Vagina (6 page)

But men who really want to understand their wives and girlfriends and make them existentially happy will simply need to understand the female ANS, and seek out a deeper understanding of the life of the vagina. Such a man will need to become “more Tantric,” more sensual and romantic in bed, but he will, just as importantly, need to be much more attentive to what the woman wants in her life at any given moment. He will need to totally forget whatever he thought “worked” with his last lover, and learn from the very beginning, following her individual response. He will have to be far more inventive, creative, and attentive than the conventional model of heterosexual sex “scripts” him to be
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A male lover of a woman, in other words, has to be far more patient, tactile, and time invested than he has probably been raised to be (and probably much more than he is initially inclined to be, after a long day at work). He must become far more interested in her state of mind, her level of stress or of relaxation, the skin of her whole body, a breath in her ear, a heavier touch and a lighter touch; far more interested in really gazing into her eyes, in light kissing and deep kissing; far more interested in offering stroking and caresses to her that do not feel to the woman as if there is a goal-oriented “agenda.” He must stimulate, sensitively and skillfully, whatever combination of the woman’s clitoris, vagina, G-spot, labia, perineum, rectum, and mouth of her cervix really makes her happy. He needs to be highly attentive to whether she wants soft, lingering lovemaking at that moment or hard, powerful sex or some exciting combination, because at different times of the month—or depending on her mind-state, which affects her body—her wishes may vary. He will need to know the difference between “bad stress” and “good stress.” Penetration may be part of the pleasure nexus, of course; orgasm is part of the pleasure nexus; but there is much, much more.

How exactly does your sexual neural network function? You can see from the Netter image of the autonomic nervous system how the genitals connect to the lower spinal cord, which in turn connects to the brain.
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The Netter image shows a close-up of the spinal cord and the nerve roots that connect the spinal cord’s impulses to the vagina and vice versa. These impulses end up in the female brain. All the neurotransmitters send signals from the clitoris, vagina, cervix, and so on up the spinal cord, and finally they reach the hypothalamus and the brain stem.

The pituitary gland is under the brain, and the hypothalamus right above it. The pituitary is called the “master gland” because it regulates all the hormones in your brain and body—the production, for instance, of oxytocin—the chemical “love factory” that generates feelings of bonding, trust, and attachment. The pituitary gland is where all the emotional action takes place. Here is one place where a dopamine system is regulated that will make you more or less aroused; another, midbrain dopamine system makes you incentivized and focused, before and during sex. Dopamine is associated with arousal and desire. Oxytocin and other emotion-generating hormones, which will make you think your lover’s otherwise annoying habits are really cute, are processed in the hypothalamus. And prolactin, which will make you finally get up out of bed to get some laundry done, or to do some other work, is also processed in the hypothalamus. So it is right to say that the vagina is sending signals to the brain during lovemaking that mediate consciousness.

That skein of living threads in the female pelvis—so intimately in communication through the spinal cord to the brain, with its shifting bath of chemicals—triggers opioids and oxytocin release after orgasm, which, as we will see, makes us ache physically when we have started to fall in love with someone. It is why women go into that disinhibited, out-of-control trance state when they climax that involves different parts of the brain.

Though delicate, that network underlying our clitorises, vulvas, and vaginas is incredibly powerful: the orgasmic pleasure generated there sends our brains messages with power to help regulate our menstrual and hormonal cycles, make us more or less fertile, calm us down at the scent of a lover, or vaginally lubricate when we are praised. By the same token, the brain also sends signals to the clitoris, vulva, and vagina, indicating when it is the right time and situation in which to lubricate, flush with blood, climax, and bond. This network is so influential over all the relevant systems of our bodies that if we are neglected sexually—or if we sexually neglect ourselves if we are not partnered—the messages sent from these pathways up the spinal cord to the brain, and the hormonal reactions in the brain, can lead us into depression, or even heighten our risk of injury or heart disease. This network is continually sending moods, sensations, and emotions to our brains and from our brains to our inner and outer skin; it is not the vagina itself but that network underneath everything that leads us to feel much of what we feel; that leads each woman to shiver differently, in response to a different touch; that leads female consciousness itself to fluctuate, as these messages along these pathways fluctuate—a flux heightened by the cyclical nature of female sexual desire. If femininity resided anywhere, I would say it resides there, in that electric inward network extending from pelvis to brain.

This neural pathway, and other evidence we will look at, explains why our notions of female sexuality are so often wrong. Since Masters and Johnson wrote
Human Sexual
Response
in 1966, which they based on their studies of men and women having orgasms in lab conditions, our culture has accepted the single model of human sexual response they described of excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution, which, they argued, is similar for women and men.
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Their summary of the vagina asserts that “it should be stated parenthetically that vaginal (natural or artificial) response to sexual stimuli develops in a basic pattern” regardless of the stimuli’s origin, a view that new science suggests is too simplistic. Even today, our culture tends to present male and female sexual response as analogous or parallel, while acknowledging that some women have more orgasms with less of a “refractory period” rest time in between than men need. That “one model” for human sexuality has even been seen as liberated—it does allow women sexual needs, since it allows men sexual needs—and it fit the Second Wave of feminism’s, and the sexual revolution’s, comfortable idea that women were, sexually at least, “just like men.”

The Masters and Johnson model is being challenged as too reductive when it comes to women, on several fronts. The latest science—including from such researchers as Rosemary Basson, M.D., at the University of British Columbia, Irv Binick at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and Barry R. Komisaruk, at Rutgers University in New Jersey—is confirming that there are many variations, for women, on what now looks like a far too basic model.
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It is more accurate to say, based on the newer science, that though female sexuality has
some
superficial analogues to male sexuality, additional levels of experience and sensation are also often involved.
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Female sexuality is very far indeed from being merely a female version of what has traditionally been understood, often from a male perspective, as “just sex.” They are finding that the vagina and brain cannot be fully considered separately: Basson found that women’s subjective sense of arousal must be measured in mind, not just body; Komisaruk and his team found arousal and orgasms
only,
for injured female subjects, in the mind.
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My journey finally led me to conclude that, with the exception of a few healers, teachers, and practitioners, we are indeed, for all our “liberation,” constraining the vagina in sexual ideologies that are actually much less than liberating and that are sometimes new, “hip,” or “sexy” forms of old-style enslavement and control. Or else we are actively ignorant of the true role and dimensionality of the vagina. I came to conclude that the vagina is not nearly as free today in the West as we are led to believe—both because its full role is seriously misunderstood, and also because it is disrespected.

3

Confidence, Creativity, and the Sense of Interconnectedness

The sister didn’t even get the watercolors—they puzzled her—looked several times—always seeming to question—The man on horseback she liked . . . I’ll take it to school tomorrow—showing it to folks that can’t see hurts but I’ll do it anyway— . . . Is it because there is more animal in me than brain—that I want to be near you to tell you how much I like it—No—it isn’t animal at all—it’s touch—Touch may be God or the Devil with me—I don’t know which— . . .

—Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz

A
round the same time that I was stuggling with my medical situation, I went back to graduate school to work toward a degree in Victorian and Edwardian women’s literature.

I began to notice that many women writing between 1850 and 1920 articulated aspects of female sexual experience that did indeed often suggest a connection between a sexual awakening and a creative awakening. These pre–sexual revolution, pre–Second Wave feminist writers such as the British Victorian lyric poet Christina Rossetti, turn-of-the-twentieth-century American novelist Kate Chopin, and Anaïs Nin, the memoirist writing in France in the 1930s, wrote about female sexual passion as if it were an overwhelming force that made short work of will and self-possession. They often seemed to connect sexual self-knowledge or sexual awakening in women with the growth or awakening of other aspects of female creativity and identity. Unlike those women writers and artists of the post-1960s era, they did not ever portray female sexuality as being “merely” about physical pleasure.

I found something else quite surprising: though misogynist commentators had often suggested that brilliant women could not be sexual—versions of the sexless, intelligent “bluestocking” have surfaced since the medieval period—and that highly sexual women had no brains, the biographies of creative artist after creative artist suggested the very opposite. In life after life of women writers, revolutionaries, and artists, a particularly liberating sexual relationship or affair—or hints of sexual self-discovery, even if the artist was unpartnered—would precede a luxuriant stretch of creative and intellectual expansion in their work. And, judging from their private letters, I saw that some of the most creative and most intellectually and psychologically “free” women of their eras—from Christina Rossetti to George Eliot, Edith Wharton, Emma Goldman, and Georgia O’Keeffe—were also, evidently, remarkably sexually passionate women.

George Eliot described her heroine Maggie Tulliver, in
The Mill on the Floss
(1860), “throwing herself under the seductive guidance of illimitable wants.”
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According to her annotator, novelist A. S. Byatt, Eliot herself “too had fears that she might because of her passionate nature become demonic. . . .” In a letter to friends, Eliot wrote of her own fear of becoming consumed with sensual desire: “I had a horrid vision of myself last night becoming earthly, sensual and devilish. . . .”
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Poet Christina Rossetti wrote exquisitely about the torments of female sensual temptation: the heroine of “Goblin Market” (1859), Laura, “sat up in a passionate yearning / And gnashed her teeth for baulked desire, and wept / As if her heart would break. . . .” Laura’s sister Lizzie, who has eaten “goblin fruit,” in contrast, is intoxicated and evidently addicted to wanting more: Lizzie cries, “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruits for you / Goblin pulp and goblin dew. / Eat me, drink me, love me; / . . . make much of me. . . . / She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.” The “wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men” in “Goblin Market” pressed upon the two girls fruits that were “like honey to the throat / But poison in the blood.”
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The young painter Georgia O’Keeffe wrote to her love object, Arthur Whittier McMahon, in 1915, “It seems so strange—not to give myself—when I want to. Love is great to give. . . .” To photographer Paul Strand, whose sexual relationship with the artist coincided with a period of tremendous artistic growth for her, she wrote—conflating the excitement of a new foray into abstraction with the excitement of thinking about kissing a man: “Then the work—Yes, I loved it—and I love you—I wanted to put my arms around you and kiss you hard. . . . It’s so funny the way I didn’t even touch you when I so much wanted to. Still am telling you that I wanted to. . . . Take me out on the Drive some nights with you—will you?” Her biographer notes that she concluded this letter “provocatively,” referring to Riverside Drive, where lovers sought darkness in the evenings.
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For many of these creative artists, apparent sexual awakening and creative surges had at certain key times in their lives seemed to fuse together, and seemed to elicit a phase of work that reached a higher level of insight and energy than had the just-previous work in their
oeuvres.
These arcs of accomplishment—these creative “high points”—seemed as if they might help confirm further my growing conviction that women experience the vagina as integral to a core self, and that it can also serve as the trigger or entry point to an awakening of sensibility that can at fortunate moments fuse the creative and the sexual.

Women writers often describe such sexually awakened moments in terms of a kind of mist falling away, heightening a sense of the
female
self. In their private letters, they often describe a startling, intoxicating discovery of self through the catalyst of the sexual love they are experiencing. As the young Hannah Arendt wrote to her lover Ernst Blucher after their affair began—an affair that was described as intensely intellectually engaged and intensely erotic, for a young woman who had never been especially physical before—“I . . . finally know what happiness is. . . . It still seems to me unbelievable, that I could achieve both—a great love, and a sense of identity with my own person. And yet I achieve the one only since I have had the other.”
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Often, no matter what they suffer for their passion, these writers’ heroines refuse to regret the sexual awakening that has brought them the suffering: in Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel
The Awakening,
Edna Pontellier muses that “among the conflicting sensations that assailed her, there was neither shame nor remorse.”
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