Vagina: A New Biography by Naomi Wolf
When the male modernists actually did write about female sexuality or about the clitoris and vagina, they did so in responses that showed an emerging Freudian dualism: their responses ranging from a chilly awe—as in Samuel Beckett’s reference to “The great grey cunt of the universe”—to D. H. Lawrence’s seeming amazement at the transcendental potential of female sexual ecstasy, as in the love scenes in which Mellors awakens Lady Chatterley’s vaginal responses, to irritable resistance, as in Lawrence’s description of New Woman clitoral “beak pecking” in another lovemaking scene in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). But in addition to the anxious male response to the clitoris and the sometimes admiring male description of vaginal sensuality in this era, a new place on the spectrum appeared, established first by Henry Miller: the dismissable, contemptible, pornographic “hole.” In its not-important-ness, it differed from Tertullian’s hellish snakepits of sin; it is the modern pornographic vagina: something tawdry, that simply doesn’t matter.
In Lawrence’s work, scenes of clitoral excitement often have a threatening quality, and are often linked to what Lawrence describes as the overly intellectualized nature of New Woman social renegades and feminists: “You want a life of pure sensation and ‘passion,’ ” the character Rupert says to the New Woman Hermione in Women in Love (1920), “but your passion is a lie. . . . It isn’t passion at all, it is your will. . . . You haven’t got any real body, any dark sensual body of life. . . . If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography—looking at yourself in mirrors . . . so that you can . . . make it all mental.”13 The “New Woman,” with her liberated, even demanding sexuality, was not an easy image for male modernists to welcome.
THE MODERNIST DIVIDE: TRANSCENDENTALISM OR “JUST PUSSY”?
This dualism—is the vagina a locus of transcendentalism or “just pussy”?—is the dualism we inherit today. Since the 1940s, the “just pussy” interpretation has—temporarily, one can hope—gained the ascendancy.
In the 1940s, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller’s lover and contemporary, worked in the sexual-transcendentalist tradition of the female modernists, who revered the imaginative potential of the vagina. For Nin, the vagina enhances the woman; it expresses, rather than being separate from, her will and her sensibility, and is itself an object that is framed in a cherishing and tender context. Nin contributed the first extended female sexual voice to the canon of English literature when she began writing erotica for money, at so many francs per page. In her short story collection Delta of Venus, written at various times in the 1940s, but published posthumously in 1978, she frequently linked female Eros to female consciousness, and she sought to explore all the dimensions of sexuality hidden in women. Her stories reveal in attentive detail all the delights of the sexual feast that constitute the Goddess Array (which I explore in the last section of this book)—gazing, stroking, admiring, lubricating, melting, opening, and so on—and stand very much in contrast to Miller’s work, and to that of Nin’s male contemporaries.
In her story “Mathilde,” Nin narrates the sexual adventures of a woman who falls in love with a drug addict, Martinez. Mathilde “remembered Martinez, his way of opening the sex like a bud, the flicks of his quick tongue covering the distance from the pubic hair to the buttocks, ending on the dimple at the end of her spine. How he loved this dimple, which led his fingers and his tongue to follow the downward curve and vanish between the two full mounds of flesh.” Mathilde asks herself how she appears to Martinez, sits in front of a mirror, and opens her legs: “The sight was enchanting. The skin was flawless, the vulva, roseate and full. She thought it was like the gum plant leaf with its secret milk that the pressure of the finger could bring out, the odorous moisture that came like the moisture of sea shells. So was Venus born of the sea with this little kernel of salty honey in her, which only caresses could bring out of the hidden recesses of her body.”14
Mathilde changes position before the mirror. “She could see her sex now from another side. . . . Her other hand went between her legs. . . . This hand stroked her sex back and forth. . . . The approach of orgasm excited her, she went into convulsive gestures, as if to pull away the ultimate fruit from the branch, pulling, pulling at the branch to bring down everything into a wild orgasm, which came as she watched herself in the mirror, seeing the hands move, the honey shining, the whole sex . . . shining wet between the legs.”
Nin’s treatment of the vagina—delicate and reverent—stands in stark contrast to Miller’s. Miller helped to introduce the “pornographic frame” around the vagina that has prevailed to the present day—in which the vagina is debased and debasing to the woman, and decontextualized from the rest of the woman. This frame is so familiar to us we take it for granted, but it is really quite historically recent. Miller created the template for this frame in a famous passage from Tropic of Cancer—read breathlessly by generations of schoolboys—in his description of the prostitute Germaine’s vagina. Germaine “advanc[ed] toward me leisurely,” Miller writes;
“she commenced rubbing her pussy affectionately, stroking it with her two hands, caressing it, patting it, patting it. There was something about her eloquence at that moment and the way she thrust that rosebush under my nose which remains unforgettable, she spoke of it as if it were some extraneous object which she had acquired at great cost, an object whose value had increased with time and which she now prized above everything in the world. Her words imbued it with a peculiar fragrance; it was no longer just her private organ, but a treasure, a magic, potent treasure, a God-given thing—and none the less so because she traded it day in and day out for a few pieces of silver. As she flung herself on the bed, with legs spread wide apart, she cupped it with her hands and stroked it some more, murmuring all the while in that hoarse, cracked voice of hers that it was good, beautiful, a treasure, a little treasure. And it was good, that little pussy of hers. . . . And again that big, bushy thing of hers worked its bloom and magic. It began to have an independent existence—for me too. There was Germaine and there was that rosebush of hers. I liked them separately and I liked them together. . . . A man! That was what she craved. A man with something between his legs that could tickle her, that could make her writhe in ecstasy, make her grab that bushy twat of hers with both hands and rub it joyfully, boastfully, proudly, with a sense of connection, a sense of life. That was the only place she experienced any life—down there where she clutched herself with both hands . . . It glowed down there between her legs where women ought to glow, and there established that circuit which makes one feel the earth under his legs again. When she lay there with her legs apart and moaning . . . it was good, it was a proper show of feeling.”15
I am not making an argument about which kind of text is “hotter.” Some women will respond to Nin, some to Miller—some, no doubt, to both or to neither. My intention is to point out, rather, that they represent very different cultural ways of seeing what the vagina represents. The male-modernist view of women is all here in how the narrator sees the vagina of Germaine. The woman is sexually desiring, but makes no distinction between purchased and freely given sexual favors. She is portrayed as dead everywhere but in her sexual center. She is identified with life and vigor and there are some appealing metaphors—“rosebush,” “treasure”—but she has no existence separate from her vagina and its relationship to the male narrator, and the vagina itself is separate from the woman rather than integrating another dimension of the woman, as it does so delicately in the “transcendentalist gateway” Nin passages.
THE BLUES VAGINA
The early years of the twentieth century prepared the way for another thread: the flowering of ragtime at the turn of the century and then African American jazz and blues in the 1920s and 1930s. This musical development transfixed the United States and also swept over Britain and Western Europe. Ragtime, jazz, and blues were seen as harbingers of the new and the free. The spontaneous styles of
Ragtime, and then jazz and blues, also introduced a new frankness about discussing the vagina, and female sexuality in general. Blues lyrics in particular were filled with African American slang for vagina. Through this slang, a great deal of direct discourse about the vagina and about female sexual response in general made its way into the drawing rooms and salons of American and European society. These slang terms were usually encoded in metaphors: the clitoris was a bell that needed to ring; the vagina was a hot frying pan, or a butter churn that needed to be beaten, or a hot dog bun in need of a hot dog. So middle-class and upper-middle-class white audiences outside of Bohemia—men and women whose social norms still forbade them to discuss the vagina or female sexuality in public—could sing the lyrics, and enjoy and repeat their double meanings, without social penalties.
The crossover of blues lyrics from African American into white and mixed society was so important partly because the blues “frame” around the vagina is so very different from the frame created by the dominant Western traditions. Unlike the gynecologists of the era, blues slang does not medicalize the vagina. Unlike Freud, it does not psychologize a “better” or “worse” sexual response for women. In contrast to Freud’s theory of male castration anxiety, and also in contrast to modernists such as Lawrence, blues slang is not fearful of the vagina. Rather, the metaphors that both male and female blues singers used about the vagina consistently cast female desire as strong, steady, positive, sometimes very funny—just as male sexual desire is often portrayed as very funny—and obviously in need of gratification, as well as deserving satisfaction. The blues vagina is not a shameful vagina. The words surrounding it are not associated with neurosis. The blues vagina is virtually never described as a “gash,” a “nothing,” or a source of shame and disease. Rather, blues vagina metaphors describe something that is delicious, appealing, or just amusing. Metaphors for the vagina in the blues tradition include jelly, jellyrolls, sugar and candy, seafood, frying pans, butter churns, bells, buns, and bowls. In blues lyrics, women are not victimized by having vaginas, but they are generally portrayed as being in full possession of their own sexuality and liking their vaginas. African American women’s sexuality had been brutally owned and traded by others for four hundred years, but in spite of—or perhaps because of—this, the sexuality of women in blues lyrics is emphasized as belonging to the women themselves. So very unlike the white, Victorian women’s novel and its “seduction and betrayal” theme, in which a “good” woman is a passive sexual victim and there is almost no narrative of positive female sexual agency, in the blues tradition, female sexual agency is the story line that predominates. Women are almost never portrayed as victimized via their sexuality, though love can certainly break their hearts.
In the blues, male lyricists tend to cast the women as being fully in control of “that thing”; a woman is often depicted as having a kind of artistry in handling her “thing,” and the male observer/narrator in the song is often cast as an appreciative audience of her sexual skill and power. One can’t say that these roles—the female demonstrator of her skill and mastery of her “thing”; the male troubadour touting the woman’s skill with “her thing”—are inherently misogynist. I think that they are actually philogynist, if you will—the male narrators of these songs often seem to love women. Blues lyrics are often philogynist lyrics.
In the lyrics of the famous women blues singers of the 1920s through the 1940s are dozens of code terms for vagina. Lil Johnson sang about female frustration in “Press My Button (Ring My Bell),” a song in which she laments an overconfident lover’s inability to locate her clitoris:
My man thought he was raising Sam
I said, “Give it to me baby, you don’t understand
Where to put that thing,
Where to put that thing,
Just press my button, give my bell a ring!”
Come on, baby, let’s have some fun,
Just put your hot dog in my bun,
And I’ll have that thing, that thing-a-ling.
Just press my button, give my bell a ring!
My man’s out there in the rain and cold
He’s got the right key, but just can’t find the hole.
He says, “Where’s that thing? That thing-a-ling?
I been pressin’ your button, and your bell won’t ring!”
[Spoken] “Beat it out, boy! Come on and oil my button! Kinda rusty!”
Now, tell me daddy, what it’s all about
Tryin’ to pinch your spark plug and it’s all worn out.
I can’t use that thing,
That thing-a-ling,
I been pressin’ your button, and your bell won’t ring!
Hear my baby, all out of breath,
Been working all night and ain’t done nothing yet,
What’s wrong with that thing? That thing-a-ling?
I been pressin’ your button, and your bell won’t ring.
Hear me, baby, on my bended knee
I want some kind daddy just to hear my plea,
And bring me that thing
That thing-a-ling,
Just press my button, give my bell a ring.16
In her 1936/1937 song “Hottest Gal in Town,” Lil Johnson describes strong female desire in a richly domestic, even “foodie,” set of metaphors, in which the eager vagina is described variously as milk, cream of wheat, and biscuits, and in which female desire is compared to a furnace being stoked. In the song, Johnson describes her ideal male lover, who will take the time to wake up early every morning to stoke said furnace, amping up the intensity of its heat, and who should be good-looking and well built; in her series of metaphors, he will churn her milk, cream her wheat, and toast her biscuits. She dwells on his physical characteristics—his height and his strength—and insists that he be similar to a cannonball. She explains that all of these qualities are the reasons that she wants him in her life—after all, she boasts, she is the hottest woman around. The repetition of different metaphors that characterize mutual desire and mutual sexual pleasure underscores the centrality of reciprocity in a satisfying sexual experience and the multiple ways in which female desire seeks and manifests pleasure.
The great female blues singers’ lyrics sometimes mourned lost sexual pleasure. In 1936’s “If You See My Rooster,” the legendary Memphis Minnie sang:
If you see my rooster, please run him on back home.
If you see my rooster, please run him on back home.
I haven’t found no eggs in my basket, eeh hee, since my rooster been gone.17
Memphis Minnie’s hit mourned her “empty basket.” A year later, Bessie Smith, a crossover sensation, sang “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl.” She needs sugar, but she also needs a hot dog between her buns, she needs her lover to move his finger a little, she needs something that “looks like a snake,” and she needs something to be dropped in her bowl:
Tired of bein’ lonely, tired of bein’ blue,
I wished I had some good man, to tell my troubles to
Seem like the whole world’s wrong, since my man’s been gone
I need a little sugar in my bowl,
I need a little hot dog, on my roll
I can stand a bit of lovin’, oh so bad,
I feel so funny, I feel so sad
I need a little steam-heat, on my floor,
Maybe I can fix things up, so they’ll go
What’s the matter, hard papa, come on and save your mama’s soul
’Cause I need a little sugar, in my bowl,
Doggone it,
I need a little sugar in my bowl
I need a little sugar, in my bowl,
I need a little hot dog, between my rolls
You get
Move your finger, drop something in my bowl
I need a little steam-heat on my floor,
Maybe I can fix things up, so they’ll go.
[Spoken] Get off your knees, I can’t see what you’re drivin’ at!
It’s dark down there!
Looks like a snake!
C’mon here and drop somethin’ here in my bowl!
Stop your foolin’, and drop somethin’, in my bowl!18
Bo Carter sang back to these assertive female voices with his own counterpoint of sexual metaphors. In contrast to the “wrongs of” or “seduction and betrayal” of white Victorian women’s ways of seeing sexuality—male dominance, female reticence—the penis-and-vagina pairings in blues lyrics play together equitably: they are interdependent and work together; each needs the other. The sexual world of the blues is one of affection and intense mutual physical need, in which neither man nor woman is necessarily “on top.” In “Banana in Your Fruit Basket,” Carter pleads with his audience, begging for a woman who will, in burning his bread, make use of his “brand-new skillet.” He swears that if the woman in question would just let him put his “banana” in her “fruit basket,” than that would be enough for him. A series of other metaphors that describe paired objects follow, objects that operate not only reciprocally, but fit together. Carter notes that he is the owner of a washboard, and that his beloved has a tub—and that when the two are put together, the couple can “rub, rub, rub”—and of course, a washboard without a tub (into which it is placed) is not useful. Carter makes a similar comparison when he continues on to sing about his “dasher”—a dasher is the staff used to churn butter. His baby, no surprise, is the owner of the churn. The song goes further in its bawdy but loving descriptions: Carter has a needle and his lover has some cloth, together they can stitch “till we both will feel it.” These series of couplets describe reciprocal relationships in which neither object is useful absent its partner; the metaphors underscore a mutual need in sex. Carter closes the song singing that whereas his baby has the “meat,” he has the “knife”—and if she will let him do “her cutting,” it will “solve” his life.