Vagina (47 page)

It is pointless for a man to wonder why his female lover climbed on top of him enthusiastically last Tuesday after the very same touch from him—but pleads a headache tonight—if he is unwilling to look at how he has attended to the Goddess Array that day or that week. But if he understands how the Goddess Array really works, he will understand that, say, his having taken a moment to look deeply into her eyes before kissing her good-bye that morning before work, or picking up the laundry off the bedroom floor that evening before he turns to her with a sexual intention—even his running the wash cycle and folding a load of the laundry—can be, later on, extremely seductive to his wife or girlfriend. If this issue has been a source of stress for her, his having taken action about it in a way that lowers her stress levels associated with it (and him) will literally make her more ready to lubricate, and her vagina will be better able to flush with blood.

I would go further: his gazing at her, or praising her, or even folding a load of laundry, is not merely rightly thought of as highly effective foreplay; it is actually, from the female body’s point of view, an essential part of good sex itself.

“SHOWERS OF STARS”

The latest science, indeed, comes full circle to where we began, and shows that women themselves, given the opportunity to initiate naming, name some kinds of orgasms with language that reflects transcendental experience.

Dr. Irv Binik at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has developed an “orgasm checklist” for women, with twenty-four descriptors; this multiplicity of available names for women’s experience has led to his team’s discovery that there are different kinds of orgasms in women, as women define them subjectively: some feel very “physiological” to women; for other kinds, women use more “all-encompassing,” “evaluative,” “subjective” terms. Binik found that women tend to use the physiological descriptors more often for masturbation—and to draw upon the emotional, subjective descriptors more often for intercourse.
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Beverly Whipple and Barry Komisaruk took this insight even further; they found, in 2011, that women use different kinds of language—amounting, really, to different kinds of poetry—to describe, when invited to do so, different kinds of orgasms resulting from the stimulation of clitoris, vagina (G-spot), or cervix and various combinations. This study made me recall how sex educator Liz Topp had said sadly, about the girls she had counseled who did not understand their own anatomy—“they don’t know that they have worlds inside of them.”

Fascinatingly, Whipple and Komisaruk found that vulval orgasms are commonly triggered by the clitoris, the major nerve involved is the pudendal nerve, and the muscle response is mostly in the PC muscle; whereas uterine orgasm is commonly triggered by the G-spot, the major nerve involved is the pelvic nerve, and the muscle response is mostly uterine. “Blended orgasms”—most women’s favorite kind, statistically—involved several trigger points, and both major nerve branches, pudendal and pelvic, as well as muscle responses in both areas.
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Perhaps it is not surprising that it is a team made up of a female researcher, working in tandem with a male researcher, that has identified one category of female orgasm that takes us back—or forward—to the language of mysticism. A Gnostic would say that when the experience of the Divine or the transcendental harmonizes what we see outside, with what we feel inside, that is “the God” or “the Goddess.”

What new name, among many, did some women, given the chance to categorize their own orgasms in their own language, give to one kind of sexual experience?

The name: “Showers of stars.”

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Goddess

It feels like home.

—Madonna, “Like a Prayer”

I
didn’t expect to have such a shift in my own vision just from having explored dimensions of the vagina that had been unknown to me. But just as I was drawn to the subject matter because I suspected that a book about the vagina would be a book about something much greater and different than a “mere” sex organ, so the change in my understanding is not just about the vagina, but seems to include a shift in how I see the world.

To finish the book, my children and I went, with another family, to a rented house, near the Greek town of Eressos, in a chain of what had been the Minoan islands. We were heading there for a week, at the start of a new summer. Two years had passed since I first began my journey.

Physically, though I had a dramatic scar running the length of the small of my back, I was well healed in every way. I was able to swim and hike again, though sadly I will never again be able to turn my spine completely—so sports, such as tennis and some kinds of dancing, are out, forever. While sometimes this causes me a bit of a pang, I am so grateful to not be in a body brace—and, just as important, so unspeakably grateful to have all my neural systems working again, to have all aspects and dimensions of my consciousness back—that these are momentary flickers, overwhelmed by the joy of knowing I have regained what I could have lost forever. My gratitude to Dr. Coady, Dr. Cole, Dr. Babu, and the other physicians who helped me, is unbounded.

Psychologically, I feel that I have discovered, through the research I did for this book, a kind of treasure for myself as well. I am surprised at how this manifests, as I keep seeing aspects of reality that had been hidden to me before.

On the last day of the writing, I took my computer in a shoulder sack and made my way to the seaside village near our rental house. The day before, I had gone out on a sail on a little white catamaran; a British teenage girl, who was working in the village for the summer, took my friend from the other family, and me, out on the water. The morning was clear and bright, lucid with white glassy heat. The water had that quality that only the Aegean possesses, somehow—a purple tinge under the blue surface, which led Homer to call it, mysteriously to me until I saw it, “the wine-dark sea.” Hidden richness, hidden treasure, depths under depths.

The young woman was confident with her sailing skills: she maneuvered into the wind. Within minutes we were in the center of the harp-shaped bay, looking back at the shore and the village. When we had arrived, tired and jet-lagged, busy with children’s needs and making sure everyone was settled in, we hadn’t yet acclimated to the reality that we were culturally, as well as physically, in Greece. I had not seen before how the simple housing we were staying in had been built into a hollow at what was the foot of a low range of golden hills, backed by even higher hills and, in turn, by rounded, gray-gold mountains. I looked at the landscape with a start: there was majesty all around us, and a steady soft wind was blowing. The hills undulated and yielded as if the earth itself were a feminine body.

Looking back at the landscape in all its majesty and softness, I felt a kind of smudge in my vision—which had been there for my entire conscious adult life—lift for a moment, and suddenly things sparkled. The dark, obscuring smudge, I realized in a flash, was the shame and disrespect that we assign to the feminine, and it does not just converge on the vagina, though that is its archetypal center; it washes over the whole world, with a darkness or wrongness that colors our perception of it, and our relationship to it. How extraordinary everything looked when for a flash, an instant, it was lifted. How harmoniously I could see our relationship to one another, and to the earth, becoming, in this gentle, earlier light.

We were due north of Crete, I realized with a start; we were close to the beginning of the journey. This bay, this island, was near the epicenter of Goddess worship of the ancient Minoan civilizations—the civilizations that antedated the ascent of the Aryan male-dominated pantheon of the gods of classical Greece, and that also antedated the harsher patriarchal worship of the Hebrews.

The very landscape was the color of the clay out of which dozens of Minoan snake-goddesses I had seen—sex goddesses—had been crafted. Indeed, I realized, I had unconsciously registered aspects, hints, traces of that goddess throughout the island; a schematized version of the Minoan snake-goddess, holding curled snakes out before her breasts, was the official symbol of the island—on the post office, on the town hall. On every cottage and villa, I had noticed a ruddy clay statuette of a female face, framed inside a vulval shell-like enclosure, very much like the mandorla shell that enclosed the Virgin Mary in the New College manuscript, facing outward from each roof corner, an invocation for protection. Traces of the acknowledgment of the sacredness and power of the feminine energies were still here, on this island.

Earlier in the week we had visited Molyvos, a beautiful hillside town. As we explored a Byzantine castle on the crest of the hill, my friend had said, “Look!” Across the valley great plumes of scarlet and orange flame leaped hundreds of feet into the sky, and massive sheets of white and steel-gray smoke, fissured at times with coal-black smoke, poured skyward. It was a forest fire, threatening the neighboring town of Petra. We ran down to the harbor, where we watched planes pour water on the licking, devouring wall of flame. The townspeople told us that the fires had begun to recur every summer; they could not be easily subdued. Dozens of people had died in the fires the summer before. It was so dangerous now, they said, because it was the driest summer in years, for the weather was extreme; it was changing.

In an instant, I realized that original sin did not, as the Judeo-Christian tradition has it, originate in human sexuality. Our species’ original sin was in deviating from our earliest tradition of reverence for the feminine and for female sexuality, and all that it represented for us. Our original sin lies in five thousand years of shaming it, stigmatizing it, controlling it, subduing it, splitting it off from women, from men, compartmentalizing it, insulting it and selling it. Great dislocations and alienations in civilization and in human development have followed from that original sin, and the results are everywhere around us. In a flash I saw waves of tragedy—for women, for men, and for a now unbalanced, now plundering civilization that followed from this original alienation.

All these moments and insights now seemed connected to me.

I remembered educator Liz Topp, who had described the teenage girls in the high school in Manhattan. These girls had told her that they were so fed up with the disrespect accorded to them sexually, and with being so kept in the dark and silenced about their own desires and development, that one day they went to the school assembly in a group, and asked for a chance to speak. They then stood up, and shouted, in unison:

“Vagina vagina vagina!”

I smiled when I thought of this, and of these girls’ impulse: that their own strength and development depended on this reclamation—as impulsive a gesture as it was.

They were right.

The final day of my writing, I stole away by myself into the center of Eressos, farther down the bay. She-goats lay peacefully under the olive trees, and their kids butted horns in the shadows. The path I followed wove parallel to the Aegean, which was on my right; the great soft hills were to my left. My path led over a small bridge; dozens of fish and turtles swam in the green river that ran beneath it. Beside the path, many-colored flowers bloomed in abundance: bright pink oleander, orange trumpet-vine flowers, soft purple thistles. In every other flower, it seemed, a bee was busily working. Flowers, of course, are the sex organs of plants; I had eaten this honey at breakfast, every morning of our stay.

I smiled. Wherever I looked around me I saw the undimmed, unsullied feminine energy, creating and giving. Female sexuality was everywhere, doing nothing less than nurturing and sustaining the entire world; doing nothing less than nurturing and sustaining us, humanity.

Vagina vagina vagina,
I thought with amusement.

Notes

Introduction

1
. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá,
Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
(New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

2
. Shere Hite,
The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality
(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004).

3
. Catherine Blackledge,
The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

4
. William James
,
The
Varieties of Religious Experience
(New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 366.

5
. Ibid., 329–71.

6
. Ibid., 366.

7
. William Wordsworth, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” in
The Major Works, Including the Prelude,
Stephen Gill, ed., (New York: Oxford World Classics, 2000): “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream / The earth, and every common sight / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light. . . . trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.”

8
. James,
The Varieties of Religious Experience,
370.

9
. Sigmund Freud,
Civilization and Its Discontents
(New York: Penguin Books, 2002).

10
. Janniko R. Georgiadis and others, “Regional Cerebral Blood Flow Changes Associated with Clitorally Induced Orgasm in Healthy Women,”
European Journal of Neuroscience,
vol. 24 (2006): 3305–16.

11
. Blaise Pascal,
Pensées
(New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 148.