Vagina (30 page)

And all this is not superficial: these perceptions are constructed at the level of neural synapses. In other words, the female brain changes physically over time in response to these kinds of repeated triggers in the environment
.

These triggers also affect her confidence and sense of hope. In a lecture I give on female sexuality, there’s a moment when I ask the women in the room to recall the names they first heard used in relation to their vaginas, when they were fourteen or fifteen—passing by construction sites, or while walking in the street. I can feel the deep discomfort of, say, eight hundred women all at once remembering where they were at the moment when, just coming into womanhood, they first heard—directed toward them—such phrases as “sit on my face” or “give me some of that thing” (or, as at least one young Asian American woman has recalled, “Give me some of that slanty pussy”). “How did that make you feel?” I ask. “Did it make you feel: ‘Is this what I am, this shameful—or this vulgar—thing?’ ” Then—those emotions still raw in the room—I have the pleasure of reading them a list of other terms for
vagina
from other cultures. “Golden lotus,” I read, from the Chinese Han and Ming dynasties’ love poetry. “Scented bower.” “Gates of Paradise.” “Precious pearl.” Chinese Taoist terms are always just as poetic: the vagina is referred to in Taoist sacred texts such as
Art of the Bedchamber
as “Heavenly Gate,” “Red Ball,” “Hidden Place,” “Jade Door,” “Jade Gate,” “Mysterious Valley,” “Mysterious Gate,” and “Treasure.”
²

One could go much further: in sacred Tantric texts, vaginas are classified into categories, but all the categories are fairly affectionate: the Chitrini-Yoni (the yoni of a “fancy woman”) is “rounded and soft, and easily and quickly lubricated, with little pubic hair. Her love-juice is said to be exceptionally hot, to smell sweet and to taste as honey.” The Hastini-Yoni “is large and deep, and enjoys much stimulation of the clitoris.” The yoni of the Padmini (“lotus-woman”) is “like a flower and loves to absorb the sun’s rays—that is, to be seen in daylight—and the caress of strong hands. Her juices have the fragrance of a freshly blossoming lotus flower.” The yoni of the Shankhini (the “fairy” or “conch-woman”) is “always moist . . . covered with much hair and . . . love[s] being kissed and licked.”
³
Hindu vagina iconography sometimes referred to a vagina-mind connection that the West seemed determined to obscure: one Hindu synonym for vagina is “Lotus of her Wisdom.”

“What if it were always like that?” I ask my audience. “What if the words you heard as a girl and young woman made you think of yourself—in the most intimate, sexual sense—as a source of wisdom, as precious, fragrant, a treasure?” To be surrounded by comparably reverent or appreciative language about one’s sexuality would make women not only more open sexually, but it would also make them more able to function in the world in ways that increased their creativity, strength, and sense of connection.

I often read the women in the room a passage from the Ming dynasty–era Chinese masterpiece
The Golden Lotus,
and it is really erotic.
⁴
But it’s a different kind of Eros than they are used to: the philosophers and courtiers of the Han dynasty saw gratified female sexuality as the force that kept the universe in harmonious order. They believed that men’s greatest health, wisdom, and potential could be developed only by becoming masters at pleasing women, and thus enjoying the potent yin essence that emanated only from the intimate parts of a truly aroused and ultimately fulfilled woman. When I am done with the passage—when my audience has heard the language of admiration with which the Han poets describe the art of love, and in the midst of it, their adoration of the vagina—everyone’s face is flushed, and the women tend to burst into a spontaneous cheer.

There is certainly something steamy in thinking about our own sexuality—our own vaginas—in such a tender, admiring context; but there is also something empowering in the act. Having gone on an imaginative journey to other times, places, and contexts in which the vagina is spoken of reverentially, these contemporary women leave the room feeling different. They walk out energized and slightly giddy, as if newly in possession of a wonderful secret. You can feel that they will make different decisions, enjoy themselves in new ways.

Language is powerful. As Virginia Woolf said, talking about another kind of arousal—intellectual arousal—“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.”
⁵
She meant—and she was right—that the body and the imagination are interdependent.

In our culture, the female body’s sexual imagination must ignite itself with meager linguistic kindling: the very word
vagina
is hard to say. It is an antierotic word, in a way (that annoyingly buzzy
v,
that unpleasantly soft
g
). When you think
vagina
in our culture (or search for it on Google, or look on Amazon), you get associations that are either coldly, repellently clinical (“vaginal herpes,” “vaginal discharge”) or at least tediously health related (“vaginal tone”). At the other end of the spectrum of associations, it’s just porn. It is almost impossible to daily feel one’s essence as a woman to be exciting, mysterious, profound, and complex if the language swirling around the center of our being is tacky or medicalized, hostile or reductively hard-core.

Do your own experiment, if you are a woman. Reread the excerpts of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller earlier in the book. Observe what happens inside of you as you read the text—even if it might cause you some stress. As you compare the Nin to the Miller, note what happens to the sense of relaxation or tension in your muscles, to your heart rate—is it lowered or elevated, or is there no change? Pay attention to your vaginal pulse, if you are aware of it; pay attention to your breathing, and to whether you feel a generalized sense of calm or anxiety.

Over the course of researching this book, I noticed that as I read texts that described the vagina in different ways, the descriptions directly affected my sense of energy and general well-being. After a morning reading Nin, for example, the world glowed. After an afternoon—in the same chair in the sun, with the same bougainvillea waving over my head—of reading Miller, I felt ill and weak, and very much like taking a shower.

How far we have come from the honey and seashells of the female modernists. Onlineslangdictionary.com, a website that aggregates slang terms, lists the following contemporary violent slang for
vagina:
“axe wound,” “hatchet wound,” “open wound,” and “wounded soldier.”
⁶
In response to the query “What are slang terms for vagina?” the answers at Yahoo.com included the violent-sounding “hole,” “gash,” “slash,” “slit,” and so on.

The following conversation occurred on a mixed-gender discussion site when it asked for slang terms for
vagina.
It did not ask for “hostile slang terms for
vagina
.” While the respondents are self-selected, the site is a mainstream one. I repeat the discussion intact, punctuated for clarity. Listen for the language of violence and derision.

ANDY:
I saw a few nominations for best slang word for “vagina” dotted about so I thought it’d be best to put them down in one place. My two favourites are “gash” and “clunge.” The best thing about gash is you can add other words to it to describe a lady’s level of arousal . . . “frothing at the gash”; “she must have turned the temperature of her clunge up to gash mark 6.”

. . .

DAVID:
“Meat curtain.”

ZOE:
“Half eaten steak sandwich,” “gutted rabbit,” “vertical seafood taco,” “corned beef curtains in white sauce,” . . . “motor,” “minge,” “pouch.”

LEWIS:
“Butcher’s dustbin.”

STEVE:
“V-hole.”

STEVEN:
“Cock-holster,” . . . “Poonany,” . . . “Quim,” . . . “Snatch. . . .”

ANNA
[one of the few women on the site, interjecting wailingly]: “clunge”: bahahah.

JOSH
[undeterred by this self-deprecating gentle protest]: “Beef eating spunk bubble.”

KIN:
“Hairy mussel,” “the Snack That Smiles Back.”

STEVE:
“Cockpocket.”

DANIEL:
Of course the normal “minge,” “tuna bap [sandwich],” “the fish plate,” “doner kebab,” “trout pouch”; but personally I think there should be more words for “fanny batter [vaginal lubrication].”

ANDY:
A “sleeping fruit bat” could be used for a lady with rather large, dangling flaps. “Pink velvet sausage wallet,” “quim.”

STEVE:
“Quim” is definitely awesome, as is “quinny” which I saw in that movie
Elizabeth.

ANDREW:
I like “badly packed kebab,” for an untidy one. The old ones are the best though: “pussy,” “fanny,” and “twat.” “Hairy fish pie” is nice.

ANDY:
I haven’t seen “mott” or “motty” (or is it “motti”?) anywhere on here yet. . . . “Get motty out for us, Petal.”

DANIEL:
Oh, forgot: “flange.”

I think most women would agree that the terms above range from kind of awful to really awful—to hear or even to think about. (Another site adds the equally repellent “ass mate” and “bearded oyster.”)

It is striking how many of the young male slang terms for vagina on these discussion boards have to do with meat: violent images of meat prepared for consumption, as in “butcher’s dustbin” (in British usage, a
dustbin
is a garbage can; a “butcher’s dustbin” is where unwanted, discarded meat scraps would end up) or else low-grade, junk-food, industrialized meat, also prepared for consumption: “badly packed kebab,” “sausage wallet,” “pink taco,” “beef eating spunk bubble.” One is not invoking champagne and caviar here, but neither do these terms have the heavily socially insulting echoes (“cunt”) of the recent past. Rather, most of these half-gross, grossly half-funny terms just connote something fleshy with which it would be unappetizing to be sexual. Other sites list contemporary slang terms that are not violent or meatlike, but that are a bit silly: “bikini bizkit,” “cherry pop,” “chuff,” “furburger,” “beaver,” and “grumble.” The only even slightly positive or endearing terms that I saw on contemporary slang websites were “honeysuckle,” the Elizabethan “quim”—mentioned above—the affectionate “hush puppy” and “lick-me-please,” and the rather dear “passion fruit” and “Southern Belle.” “Map of Tassie/Mapatazi [Map of Tasmania]” is popular in Australia, apparently—the island of Tasmania is an upside-down triangle. Other sites note the wretched “panty hamster,” “vertical bacon sandwich,” and “Velcro triangle.”

A very few other slang sites have a very few less appalling terms. From Blackchampagne.com, we learn about slang terms for
clitoris
that include “the sugared almond” and, from African American slang, the rather lovely “pearltongue.”
⁷

This slang suggests that Western young men today do not identify vaginas with the dark magic of the past nor with its more viciously insulting associations; instead, most of the terms connote low-grade, mass-produced junk food and don’t carry much of an emotional wallop. Does this shift have something to do with the way pornography portrays the vagina: that is, exactly like “sausage wallets”? Does it have to do with the way pornography is produced—in mass units, like junk food—or with the way sex is represented in pornography—as fast and interchangeable, like junk food? And with the way in which pornography is consumed, especially by this generation that was sexually initiated on it—casually and repetitively, like junk food?

Does this slang reveal that pornography has achieved the opposite of what Andrea Dworkin feared? Rather than frantically driving men to rape the vagina, does pornography lead many young men raised on it today to view the vagina with relaxed or even desensitized emotional distance, as something only slightly more compelling, and perhaps slightly less efficiently packaged, than a microwavable burrito?

Women are trying to “talk back” or “name back.” A girl-power website, Tressugar.com, lists woman-friendly terms for the vagina—doubtless to counter all the negative slang terms that exist in abundance. The site was assembled by Western women in their twenties. You can clearly see from it that these young women in our post-sexual-revolution, postfeminist context see their vaginas not as dark and foreboding, nor as potently alluring and overwhelmingly compelling. Rather, they see them as cute and nonthreatening: the vagina is a little fluffy Hello Kitty buddy, or a sweet treat; metaphors merge, like a box of Jujubes wrapped in glitter and fur.

The site also encourages women to send in their own terms for
vagina
to counter hostile or unpleasant male-derived slang. Some of these young women’s favorite terms evoke deliciousness: “yum yum,” “honey pot,” and “goodies”; others refer to furry accessories or fluffy pets: “muff,” “beaver,” “kitty.” Other young lexicographers seem to name their vaginas as if they were funny little siblings, the way some men have affectionate nicknames for their penises: “cooter,” “poon.”

A current women’s magazine ad for vaginal deodorant, repackaged as vaginal “wash”—yes, that product from the benighted 1960s has resurfaced—shows a grinning redheaded model in a very short bright-yellow frock with her arms in the air, in a kind of “lady bits power” salute, cheering, “WooHoo for my FrooFroo!” The ad continues: “mini, twinkle, hoo haa, flower, fancy, yoni, lady garden . . .” and goes on to warn (always the warning)—“Did you know that some regular shower gels and soaps, if used on your privates, could strip it of its natural defenses, causing dryness and irritation? With its ph-balanced formula, especially developed for intimate skin, Femfresh washes are one of the kindest ways to care for your vajayjay, kitty, nooni, lala, froo froo! Whatever you call it, make sure you love it.” The sloganeers sign off by adding that Femfresh offers “Extra Care for Down There.”