Vagina (49 page)

6
. In 1992, the National Health and Social Life Survey found that the prevalence of low female sexual desire in the general population in the United States was high and that low desire and arousal concerns were the category most strongly associated with dissatisfaction in women: http://popcenter.uchicago.edu/data/nhsls.shtml. The survey was updated in 2009, and it still found that 43 percent of women in the sample reported sexual dysfunction, compared to 31 percent of men: Edward O. Laumann, Anthony Paik, and Raymond C. Rosen, “Sexual Dysfunction in the United States: Prevalence and Predictors,”
Journal of the American Medical Association,
vol. 281, no. 6 (February 10, 1999): 587.

7
. J. J. Warnock, “Female Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder: Epidemiology, Diagnosis and Treatment,”
CNS Drugs
16, no. 11 (2002): 745–53. Another study found a third of premenopausal women suffered from low sexual desire: S. L. West, A. A. d’Aloisio, R. P. Agansi, W. D. Kalsbeek, N. N. Borisov, and J. M. Thorp, “Prevalence of Low Sexual Desire and Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder in a Nationally Representative Sample of US Women,”
Archives of Internal Medicine
168, no. 3 (July 2008): 1441–49.

8
. Corky Siemaszko, “Sex Survey Finds U.S. Men Aren’t the Lovers They Think They Are—and Women ‘Faking It’ Is to Blame,”
New York Daily News,
October 4, 2010.

Two / History: Conquest and Control

Chapter 6: The Traumatized Vagina

1
. Jonny Hogg, “400,000-plus Women Raped in Congo Yearly: Study,”
Reuters,
May 11, 2011, citing a study by the
American Journal of Public Health.
www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/11/US-congo-rape-idUsTRE74A79Y20110511. See also Jeffrey Gettleman, “Congo Study Sets Estimate for Rapes Much Higher,”
New York Times,
May 11, 2011. www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/world/Africa/12congo.html. The Congolese Women’s Campaign Against Sexual Violence confirms lower numbers, but notes that forty women are raped daily in Eastern Congo: http://www.rdc-viol.org/site/en/node/35.

2
. Jimmie Briggs, interview, New York City, May 12, 2010.

3
. Douglas Bremner, Penny Randall, Eric Vermetten, Lawrence Staib, Richard A. Bronen, Carolyn Mazure, Sandi Capelli, Gregory McCarthy, Robert B. Innis, and Dennis S. Charney, “Magnetic Resonance Imaging-Based Measurement of Hippocampal Volume in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Related to Childhood Physical and Sexual Abuse—A Preliminary Report,”
Biological Psychiatry
1, no. 41 ( January 1997): 23–32.

4
. Dr. Burke Richmond, interview, New York City, November 20, 2011.

5
. Roni Caryn Rabin, “Nearly 1 in 5 Women in U.S. Survey Say They Have Been Sexually Assaulted,”
New York Times,
December 14, 2011. www.nytimes/2011/12/15/health/nearly-1-in-5-women-in-us-survey-report-sexual-assault.html.

6
. Tami Lynn Kent,
Wild Feminine: Finding Power, Spirit & Joy in the Female Body
(New York: Atria Books, 2011), 51–65.

7
. Alessandra H. Rellini and Cindy M. Meston, “Psychophysiological Arousal in Women with a History of Child Sexual Abuse,”
Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy
32 (2006): 5–22. See also Cindy M. Meston and Boris B. Gorzalka, “Differential Effects of Sympathetic Activation on Sexual Arousal in Sexually Dysfunctional and Functional Women,”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology,
vol. 105, no. 4 (1996): 582–91, and Cindy M. Meston, “Sympathetic Nervous System Activity and Female Sexual Arousal,” in “A Symposium: Sexual Activity and Cardiac Risk,”
American Journal of Cardiology,
vol. 86, no. 2A (July 20, 2000): 30F–34F.

For more data on the link between relaxation and female sexual arousal, and the link between anxiety and female sexual inhibition, see Andrea Bradford and Cindy M. Meston, “The Impact of Anxiety on Sexual Arousal in Women,”
Behavioral Research and Therapy,
vol. 44 (2006): 1067–77: “A high incidence of sexual dysfunction has been reported in women with anxiety disorders.” Hannah Gola and others show that women who have been violently raped show changes in their cortisol responses in response to psychological triggers: “Victims of Rape Show Increased Cortisol Responses to Trauma Reminders: A Study in Individuals with War- and Torture-Related PTSD,”
Psychoneuroendocrinology
37 (2012): 213–20.

8
. See Margaret Buttenheim and A. A. Levendosky, “Couples Treatment for Incest Survivors,”
Psychotherapy,
vol. 31 (1994): 407–14. The studies that document the damage of sexual abuse, especially early sexual abuse, to female sexual response later in life are many and the correlation is strong. Most of them, however, focus on emotional and psychological trauma as the primary inhibitor of sexual response in previously victimized women.
The Abuse of Men: Trauma Begets Trauma,
edited by Barbara Jo Brothers, summarizes many studies: “Courtois (1988) has reported that 80% of the victims of childhood sexual abuse experienced some difficulty in adult relationships.” Becker, Skinner, and Able, they note, cited in Sarwer and Durlak, 1996, place the range of such damaged relationships, rather, at 50 percent: “Difficulties range from hypoarousal, to aversion of genitals and painful sex. . . . Buttenheim and Levendosky confirm [this issue] when they describe the sexless marriage as another manifestation of the survivor’s difficulty with sexuality.” Barbara Jo Brothers, ed.,
The Abuse of Men: Trauma Begets Trauma
(Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2001), 20. Sandra Risa Leiblum, ed., in
Principles and Practice of Sex Therapy,
cites Levendosky and Buttenheim’s 1994 study that argues that sexual dysfunction in a relationship that involves an incest or sex abuse survivor is “an elaborate mutual reenactment” of the original incest. Sandra Risa Leiblum, ed.,
Principles and Practices of Sex Therapy
(New York: The Guilford Press, 2007), 361.

9
. M. F. Barnes, 1995, cited in Abrielle Conway and Amy Smith, “Strategies for Addressing Childhood Sexual Abuse in the Hope Approach,”
Regent University Hope Research Study,
www.regent.edu/acad/schlou/research/initiatives.htm#hope.

10
. J. Douglas Bremner, and others, “MRI and PET Study of Deficits in Hippocampal Structure and Function in Women with Childhood Sexual Abuse and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
160, no. 5 (May 1, 2003): 924–32. These researchers found that women with childhood sexual abuse have measurable changes in the hippocampus area of their brains—16 percent to 19 percent smaller hippocampal area and less hippocampal activation was found in the women who had experienced childhood sexual abuse as opposed to the controls. The hippocampus is involved in “verbal declarative memory” tasks, as well as consolidation of new memories and emotional responses—which raises an intriguing question about the possible light that this result may shed on the brain-level ability of women who have been sexually traumatized in childhood to easily experience an unmediated “I.” Sexual-abuse or rape-induced PTSD could be shown in this experiment as well to break down a woman’s ability to “know what she knows” and reconstitute a certain sense of self in an ongoing way:

OBJECTIVE: Animal studies have suggested that early stress is associated with alterations in the hippocampus, a brain area that plays a critical role in learning and memory. The purpose of this study was to measure both hippocampal structure and function in women with and without early childhood sexual abuse and the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). METHOD: Thirty-three women participated in this study, including women with early childhood sexual abuse and PTSD (N=10), women with abuse without PTSD (N=12), and women without abuse or PTSD (N=11). Hippocampal volume was measured with magnetic resonance imaging in all subjects, and hippocampal function during the performance of hippocampal-based verbal declarative memory tasks was measured by using positron emission tomography in abused women with and without PTSD. RESULTS: A failure of hippocampal activation and 16% smaller volume of the hippocampus were seen in women with abuse and PTSD compared to women with abuse without PTSD. Women with abuse and PTSD had a 19% smaller hippocampal volume relative to women without abuse or PTSD. CONCLUSIONS: These results are consistent with deficits in hippocampal function and structure in abuse-related PTSD.

11
. R. Yehuda, 2003, and S. M. Southwick and others, 1999, cited in Thomas Steckler, N. H. Kalin, and J. M. H. M. Reul,
Handbook of Stress and the Brain: Integrative and Clinical Aspects,
vol. 15,
Techniques in the Behavioral and Neural Sciences
(New York: Elsevier Science, 2005), 251, 272.

12
. S. M. Southwick, R. Yehuda, and C. A. Morgan III, “Clinical Studies of Neurotransmitter Alterations in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” in
Neurobiology and Clinical Consequences of Stress: From Normal Adaptation to PTSD,
ed. M. J. Friedman, D. S. Charney, and A. Y. Deutch (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott-Raven, 1995), 335–49.

13
. Ibid.

14
. K. Stav, P. L. Dwyer, and L. Roberts, “Pudendal Neuralgia: Fact or Fiction?” make Ms. Fish’s point.
Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey
64, no. 3 (March 2009): 190–99.

15
. Nancy Fish, interview, Copake, New York, April 5, 2011.

16
. See Stephen Porges,
The Polyvagal Theory: Neuropsychological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

17
. Mike Lousada, interview, London, UK, June 12, 2011.

18
. Dr. James Willoughby, Faculty of History and New College, New College Archives, University of Oxford, interview, June 11, 2011.

19
. Juan Eduardo Cirlot and Jack Sage,
A Dictionary of Symbols
(New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1971), 381.

Chapter 7: The Vagina Began as Sacred

1
. Riane Eisler,
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
(New York: HarperOne, 1988), 51.

2
. See J. A. MacGillivray,
Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).

3
. Rosalind Miles,
The Women’s History of the World
(London: Paladin Books, 1989), 34–37.

4
. Asia Shepsut,
Journey of the Priestess
:
The Priestess Traditions of the Ancient World
(New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 62–79.

5
. Ibid., 16.

6
. Ibid., 72.

7
. Ibid., 69.

8
. Catherine Blackledge
, The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 30.

9
. Erich Neumann,
The Great Mother: Analysis of an Archetype
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 168.

10
. Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,”
The Freud Reader,
ed. Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 239.

11
. Thomas Laqueur,
Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 26.

12
. Leviticus 15:19, www.come-and-hear.com/editor/america_3.html.

13
. Babylonian Talmud,
Tractate Kerithoth 2B
Soncino 1961 Edition, 1, www.come-and-hear.com/editor/america_3.html.

14
. Tertullian, “On the Apparel of Women,” www.public.iastate.edu/~hist.486x/medieval.html; see also Kristen E. Kvam, Lina S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler,
Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 131.

15
. Morton M. Hunt,
The Natural History of Love
(New York: Minerva Press, 1959), 187.

16
. Ibid., 207. For a full account of the rise of sexless mariolary, see Jacques Delarun, “The Clerical Gaze,”
A History of Women: The Silences of the Middle Ages,
ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 15–36.

17
. Mary Roach,
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 214–15.

18
. Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Canterbury Tales,
ed. Nevill Coghill (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 285. In “The Miller’s Tale,” one of the clerks tells Alison that “If I don’t have my wish, for love of you, I will die.” “And prively he caughte hire by the queynte, / And seyde, ‘Ywis, but if ich have my wille, / For deerne love of thee, lemman, I spille.’ ” Foreword, 88. In “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” the Wife of Bath tells one of her husbands that “For, certeyn, olde dotard, by youre leve, / Ye shul have quente right ynogh at eve.” Later she refers to her vagina as her “bele chose” (Fr.
belle chose
, beautiful thing).