Vagina: A New Biography by Naomi Wolf
“Why?” asked a woman in yellow. “Does it have caffeine?”
“It’s your life force. Porn films have reduced it from being a sacred experience to: ‘I hear you squirt.’ I have never ‘squirted,’ ” she said with some hauteur. “I have released lots of amrita. The nectar of the Goddess.” I sat down and wondered if it would get less weird, and it did.
“Tantra,” she explained, “says that you miss the boat of love if you’re living in the left hemisphere of the brain—that love is a mystical experience that only happens in the right hemisphere. We’ll do a [niyasa] at a point in the body called ‘yoni-nadi.’ It gives access to the core of the second chakra’s energy—it is the point that male Tantrists press for ejaculatory control. I proposed that women had this same area; I had met some triple-Scorpio women in the swinging sixties; I met my first multiorgasmic, ejaculating women at that time.
“I watched my girlfriends wake up! I watched women come alive, and crazy emotions emerge. I watched them go from numbness to awakening or orgasms to living orgasms—to dancing in the sky. When they release that second-chakra energy, that passion for life emerges: for your kids, for your job; you become able to live all of your life with that passion.”
Now that there were only women in the room, an intimate atmosphere of female secrets shared started to prevail. “Sacred spot massage will begin to awaken what’s dormant,” Caroline Muir said to the women, now gathered closely around her on pillows, like an all-ages sleepover. “Clitoral is what people usually do; but with this G-spot or sacred spot area—which is, again, closely connected to the clitoris—we are going into that deeper soul of your sexuality.” Sacred spot massage, she went on, “is an activation of the second chakra and a banishing of the sexual residue of the past. All of the good reasons to be shut down—guilt, fear, shame—go into this chakra. And you learn to make love from men who never learn to make love. With this massage the question is: What part of the psyche are we going to touch?
“Twenty-five percent of men at the sacred spot massage retreat, when they touch the vagina for the first time—nothing. The labia—it’s like visiting Utah: ‘Nothing’s happening here.’ It’s numb; it’s asleep. Thirty minutes later, same yoni: It’s Rio de Janeiro! Mardi Gras!
“These [vaginas, labia] are places of paranoia and mistrust. You are not told, as a girl, when you touch yourself, ‘Put love into your yoni.’ This [sacred spot massage] practice resolves the sludge that you have picked up in your yoni for as long as you’ve been living.” I was hearing the neuroscience that Dr. Coady had introduced to me; the studies of multisystem dysregulation in the experience of vaginal pain; the dysregulation in the systems of the rest of the body caused by sexual trauma; the studies showing that stress affects the actual vaginal tissue of female rats; Dr. Burke Richmond’s clinical experience that sexual trauma can cause perceptual dysregulation—underneath the gentle Tantric descriptions of what sounded like the same phenomenon. The idea that the vagina has a rich, nuanced memory bank and, yes, a physical and emotional biography of its own, was being confirmed at once, by two separate cultural paradigms.
Caroline Muir went on: “The clitoris has analogies to the penis. It wants release. You feel better after release. We’ve learned to burn it up and hopefully get it over with before a man is done with his pleasure. I was only successful in terms of clitoral orgasm. Vaginal orgasms were a mystery to me. Other girlfriends said, ‘Whoa, it’s like the Fourth of July in there.’
“We discover our sexual pleasure under the sheets ’cause it’s warm and juicy down there—it feels good. But your mom, or religion, made you feel ashamed. Not a lot of good press and PR on female pleasure, owning it and knowing you deserve it and learning enough about your own pleasure to teach a man to give it to you.
“When you start to awaken inside, the sacred spot area—it reveals to you more of the truth about your divinely feminine nature. When you fall in love with your divinely feminine self, nothing will be more precious to you. She will never leave you, ‘she’ being the essence of who you are. As this spot and the clitoris awaken to your potential, it is like a roller coaster. You’re not just expected to orgasm; that’s a support along the way that shows that something is working well. Many women experience a lot more vaginal pleasure with this massage; women wake up. You see light more clearly when you clean the window. This is not taught in Sex Ed 101: ‘You have a yoni, you know, it’s not just a pussy.’ ”
Caroline Muir demonstrated sacred spot massage technique by curling forward the index and middle fingers of her left hand. She demonstrated that the right hand goes on the clitoris while the left hand curls under for the “sacred spot.”
“Penises like it a little rougher than yonis do; we are more delicate, like the petals of these roses.” She gestured at the blooms in front of her. “You don’t want to rip the petals open to put it in.
“If we’re heterosexual women we haven’t actually explored other women. If you have a chance with a friend to explore what a yoni looks like and feels like other than your own, it is one of the great rites of passage. ‘Wow, yours is really tiny, I can hardly find your inner labia.’ ‘Wow, your inner labia are so voluptuous.’ We need to bless the yoni, from a female perspective.
“Here are the stories we tell ourselves:
1.‘I know I won’t come.’
2.‘I know I won’t get wet.’
3.‘I’m sure he’s getting bored.’
4.‘I’m sure he wants to get on with it.’
5.‘I’m sure I must smell.’
6.‘I’m sure he must think my yoni’s ugly.’
“All of these things we do to convince ourselves that we are not beautiful, not desirable.
“The men tonight do not take their clothes off or become naked. They must leave after one and a half hours. This is all about you.”
Caroline Muir opened the floor to questions.
A woman with tattooed biceps and a red bandanna around her neck spoke up: “My orgasms aren’t as intense. I have different types now—not contracting, but whole body orgasms, waves of pulsation—not the traditional thing.” She held up her hand and squeezed it into a fist, as if to demonstrate “the traditional thing.”
Caroline Muir responded, “They are waves of orgasmic energy. When you are twenty, you have hot, fast orgasms. When you are older, they soften and get more intense. The pathways between genitals and brain have had more years to wake up. There are more pathways, so it feels different from fast, hot clitoral orgasms.”
“I feel a loss,” the tattooed woman said, “because I want both.”
“That’s very normal,” Caroline said. “And women in their twenties, if they don’t have children, just don’t have all their energy going to children.”
A tanned woman in expensive sweats, wearing a long sleek braid, said: “I’m thirty-four. In my late twenties I stopped having powerful orgasms. I was with a sex addict . . . I used vibrators constantly for years; every day. Did I damage myself? It’s been years. I can’t get it back.” She started to cry.
I was startled—I had just started getting e-mails from informants who knew I was writing about the issue of desensitization through porn and vibrators.
Caroline Muir replied gently: “Every time we get used to vibrator speed and then we try fingers, it is an adjustment.” A tall blond woman stroked the arm of the woman who was weeping. “The vibrator is that young, hot, fast energy. Yonis don’t love that.”
“You don’t think I caused myself damage?” asked the woman, the tears still in her eyes.
“No,” said Caroline.
“I’m fifty-five,” said a short-haired matronly-looking woman in a bright floral print top. All my stereotypes were collapsing: this woman, who had a Southern accent, would have looked perfectly at home at a Baptist church picnic. “I’m not able to use a vibrator anymore,” she said. “Every time I try, it’s like going to McDonald’s. I don’t want to eat there.” After having sacred spot massage and starting T
A woman who was dressed like a trophy wife from Westchester—cardigan sweater, pearls, pageboy haircut—asked Caroline Muir if she could be hired to do personal yoni massage. “I do indeed do yoni massage with women. It costs $250 an hour for two hours. I am not bisexual; arousal happens, but that is not my goal. There is crying, emotion: ‘Oh God, this is so tender!’ The tenderness is what we lack.”
Caroline Muir continued: “The massage awakens a lot of memory. When I had it for the first time, I could smell the ether of the hysterectomy that I had undergone at the age of twenty-six; I could remember childhood transgressions—a finger poked in. Sacred spot massage awakens memories.”
(As an aside, Caroline Muir noted that men’s “sacred spot” is in the anus, against the prostate—which, if the connection of sacred spot anatomy to defenses, emotional vulnerability, and release is true, raises very interesting questions about why heterosexual men are often so hyperaverse to the thought of homosexuality; why they often see receptive homosexuality as feminizing; and why the masculine language of being anally penetrated is synonymous with a loss of mastery. Could the idea of penetration—of male “sacred spot” release—threaten heterosexual men with a potential loss of emotional mastery?)
“The awakening of the unconscious and the releasing of energies through scared spot massage makes room for a new life of pleasure and love. We have given this workshop for twenty-five years, and the success of it is not ‘better sex,’ but sexual healing.”
I raised my hand and put to Caroline Muir the connections I was hearing about regarding blocks in the vagina, or release in the vagina, and female creativity.
“Yes,” she said emphatically. Indeed, in her explanation, female sexual energy doesn’t spark creative energy; it actually is creative energy: “Shakti, or feminine, sexual energy is transferable energy. Shakti is the creative force. In the right combination, it creates life. Meaning: here is the creative life force, feminine in nature, and I’ve deepened my ability to breathe this yoni energy into my brain. The more vaginal—not clitoral—releases in a woman, the more she is going to want to save the world, save her grandchildren, paint paintings, make a difference on the planet.
“The energy awakening doesn’t have to be orgasmic. Every time you receive loving touch of an awakening nature to your vaginal tissue, you will in increments wake up. You may not notice it the first twelve times. Then, Whoa!”
Night was falling outside. I looked around the room one last time: I was skeptical still that a night in the hands of a stranger could be so life-changing—I couldn’t imagine doing it myself—yet I hoped that all those women, in their poignant and brave journeys, would find what they needed to find. Each of them, in her own way, was telling a compelling and fundamental truth: what she knew she had been given, sexually, by our culture, was not enough to reflect who she truly was.
As I plunged into the lighted chaos of Broadway, Caroline Muir’s words to the searching women stayed with me:
“Most of the journey is shedding those layers of ‘I’m not enough.’ The Beloved is not the husband or the lover. The Beloved is in me. The Beloved is me.”
I had became convinced that Tantra had some answers to the question of how female sexuality was best understood. But even with my glimpse at the sacred-spot-massage retreat, Tantra still intimidated me.
I interviewed several Tantric “dakinis”—women from all kinds of backgrounds who had trained at Tantra workshops and practiced Tantra in their daily lives. From their own descriptions, these dakinis were much more orgasmic than groups of comparable women from whom I had also heard about their sexual lives. They also seemed unusually happy and energetic, and no matter what they looked like—and, as in any group of women, few of them looked like fashion models or conventional beauties. Unlike a theoretical control group, they seemed very satisfied with their own femininity, and had a kind of assurance about their sexuality.
The more I learned about Tantra, the more something else emerged: I saw that Tantric practices regarding female sexuality matched up in interesting ways with emerging new science on the brain and endocrinology. The Tantric masters of centuries ago seemed to have identified key points on the female body that corresponded to important neural pathways: the “sacred spot” matched the G-spot. The Taoist texts of ancient China encouraged men to suck on women’s nipples, explaining that doing so causes women’s bodies and their minds to relax; science has shown us that sucking on a woman’s nipples releases oxytocin, the relaxing hormone. The Tantric and Taoist masters had identified significant fluids in women’s vaginas that, though they were esoterically named, seemed to correspond to what the latest science was discovering about trace chemicals and hormones in body fluids. Tantric masters had identified female ejaculation, which is only now being studied by Western science. And Tantra simply got outstanding empirical sexual results for women who took these workshops.
My interest in divining Tantra’s “secrets” is what led me to Mike Lousada, the man whom I would come to think of as “my resident adviser for all things yoni,” and whose conversations would have such a lasting impact on me. His website, Heartdaka.com, is intriguing. The top of the home page reads “Mike Lousada’s Sacred Sexual Healing in London,” and beneath that runs a Rumi quotation, “Your task is not to seek love, but to merely seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
A series of intimate questions confronts the site’s visitor: “Do you hold back from being in a relationship?”; “Do you feel there is more to sex but aren’t sure what it is?”; “Do you feel unable to enjoy sex?”; “Do you have difficulty experiencing orgasm?”; “Do you want to reclaim the innocence of your sexuality?” But the ecstatic testimonials—all from women—quickly neutralize any potential threat.5 “Thank you for holding me so skillfully in my vulnerability,” Ms. D; “After seeing you, I hear my heart beat, I feel so alive—a real woman . . . Thank you,” Ms. S; “Thanks, Mike. I feel grace and courage, feminine, protected, clarity, focused . . . a serene smile on my face,” and so on. And there at the bottom of the page, as if Heartdaka.com were any old business, was a link to Lousada’s Facebook profile, complete with his photo: a handsome man with a beard, seated on a rock, gazing out into the middle distance, and wearing hippieish trousers.
So, after some hesitation, I called Lousada and made an appointment. I learned that he charged a hundred pounds an hour (about $150).
He explained that his mission was to empower women sexually, and that he also focused on healing women sexually—via yoni massage—who had been erotically traumatized. His client base included women from all backgrounds and of all ages. His track record is impressive, to say the least: he has restored the orgasmic potential in hundreds of women.
Wow, I thought, this was a lot more explicit than the vague “workshop” and nebulous “massage” I had anticipated. I explained that since I was in a relationship I would not be open to actual yoni work, and he soothingly assured me that he would respect my boundaries. The fact that I was going to interview a male sexual healer/yoni guru also wreaked havoc on my judgmental feminist reflexes about the sex trade and its morality.
I was fascinated by my own reaction and the reactions of my women friends and colleagues after I committed to seeing Lousada. Not a single female friend expressed horror or aversion; they were either totally captivated, or annoyed that they couldn’t go
And yet, Lousada did not seem like anyone’s victim or predator; with what intellectual cudgel could I beat his decision to enter an aspect of his sexuality into a market economy? I was brought to a standstill, in relationship to the issue of prostitution, by the very fact of him.
“Do you consider yourself a sex worker?” I asked, in our initial conversation.
He said that he preferred the term sexual healer (though now, a year later, as he has started to address a more mainstream and medical audience about his successful techniques, he identifies himself as a “somatic therapist”). He went on to say that he works clothed or unclothed, as the client wishes, and that the client can be dressed or undressed, as she likes, as well. Images flashed through my head—I couldn’t quite believe that I was about to encounter my first yoni empowerer or, as I mistakenly saw it then, male sex worker catering to women. Did women seeking out someone like Lousada mean that women are just as “horny”—awful word, but there aren’t a lot of good substitutes—as men have been so long portrayed? Or did it, rather, testify in a small way to a widespread sexual sorrow among Western women? Were women who could afford to, really seeking sexual encounters with hired men regardless of how the men described themselves—encounters that they could guide, and for which they could set the pacing—because their sexual lives with their own partners were not working well?