Vagina: A New Biography by Naomi Wolf
The blues singer Blu Lu wrote and performed the sensuous “Don’t You Feel My Leg” in 1938—a song so steamy, and the lyrics so obviously about sexual desire from a female point of view, that it was banned for a time.
Don’t you feel my leg, don’t you feel my leg.
Cause if you feel my leg you’re gonna feel my thigh.
And if you feel my thigh, you’re goin’ to go up high
So don’t you feel my thigh.
Don’t you buy no rye, don’t you buy no rye.
Cause if you buy some rye you’re goin’ to make me high.
And if you make me high you’re goin’ to tell a lie.
So don’t you make me high.
You said you’d take me out and treat me fine
But I know there’s something you’ve got on your mind.
If you keep drinking you’re gonna get frayed
And you will wind up asking for fine brown turkey . . .
Don’t you feel my leg, don’t you feel my leg . . . [refrain].
Don’t you feel my leg now, you know why,
Cause I ain’t goin’ to let you feel my thigh.
Yes, you might go up high . . . [refrain]19
Some female artists made the same version of a sexually explicit song even more graphic in subsequent renditions. Georgia White recorded “I’ll Keep Sittin’ on It (If I Can’t Sell It)” in 1936. The song employs a “chair” motif to express pride and sexual self-respect as well as humor—a motif that also allowed it to pass the censors. The song describes a woman contemplating selling a chair, but only for the right price. If she can’t sell her chair, White sings, she’ll make the decision to just keep sitting on it. The listener must purchase the chair if he wants it so badly—White isn’t giving it away, regardless of her prospective buyer’s desire; in fact, she adamantly refuses to even entertain the possibility. The song exhorts the buyer to step up and show that he values it. White sings with bravado about the chair’s lovely bottom, built to last. She notes that if a buyer desires something of high quality in general, he is expected to part with money for it, and she promises that he won’t ever regret his decision. She stresses that she is not speaking lightly: she means to draw this line. In context, the idea of exchanging “money” for her “chair” does not read as a metaphor for sex work, for a literal exchange of sex for money, but a statement, rather, of the value White places on her own sexuality—she is not going to treat it as if it were worthless.
Ruth Brown’s rendition of four years later is much more explicit.
I own a second-hand furniture store
And I think my prices are fair.
But this real cheap guy came in one day
Saw this chair he wanted to buy
But he wouldn’t—claimed the price was too high.
So I looked him straight in the eye,
And this was my reply . . .
If I can’t sell it, I’m gonna sit down on it.
I ain’t gonna give it away.
Now darlin’, if you want it, you gonna have to buy it.
And I mean just what I say.
Now how would you like to find this
Waitin’ at home for you every night?
Only been used once or twice, but it’s still nice and tight . . .
Now you can’t buy a better pair of legs in town
And a back like this? Not for miles around. . . .
Because it’s made for comfort,
Built for wear and tear.
Where else would you find such an easy chair?
It’s lush, plush, slick and sleek.
Darlin’, a high-class piece like this at any price is cheap . . .
Now look at this nice bottom.
Ain’t it easy on the eye?
Guaranteed to support
Any weight or size.
If I can’t sell it . . .20
The African American blues tradition continued to change American popular music: its descendants include rock and roll and hip-hop. But the humorous and explicit lyrics of the blues that took for granted the essential goodness of female sexual desire did not survive into the musical traditions that descended from the blues. White producers who packaged African American music for white audiences in the 1950s cleaned up the references in the lyrics they were mainstreaming, and by the time rock and hip-hop seized their own initiatives in singing about sex, this woman-friendly lyrical tradition was long gone.
THE SELF-DEFINING VAGINA OF THE SECOND WAVE
The postwar years, as Betty Friedan documented in her 1963 classic, The Feminine Mystique, were years of regression.21 Freudian analysis loomed large in the United States and middle-class white women, at least, and much to their frustration, struggled to fit into domesticity and sexual “fulfillment” centered around a Freudian (that is, nonclitoral) model of “maturity” and “adjustment.” Nonetheless, the ground shifted again with the 1965 discovery of the birth control pill, and the beginning of what came to be called the “sexual revolution.”
In 1976, Shere Hite published The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality.22 This book created a radically different perspective from all that had preceded it, particularly the Freudian model, since it looked directly at what women experience during intercourse and presented their experiences in their own words, rather than prescribing to them what they should experience. What Hite found, as noted above, was that two-thirds of women could not have orgasms with penile thrusting alone. This conclusion was a revelation to millions of women who had felt themselves, having read Freud and the neo-Freudian Karen Horney, to be insufficiently mature if they were unable to reach orgasm through intercourse.
Hite’s quotes from women who do have orgasms from intercourse—versus women who need clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm—set up a political duality that is still with us. We should now understand, as I noted in the first section, that the clitoris, the vagina, and indeed all the many sexual centers in the female sexual area (for lack of a better term; it is more than an “organ” and more than just one organ) are all part of the same complex neural nexus. And the latest data show that the G-spot is probably part of the structure of the clitoris.
But in the 1970s, in a newly fierce argument with Freud, many feminist commentators addressed the clitoris as if it needed to be championed in opposition to the vagina. Feminists such as Anne Koedt, in the The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm (1970), sought to dismiss Freud’s elevation of the vagina over the clitoris. These feminists, in their reasonable championing of clitoral attention, made the case that the idea of vaginal pleasure was a sinister patriarchal plot. This plot, they argued, sought to persuade women that the vagina is the locus of true femininity, and the clitoris insignificant. If women could be persuaded of this, they maintained, then they would be brainwashed into dependency on men—and men would have carte blanche to be lazy, and to ignore women’s needs for attention to the clitoris.
Shere Hite’s 1976 success in reglamorizing the clitoris reinforced the many ways of teasing and stimulating the clitoris in Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972), which also imprinted a generation. With all this rebranding, the vagina ended up, for the thirty years that followed, suffering a bit of a cultural downgrade. From the 1970s on, the vagina was recast as rather retro, housewifey, and passé—until the rediscovery of the G-spot in 1981 by Beverly Whipple. (In the twenty-first century, porn-driven interest in female ejaculation drew attention back to the vagina.) This polarization assigned to two parts of women’s sexual systems—which turn out to be part of a single network—are two very different cultural identities. For thirty years, the clitoris was seen as sort of cooler than the vagina, and once again women were faced with a false choice that minimized their own sexual complexity. The clitoris, if it had a persona, was a glamorous, miniskirt-wearing Gloria Steinem; the vagina was the slightly ridiculous, out-of-date-hairstyle-wearing Marabel Morgan, who wrote the regressive bestseller The Total Woman (1970).
Soon, Second Wave feminists wer
The 1970s also saw a great deal of feminist reclamation of the vaginal complex—that is, the vagina, labia, and clitoris. Germaine Greer, who had garnered international attention with her feisty manifesto The Female Eunuch (1970), understood the vagina-freedom connection implicitly. She devoted a chapter in her book The Madwoman’s Underclothes (originally published in 1986) to “The Politics of Female Sexuality,” published in 1970, to the vagina and the politics of its derogation, and exhorted, in a much-mimeographed essay in Suck magazine, “Lady, love your cunt.”24
Assertive and self-defining feminist vaginas debuted in literature as well in this key feminist decade. Erica Jong, of course, published Fear of Flying in 1973, coining the famous term that she jokes will be inscribed on her tombstone: the “zipless fuck,” which, she argues in the novel, is the fantasy goal of every liberated woman: hot sex with no emotional entanglements and no baggage. Jong’s heroine, Isadora Wing, also links her vagina’s awakening to her own creative awakening, and to her individuation as an agent of her own life rather than as the passive hanger-on to various men. Jong’s novel was published in fourteen countries. It was so popular precisely because it was the first female bildungsroman to identify in parallel terms a journey of female sexual awakening with a journey of psychological and creative awakening. The dry, physically repressed Dr. Wing, Isadora’s husband, whom she flees at length for more sensuous male lovers, can never, we understand, awaken the latent adventuress/writer in Isadora. The final scene of the book, in which Isadora—now deeply engaged with her own sexual and creative journey—contemplates her own blond pubic hair as she lies in the bathtub, is a trope for the vagina’s connection to the imagination: “I floated lightly in the deep tub, feeling that something was different, something was strange. . . . I looked down at my body. The same. The pink V of my thighs, the triangle of curly hair, the Tampax string fishing the water like a Hemingway hero, the white belly, the breasts half floating. . . . A nice body. Mine. I decided to keep it. I hugged myself. It was my fear that was missing . . . whatever happened, I knew I would survive it. I knew, above all, that I’d go on working. . . .”25 The newly liberated and creative heroine contemplates her own body, her own vagina—and thinks about a rededication to her creative work: this scene is a metaphor for a sexual awakening that is creative as well as physical, and a creative awakening that is as sensuous as it is cerebral.
In the visual arts, Judy Chicago took her exhibit The Dinner Party to museums around the country in 1974. Chicago portrayed thirty-nine mythic and real women from throughout history by depicting different vaginas painted on dinner plates and placing them on a triangular dinner table—the triangle being an archetypal feminine or vulval shape. She spoke of the “butterfly-vulva” motif as a trope of women’s creativity. The various vaginas were meant to convey these women’s individual characters and to represent their work. She published the collection of plates as a book of photographs in 1979. This exhibit and the book were shocking at the time, drawing a range of virulent critical responses. These portraits of the hypothetical vaginas of Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Dickinson could not have portrayed the vagina-creativity connection more literally—even if the nature of that connection still remained intuitive.
So it was a pretty good decade for the vagina, if one that superficialized its importance as a locus of pleasure strictly defined. The results were positive for women: in the late 1970s, Redbook magazine reported that 70 percent of female respondents self-reported “satisfaction with the sexual aspect of their marriage”; 90 percent reported taking an active role in sex at least half the time, and often “always”; 64 percent said they regularly reached orgasm during lovemaking; most of the subjects said they often initiated sex, and that they felt they could communicate their sexual needs clearly to their partners. (The numbers of women who reach orgasm during lovemaking have not gone up in the subsequent decades of “sexual revolution” and the proliferation of pornography; and the data for women who self-report that they are honest in expressing sexual needs to their male partners has actually gone down.)26
The feminist movement to reclaim the vulva and vagina was not restricted to literature, painting, and nonfiction prose. The marketplace also stepped in enthusiastically: the culture saw “sex-positive” consumer attention to the vagina in woman-centric erotica such as Vive productions, which made (slower-paced, more emotionally involving, more romantic) pornographic videos for women—a genre soon to become almost obsolete, as women acclimated to masturbating to conventional porn—and woman-friendly sex toy emporia opened, such as New York City’s Babeland boutiques and San Francisco’s pleasant, brightly lit store Good Vibrations. (A manager at the Brooklyn branch of Babeland—formerly Babes in Toyland—reports that new sex-play products designed to stimulate the G-spot and to encourage female ejaculation are being designed continually, and that the stock is flying off the shelves. Why the trend, I asked? She replied that pornography had begun to focus intensely on female ejaculation, leading women to wish to explore stimulation of their G-spots.)
But there was a real difference in tone between this mode of reclaiming female sexuality and that of the early twentieth century, which had, as we saw, also witnessed a stirring of women’s voices and imagery around female sexual pleasure. Loie Fuller, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Georgia O’ Keeffe, and Edith Wharton were writing or painting or dancing as ways to express truths about female desire; but sexual desire, in their work, is not separate from female transcendence, inspiration, and joy in other areas of women’s lives. It is a means to a larger, fuller, all-encompassing transcendence and creativity. The post-1970s “reclamation” of female sexuality, in contrast, is quite mechanical. It is not about the spirit. It is much debased. It is about what vibrates how. It is diminished, I believe, by the influence of medical discourses such as Masters and Johnson’s, which reframes female and male sexuality as “just flesh,” and it is also distorted by the pressures of the porn industry that boomed alongside the sexual revolution.
Historian of sexuality Steven Seidman notes that the 1960s and 1970s introduced the notion of “fun”—not just pleasure—as an important part of sexual life, especially in best-selling sex manuals.27 He cites David Reuben, M.D.’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) (1969), Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, and “M” ’s The Sensuous Man (1971) as recasting consensual sex as “an adult form of play”; all sexual practices, including flagellation, aggression, and fetishism, he writes, were now seen as equally valid, and any kind of fantasy—no matter how “wild or bloodthirsty”—was to be valued and explored. This of course is a radically different model than the gateway to heaven or hell of the Renaissance, or the sober duty of the Victorians, or the connection with the Divine of the Aesthetic sexual transcendentalists. “This sex ethic may be termed libertarian,” he writes persuasively.
This is our sex ethic. There is nothing wrong with “fun,” of course; but this model of what sex is for—what the vagina is for—has left many with deeper questions about the role of sexuality as a medium of profound intimacy or profound alterations of consciousness. And the “sex as play” model also raises all the questions that any “anything goes” ethic raises—why not, even if one is in a relationship, get hooked on porn? Why not go to a st
This “libertarian,” “sex as play” view of sexuality and the vagina’s role in it is our complicated inheritance. Sexual libertarianism may not be the same thing, as it turns out, as true sexual liberation. “These manuals [such as The Joy of Sex],” Seidman continues, “encourage the reader not to resist [any kind of fantasy] since the sexual sphere represents an ideal setting for probing tabooed wishes and fears. . . . [D]on’t block [your own fantasy] and don’t be afraid of your partner’s fantasy; this is a dream you are in.”
In these manuals, Seidman notes, “to put the reader at ease,” he or she is assured that sexual behavior is not a marker of a person’s true nature. This ideology—descending from Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, via, in debased form, Friedrich Nietzsche—argues that sensation, even extreme sensation, is good for its own sake alone. This sexual “will to power,” adorned with a dollop of Freud’s argument that the individual gets a “pass” for whatever the subconscious comes up with—since one can have no responsibility for, and hence no guilt about, subconscious desires—fit perfectly with the heady, consumerist postwar economy in the West. It prepared a fertile ground for the entrenchment of the pornographic experience of sex and of the vagina in particular. It came to be how we thought “sex was”—rather than letting us understand that this way of thinking about sex is just one of many possible sexual ideologies. And it cleared the way in the minds of both women and men for the rise in the next few decades of wider and wider acceptance and then internalization of the moral flatness, distractedness and fixatedness of pornography.