male friends of mine, who were older than the young women, were on board as well. The young women were not dating any of the men, but that possibility was in the air. We motored out of the mooring ground by the park and sped onto the dark Hudson under a nearly full moon. I remember how I felt—renewed, in an odd way; light, rich, fertile with ideas, but unguarded.

We sailed alongside the glittering lights of the city, past the sparkling canyons of lower Manhattan. Clouds sped across the neon-bright face of the moon. I chatted with a friend I will call Trevor, one of the three men on board. He is a kind and caring man, a solid citizen, with three kids and a lovely wife. My friend Alex was handling the ropes. I asked Trevor what he was reading these days.

“War stories,” he confessed. “I had to stop reading modern fiction. I found that most modern fiction is written for women, and I couldn’t really get into it. I had to face the fact that that wasn’t for me, that I like war stories. I like stories about combat, and tactics, and sex.”

“There isn’t usually sex in a war story,” remarked our friend Stephen, who was steering the boat.

“There’s rape,” joked Trevor and Alex, simultaneously.

Both of these men are nice men. And part of my brain immediately, routinely declared: “That was just a joke. Dismiss it.” But something had happened to me in England: I had had a glimpse of a world in which men respected what, for lack of a better language, I was starting to think of as the Sacred Feminine—or even as “the Goddess”—and I glimpsed the harm such language did, to me and to the women around me. For once, I was not numbed to those eternal jokes, those rape jokes, those pussy jokes. I felt the slashing harm of it. A great lump rose in my throat; I excused myself to go down into the hold.

I lay down on one of the bunks. The hold swayed beneath me, as I was held over the dark, open river. I closed my eyes. I felt the pain of the words cutting again, like a scimitar, ripping into what I can only describe as my energy field; pain that I never would have even noticed before in brushing those words off, or “arguing” with the jokers, intellectually. I was in touch with my own “pelvic emotions,” I suppose, in an unmediated way, and so felt the violence of those words—words that were not even intended as malicious—a carelessness that only made it worse, in a way; words that were “merely” as insensitive to harm to the feminine as I had been myself.

I took deep breaths—but something very odd happened. Tears started to slide from under my closed lids and down my cheeks. I wasn’t sobbing. I was just almost too full of feelings. I lay perfectly still, but the tears slid and slid from under my lids, and splashed down my neck and throat, in a way that I had never experienced before. I lay like that—relaxed, without sobbing, just tearing up again and again, welling over with tears—for fifteen or twenty minutes. I thought of the young women above deck, who had also heard those words and who now, I knew, would be ever so slightly changed by them; who would be ever so slightly more closed down physically, or ever so slightly more spiritually or creatively dampened by them. I felt the grief of it.

The sexual threats encoded in hostile language centered on the vagina do more than trigger stress reactions in our bodies. Cultural concepts become embedded in a woman’s body and her brain perceptually. As University of Michigan psychologist Richard E. Nisbett demonstrated, in his book
The Geography of Thought,
the brains of people from different cultures
neurally encode cultural differences in perception
through daily practice over time. For example, his research showed that Westerners tend to perceive through a narrow focus on singular objects, while Easterners used a wide-angle lens and see objects as contextually embedded.

So a woman’s cultural “take” on her vagina also shapes her brain.
¹

If a woman hears about her vagina as a “gash” or a “slit” all her life, then that perception of her vagina will become neurally encoded in her brain; whereas if she hears about it, for example, as “the jade gate,” her brain shapes itself and her perceptions around that sensibility.

In Han dynasty China (206 BCE–220 CE) or India fifteen hundred years ago or in thirteenth-century Japan, when the vagina was portrayed as the most sacred spot in the most sacred temple in a sacred universe, that was how woman’s brains experienced their vaginas. When, as in medieval Europe during the witch hunts, the culture cast the vagina as the devil’s playground and the gateway to hell, a woman in that culture felt herself to be built up around a core of existential shame. If, as in Elizabethan England, a culture portrays the vagina as a hole, a woman in that culture will feel that she is centered around emptiness or worthlessness; when, as in Germany and England and America after Freud, a woman’s culture portrays the vagina’s response as a test of womanliness, she is likely to feel herself insufficiently womanly. When a woman’s culture—as in today’s women’s magazine-type sexual athleticism in the West—casts the ideal vagina as a producer of multiple orgasms on call, she will feel herself put to a continual, impossible test. When mass culture represents any given vagina as just one in ten million available orifices, as in today’s porn industry, a woman will feel her sexual self to be replaceable, not important and not sacred.