Vagina: A Cultural History by Naomi Wolf

Author:Naomi Wolf [Wolf, Naomi]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

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”

The 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.

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