Vagina: A New Biography by Naomi Wolf
When I first learned that new science had confirmed the sexual responsiveness of the cervix, I was shocked that I had heard nothing about it from science reporting (though I had from literature: “At the back of the womb there lay flesh that demanded to be penetrated. It curved inwards, opening to suck. The flesh walls moved like sea anemones, seeking by suction to draw his sex in. . . . She opened her mouth as if to reveal the openness of the womb, its hunger, and only then did he plunge to the very bottom and felt her contractions . . . ,” writes Anaïs Nin, who was not waiting for scientific confirmation, in Delta of Venus3). That elision of information was one of many weird omissions I would find on this journey as I stumbled upon hugely important scientific discovery after hugely important scientific discovery that had received virtually zero mainstream ink. If a sixth unknown sense were confirmed by science, if they had found that every man had, tucked away, somewhere about his person, an extra sexual organ, for God’s sake—would that not make the evening news?
Another recent study has found that the whole “clitoris versus vagina”—Masters and Johnson versus Shere Hite—debate is itself wrongly framed: the G-spot, in the anterior wall of the vagina, is now being understood by many researchers to be part of the anterior root of the clitoris. The female sexual organ, which includes all these areas, is being proved by new science to be far more complex and far more magical than the utilitarian thrusting totted up by Masters and Johnson can account for, or the goal-oriented, male-identified model of female sexuality mistakenly popularized to this very day in sex advice columns in magazines from Good Housekeeping to Cosmo.
It turns out that women are designed to have many different kinds of orgasms; that women have the potential to have orgasms without any end except physical exhaustion; that if you understand female sexuality, you pace all the action around her; that while this is a high bar to set, you still want to set it, because properly treated, some women can ejaculate, and because all women in orgasm can go into a unique trance state; that women’s orgasms last longer than men’s; that memory plays a role in female arousal in a way that is not the case with male arousal; and that women’s response to arousal and orgasm is biochemically very different from men’s. We’re like guys sexually in superficial ways, but in many ways we are, sexually, profoundly not like guys.
Maybe one reason this new information has been underreported has to do with anxieties about the male ego, even if the censorship involved is unconscious. Why wouldn’t every newspaper be reporting new data that suggest that women are potentially sexually insatiable? Or that many of them are unhappy with the current sexual status quo? Or that certain kinds of seductive behavior and attention from their partners doubles or even quadruples the “microvolts” in the climaxing cervix and vagina? What’s not to like about this information? Perhaps the lack of attention to this new information is the fear of implying a new “task”—that of sexual muse and sexual artist—to be put upon male shoulders, even as most men are already overtired and overworked.
I believe, though, that this hesitancy underestimates most heterosexual men’s interest in making the women in their lives truly happy—not to mention these men’s own vested interest in having sexually vibrant and joyful lovers, which in turn can help make heterosexual men themselves happy.
AN EPIDEMIC OF FEMALE SEXUAL UNHAPPINESS
I now had reached the point in my journey at which I had begun to believe that our misunderstanding of what women really need sexually—as well as how sex affects them—has led to a great deal of sexual suffering among women today. The numbers show that we have an epidemic in the West of women—“free,” presumably sexually literate women—who are suffering from a terrible and preventable sexual malaise. One American woman in three reports that she is suffering from too low levels of sexual desire, and for one woman in ten the absence of desire is so severe it is clinically diagnosable. Indeed, a low sexual desire level—medically defined as “hypoactive sexual desire disorder”—is the most common form of “female sexual dysfunction” reported in the United States.
J. A. Simon’s 2010 article in Postgraduate Medicine, “Low Sexual Desire—Is It All in Her Head? Pathophysiology, Diagnosis, and Treatment of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder,” points out that
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) defines female hypo [low] sexual desire syndrome as “persistent or recurrent deficiency or absence of sexual fantasies and thoughts, and/or desire for, or receptivity to, sexual activity, which causes personal distress or interpersonal difficulties and is not caused by a medical condition or drug.” . . . Sexual function requires the complex interaction of multiple neurotransmitters and hormones, both centrally and peripherally, and sexual desire is considered the result of a complex balance between inhibitory and excitatory pathways in the brain. For example, dopamine, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone play an excitatory role, whereas serotonin and prolactin are inhibitory. Thus, decreased sexual desire could be due to a reduced level of excitatory activity, an increased level of inhibitory activity, or both.4
These few sentences are a model of scientific understatement, in the sense that the neutral language of science—which is basically saying that a woman’s low sexual desire is a result of neurotransmitter and hormonal disconnects or imbalances—is not addressing, or is disregarding, the fact that while menopause, medication, and other immovable factors that the authors name can play a role in low sexual desire, a thousand other psychosexual, interpersonal, and even mood-lighting influences that can easily be changed and made better, can also play a major role in lowering many women’s levels of sexual desire.
I learned on my journey that women’s sexual desire can often fairly easily be turned way back up—but they can’t do this easily by themselves, or alone with their doctors. Their lovers and husbands have to pay attention to what will, in Tantric terms, “stoke the fire.”
The data on low female libido present an even more striking set of facts than they seem to at first glance. A substantial number of women report sexual dissatisfaction, even as “sex” is everywhere and sexual “information” has never been easier to access.
According to an American Psychiatric Association symposium, “Sex, Sexuality And Serotonin,” 27 percent to 34 percent of women—more than double the 13 to 17 percent of men—reported experiencing low sexual desire. An extraordinary 15 to 28 percent of women—from one woman in six to one woman in three—reports that she suffers from “orgasmic disorders.” This percentage has risen in the four decades since the height of the sexual revolution—1976—when about 25 percent of women complained of problems with desire.5
A 2009 study, the National Health and Social Life Survey, based at the University of Chicago under the direction of Edward O. Laumann, reported that 43 percent of women—as opposed to 31 percent of men—suffered from what was identified as a “sexual dysfunction.”6
J. J. Warnock, in “Female Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder: Epidemiology, Diagnosis and Treatment,” writes that “Female hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) may occur in up to one-third of adult women in the US. The essential feature of female HSDD is a deficiency or absence of sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity that causes marked distress or interpersonal difficulty.”7
An even newer report, released by Indiana University in 2010, reveals that only 64 percent of women participants reported reaching orgasm the last time they had had sex (which means that 36 percent, almost four in ten, didn’t), but that 85 percent of the male participants in the same study told researchers that their most recent female sex partner had reached orgasm: the data were adjusted for men having sex with men—and the adjustment did not account for the gap between the number of women whom the men thought were climaxing during sex with them, and the much smaller number of women who were actually doing so.8
Whether so many women having such disappointing sexual experiences is leading to many couples having very little sexual intimacy, or whether
so little sexual intimacy leads to so many women reporting their low libido, sexual sadness, and frustration, the data show that one heterosexual couple in five is scarcely making love at all.
We have to conclude from this and other studies with similar numbers that the Western sexual revolution sucks. It has not worked well enough for women.
In this liberated, postsexual revolution, postfeminist era, when women can do “whatever” they wish sexually and be “bad girls” with little stigma—when any fantasy is available at the touch of a remote control and any sex appliance available rush delivery at the click of a mouse—an astonishingly high percentage of ordinary women, from one in five to one in three, still report feeling little desire, or have trouble regularly reaching orgasm, or report being angry about something involving sexual intimacy. Now that I know more completely how connected the vagina is to female mood and consciousness, I will coin a phrase and say that between one woman in five and one woman in three seems to be suffering from something very like sexual, or even like vaginal, depression.
Oddly enough, our ostensibly pro-sex culture seems very comfortable with this incredibly high rate of female sexual unhappiness. There are no campaigns calling urgent attention to this epidemic of female sexual absence and sorrow. Australian sex therapist Bettina Arndt’s book The Sex Diaries (2009) sold widely in part because it addresses directly many women’s startlingly low levels of desire. Arndt reported that it is quite common, in her clinical experience, for women to want sex less often than their husbands do, and that this is the unacknowledged secret behind many divorces, and even behind many male infidelities.
We will see that new studies show that when circumstances are supportive, virtually every woman can reach orgasm. What if so many women are suffering from low levels of desire, from frustration, and from sexual withdrawal, because—there is no way to say this but honestly—many men are taught about women in such a way that they don’t really know what they are doing? These numbers must mean, too, that even in this post-sexual-revolution era, many women don’t know how to identify, and then ask for, what they need and want.
If a man follows this culture’s sexual “script” about what the vagina is, what female sexuality is, and how in general to relate to a woman—he is very likely, against all of his dearest wishes and best intentions, to miss, over time, knowing what is necessary to keep her aroused. The most destructive thing that men are being taught about women is that the vagina is just a sexual organ, and that sex for women is a sexual act in the same way it is for men. But neither gender is being taught about the delicate mind-heart-body connection that, it turns out, is female sexual response.
From what I was learning about an optimal state of female sexual and emotional health, which leads women to be passionate and orgasmic to a high degree, this terribly low level of female sexual happiness and desire is a clear marker that something has gone widely amiss. The low levels of female libido that all the recent studies report should be read as signs of a raging disease: signs of something being very wrong for millions of women in terms of what is happening to them sexually.
The next part of this book shows how this disconnect took place over the course of a couple of millennia—and what to do about it now.
Two
History: Conquest and Control
6
The Traumatized Vagina
Scapegoating the victim—saying that she brought the situation on herself—is necessary . . . just as the efficacy of ritual sacrifice once depended on the delusion that the victim was responsible for the sins of the world.
—Peggy Reeves Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape
Just as good sexual experience in the vagina drives joy and creativity into the female brain, the obverse is also true, due to the same neural pathways: the traumatized vagina, the abused vagina, the vagina that is part of a neural network that is being neglected by a withholding or sexually selfish mate—literally cannot effectively condition the female brain with the chemicals that constitute the emotions of confidence, courage, connection, and joy.
So if you are to subdue and suppress women, and in such a way that you don’t need to actually pen them in or lock them up—in such a way that they come to “do it to themselves,” to suppress themselves, to lose joy and self-direction, to have no pleasure, to distrust the strength of love, to think human connection frail and unreliable—you must target the vagina.
As I learned about the incredible connection of the pelvic neural network to women’s minds and emotions, I could not help thinking about women I had met, from all walks of life, who had been terribly injured in just the ways that would harm or interfere with that mind-body circuitry. I could not get their faces out of my mind. I could not forget certain things they said, certain aspects of their affect, which so many of them had shared. I wondered if there were connections that we were blind to, in the way in which we were currently interpreting this kind of suffering. I realized that women I had met who had suffered vaginal illness, trauma, or injury, across many cultures and of many different ages, often shared in common certain ways of holding themselves; of standing and moving; and a certain expression in their eyes. I kept hearing how the phrase “I feel like I am dirty—like damaged goods” echoed in the words of so many women I had met: from women at a refugee camp in Sierra Leone, many of whom had suffered vaginal fistulas as a result of having been raped as an act of war, to women calling in to a rape crisis center in Edinburgh, Scotland, to the woman I met at a crowded café in Chelsea, Manhattan, who suffered from vulvodynia.
Were we missing the significance of vaginal trauma—just as we were missing the significance of female sexual pleasure—by reading vaginal trauma as “just” physical, or by misunderstanding the trauma of rape as “just” a PTSD-type reaction to a violent act? Were we missing what could be a much more profound and delicate understanding of just what was being harmed when a woman’s vagina was harmed?
I knew that for women, a fully functioning pelvic nerve is crucial for producing the dopamine, oxytocin, and other chemicals that raise levels of perception, confidence, and feistiness. Would injury or trauma to the vagina and the pelvic nerves materially interfere with the neural pathway’s delivery of those intoxicating chemicals to the female brain? And then, another vista swung open: Could that be why women’s vaginas were targeted with violence millennium after millennium? I could not argue that this was consciously tactical. But could it have been established, subconsciously, over the millennia, because it is effectively tactical? It is hard to repress and control a majority of the human population. What if this targeting had been discovered as an efficient tool?
In other words, just as men over the course of generations, in our earliest history, would have noticed what we can now understand as a biologically-based link between a sexually empowered woman and her high levels of happiness, hopefulness, and confidence—would they have noticed the effect of a corresponding biologically-based link between a sexually traumatized woman and a lowered ability to muster happiness, hopefulness, and confidence?
When you spend time in a rape crisis center, as I have done, it is hard to avoid wondering if men are monsters. Why is rape a constant in every society?
Why does war always include mass rape of the enemy’s women? Why do so many men rape in a context of war? Feminists such as Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1970), who argues that “rape is generally the result of male sadism and hatred of women,” and Susan Brownmiller, in Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), who argues that war turns men into perverts in order to turn them into rapists, tend to follow the individualized reading of sexuality posited by Freud. Thus they tend to psychologize all rape, which leads to the alarming possible conclusion that all men as individuals are potential sadists. But what if some rape is not personal, but instrumental and systemic?
In 2004, I went to Sierra Leone to report on the mass sexual violence that had been part of the brutal civil war that tore the country apart. The International Resc
ue Committee took me and several other supporters and journalists to recently rebel-held territory; there, we encountered hundreds of women who had been raped in the war, and in separate visits we met with dozens of rapists from the conflict. It was this trip that persuaded me that the Western model of rape—in which rape results from individual dysfunction, hostility, or perversion—could not account for the instrumentality of rape in the context of war.
We met the women in various settings, but on one visit we went to a refugee center, a walled compound—set in the midst of an open, barren plain—that housed what seemed like thousands of women who had been violently raped in the recent conflict. A single tree provided a little shade, and low, simple concrete structures that housed the women surrounded an unpaved courtyard. It was a haunting, Purgatorial setting: for as far as the eye could see, women drifted slowly, aimlessly around the compound, and except for one or two aid workers and the security guards stationed at the compound entrance, there was not a single adult man.
The women showed tremendous courage. They performed a theater piece for us, which used elements of tribal dance to dramatize their emotions. One woman, playing a rapist, “attacked” another woman. The raw violence in the scene was startling.
After the performance, a female doctor introduced us to several of the women. One woman sat in painful silence as the doctor explained that the woman suffered from a vaginal fistula resulting from her attack. “A vaginal fistula,” the doctor explained, “is a tear or puncture in the wall of the vagina, which connects it to another organ, such as the bladder, colon, or rectum.” It was a very common injury in the region. Since there had not been enough antibiotic medication in the woman’s village to treat the woman, the infection in the wound had led to an odor that had driven her husband to repudiate her. That, too, was a fate that had befallen many of the other women at the compound who also suffered from vaginal fistulas.
Another recent study has found that the whole “clitoris versus vagina”—Masters and Johnson versus Shere Hite—debate is itself wrongly framed: the G-spot, in the anterior wall of the vagina, is now being understood by many researchers to be part of the anterior root of the clitoris. The female sexual organ, which includes all these areas, is being proved by new science to be far more complex and far more magical than the utilitarian thrusting totted up by Masters and Johnson can account for, or the goal-oriented, male-identified model of female sexuality mistakenly popularized to this very day in sex advice columns in magazines from Good Housekeeping to Cosmo.
It turns out that women are designed to have many different kinds of orgasms; that women have the potential to have orgasms without any end except physical exhaustion; that if you understand female sexuality, you pace all the action around her; that while this is a high bar to set, you still want to set it, because properly treated, some women can ejaculate, and because all women in orgasm can go into a unique trance state; that women’s orgasms last longer than men’s; that memory plays a role in female arousal in a way that is not the case with male arousal; and that women’s response to arousal and orgasm is biochemically very different from men’s. We’re like guys sexually in superficial ways, but in many ways we are, sexually, profoundly not like guys.
Maybe one reason this new information has been underreported has to do with anxieties about the male ego, even if the censorship involved is unconscious. Why wouldn’t every newspaper be reporting new data that suggest that women are potentially sexually insatiable? Or that many of them are unhappy with the current sexual status quo? Or that certain kinds of seductive behavior and attention from their partners doubles or even quadruples the “microvolts” in the climaxing cervix and vagina? What’s not to like about this information? Perhaps the lack of attention to this new information is the fear of implying a new “task”—that of sexual muse and sexual artist—to be put upon male shoulders, even as most men are already overtired and overworked.
I believe, though, that this hesitancy underestimates most heterosexual men’s interest in making the women in their lives truly happy—not to mention these men’s own vested interest in having sexually vibrant and joyful lovers, which in turn can help make heterosexual men themselves happy.
AN EPIDEMIC OF FEMALE SEXUAL UNHAPPINESS
I now had reached the point in my journey at which I had begun to believe that our misunderstanding of what women really need sexually—as well as how sex affects them—has led to a great deal of sexual suffering among women today. The numbers show that we have an epidemic in the West of women—“free,” presumably sexually literate women—who are suffering from a terrible and preventable sexual malaise. One American woman in three reports that she is suffering from too low levels of sexual desire, and for one woman in ten the absence of desire is so severe it is clinically diagnosable. Indeed, a low sexual desire level—medically defined as “hypoactive sexual desire disorder”—is the most common form of “female sexual dysfunction” reported in the United States.
J. A. Simon’s 2010 article in Postgraduate Medicine, “Low Sexual Desire—Is It All in Her Head? Pathophysiology, Diagnosis, and Treatment of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder,” points out that
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) defines female hypo [low] sexual desire syndrome as “persistent or recurrent deficiency or absence of sexual fantasies and thoughts, and/or desire for, or receptivity to, sexual activity, which causes personal distress or interpersonal difficulties and is not caused by a medical condition or drug.” . . . Sexual function requires the complex interaction of multiple neurotransmitters and hormones, both centrally and peripherally, and sexual desire is considered the result of a complex balance between inhibitory and excitatory pathways in the brain. For example, dopamine, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone play an excitatory role, whereas serotonin and prolactin are inhibitory. Thus, decreased sexual desire could be due to a reduced level of excitatory activity, an increased level of inhibitory activity, or both.4
These few sentences are a model of scientific understatement, in the sense that the neutral language of science—which is basically saying that a woman’s low sexual desire is a result of neurotransmitter and hormonal disconnects or imbalances—is not addressing, or is disregarding, the fact that while menopause, medication, and other immovable factors that the authors name can play a role in low sexual desire, a thousand other psychosexual, interpersonal, and even mood-lighting influences that can easily be changed and made better, can also play a major role in lowering many women’s levels of sexual desire.
I learned on my journey that women’s sexual desire can often fairly easily be turned way back up—but they can’t do this easily by themselves, or alone with their doctors. Their lovers and husbands have to pay attention to what will, in Tantric terms, “stoke the fire.”
The data on low female libido present an even more striking set of facts than they seem to at first glance. A substantial number of women report sexual dissatisfaction, even as “sex” is everywhere and sexual “information” has never been easier to access.
According to an American Psychiatric Association symposium, “Sex, Sexuality And Serotonin,” 27 percent to 34 percent of women—more than double the 13 to 17 percent of men—reported experiencing low sexual desire. An extraordinary 15 to 28 percent of women—from one woman in six to one woman in three—reports that she suffers from “orgasmic disorders.” This percentage has risen in the four decades since the height of the sexual revolution—1976—when about 25 percent of women complained of problems with desire.5
A 2009 study, the National Health and Social Life Survey, based at the University of Chicago under the direction of Edward O. Laumann, reported that 43 percent of women—as opposed to 31 percent of men—suffered from what was identified as a “sexual dysfunction.”6
J. J. Warnock, in “Female Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder: Epidemiology, Diagnosis and Treatment,” writes that “Female hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) may occur in up to one-third of adult women in the US. The essential feature of female HSDD is a deficiency or absence of sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity that causes marked distress or interpersonal difficulty.”7
An even newer report, released by Indiana University in 2010, reveals that only 64 percent of women participants reported reaching orgasm the last time they had had sex (which means that 36 percent, almost four in ten, didn’t), but that 85 percent of the male participants in the same study told researchers that their most recent female sex partner had reached orgasm: the data were adjusted for men having sex with men—and the adjustment did not account for the gap between the number of women whom the men thought were climaxing during sex with them, and the much smaller number of women who were actually doing so.8
Whether so many women having such disappointing sexual experiences is leading to many couples having very little sexual intimacy, or whether
We have to conclude from this and other studies with similar numbers that the Western sexual revolution sucks. It has not worked well enough for women.
In this liberated, postsexual revolution, postfeminist era, when women can do “whatever” they wish sexually and be “bad girls” with little stigma—when any fantasy is available at the touch of a remote control and any sex appliance available rush delivery at the click of a mouse—an astonishingly high percentage of ordinary women, from one in five to one in three, still report feeling little desire, or have trouble regularly reaching orgasm, or report being angry about something involving sexual intimacy. Now that I know more completely how connected the vagina is to female mood and consciousness, I will coin a phrase and say that between one woman in five and one woman in three seems to be suffering from something very like sexual, or even like vaginal, depression.
Oddly enough, our ostensibly pro-sex culture seems very comfortable with this incredibly high rate of female sexual unhappiness. There are no campaigns calling urgent attention to this epidemic of female sexual absence and sorrow. Australian sex therapist Bettina Arndt’s book The Sex Diaries (2009) sold widely in part because it addresses directly many women’s startlingly low levels of desire. Arndt reported that it is quite common, in her clinical experience, for women to want sex less often than their husbands do, and that this is the unacknowledged secret behind many divorces, and even behind many male infidelities.
We will see that new studies show that when circumstances are supportive, virtually every woman can reach orgasm. What if so many women are suffering from low levels of desire, from frustration, and from sexual withdrawal, because—there is no way to say this but honestly—many men are taught about women in such a way that they don’t really know what they are doing? These numbers must mean, too, that even in this post-sexual-revolution era, many women don’t know how to identify, and then ask for, what they need and want.
If a man follows this culture’s sexual “script” about what the vagina is, what female sexuality is, and how in general to relate to a woman—he is very likely, against all of his dearest wishes and best intentions, to miss, over time, knowing what is necessary to keep her aroused. The most destructive thing that men are being taught about women is that the vagina is just a sexual organ, and that sex for women is a sexual act in the same way it is for men. But neither gender is being taught about the delicate mind-heart-body connection that, it turns out, is female sexual response.
From what I was learning about an optimal state of female sexual and emotional health, which leads women to be passionate and orgasmic to a high degree, this terribly low level of female sexual happiness and desire is a clear marker that something has gone widely amiss. The low levels of female libido that all the recent studies report should be read as signs of a raging disease: signs of something being very wrong for millions of women in terms of what is happening to them sexually.
The next part of this book shows how this disconnect took place over the course of a couple of millennia—and what to do about it now.
Two
History: Conquest and Control
6
The Traumatized Vagina
Scapegoating the victim—saying that she brought the situation on herself—is necessary . . . just as the efficacy of ritual sacrifice once depended on the delusion that the victim was responsible for the sins of the world.
—Peggy Reeves Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape
Just as good sexual experience in the vagina drives joy and creativity into the female brain, the obverse is also true, due to the same neural pathways: the traumatized vagina, the abused vagina, the vagina that is part of a neural network that is being neglected by a withholding or sexually selfish mate—literally cannot effectively condition the female brain with the chemicals that constitute the emotions of confidence, courage, connection, and joy.
So if you are to subdue and suppress women, and in such a way that you don’t need to actually pen them in or lock them up—in such a way that they come to “do it to themselves,” to suppress themselves, to lose joy and self-direction, to have no pleasure, to distrust the strength of love, to think human connection frail and unreliable—you must target the vagina.
As I learned about the incredible connection of the pelvic neural network to women’s minds and emotions, I could not help thinking about women I had met, from all walks of life, who had been terribly injured in just the ways that would harm or interfere with that mind-body circuitry. I could not get their faces out of my mind. I could not forget certain things they said, certain aspects of their affect, which so many of them had shared. I wondered if there were connections that we were blind to, in the way in which we were currently interpreting this kind of suffering. I realized that women I had met who had suffered vaginal illness, trauma, or injury, across many cultures and of many different ages, often shared in common certain ways of holding themselves; of standing and moving; and a certain expression in their eyes. I kept hearing how the phrase “I feel like I am dirty—like damaged goods” echoed in the words of so many women I had met: from women at a refugee camp in Sierra Leone, many of whom had suffered vaginal fistulas as a result of having been raped as an act of war, to women calling in to a rape crisis center in Edinburgh, Scotland, to the woman I met at a crowded café in Chelsea, Manhattan, who suffered from vulvodynia.
Were we missing the significance of vaginal trauma—just as we were missing the significance of female sexual pleasure—by reading vaginal trauma as “just” physical, or by misunderstanding the trauma of rape as “just” a PTSD-type reaction to a violent act? Were we missing what could be a much more profound and delicate understanding of just what was being harmed when a woman’s vagina was harmed?
I knew that for women, a fully functioning pelvic nerve is crucial for producing the dopamine, oxytocin, and other chemicals that raise levels of perception, confidence, and feistiness. Would injury or trauma to the vagina and the pelvic nerves materially interfere with the neural pathway’s delivery of those intoxicating chemicals to the female brain? And then, another vista swung open: Could that be why women’s vaginas were targeted with violence millennium after millennium? I could not argue that this was consciously tactical. But could it have been established, subconsciously, over the millennia, because it is effectively tactical? It is hard to repress and control a majority of the human population. What if this targeting had been discovered as an efficient tool?
In other words, just as men over the course of generations, in our earliest history, would have noticed what we can now understand as a biologically-based link between a sexually empowered woman and her high levels of happiness, hopefulness, and confidence—would they have noticed the effect of a corresponding biologically-based link between a sexually traumatized woman and a lowered ability to muster happiness, hopefulness, and confidence?
When you spend time in a rape crisis center, as I have done, it is hard to avoid wondering if men are monsters. Why is rape a constant in every society?
Why does war always include mass rape of the enemy’s women? Why do so many men rape in a context of war? Feminists such as Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1970), who argues that “rape is generally the result of male sadism and hatred of women,” and Susan Brownmiller, in Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), who argues that war turns men into perverts in order to turn them into rapists, tend to follow the individualized reading of sexuality posited by Freud. Thus they tend to psychologize all rape, which leads to the alarming possible conclusion that all men as individuals are potential sadists. But what if some rape is not personal, but instrumental and systemic?
In 2004, I went to Sierra Leone to report on the mass sexual violence that had been part of the brutal civil war that tore the country apart. The International Resc
We met the women in various settings, but on one visit we went to a refugee center, a walled compound—set in the midst of an open, barren plain—that housed what seemed like thousands of women who had been violently raped in the recent conflict. A single tree provided a little shade, and low, simple concrete structures that housed the women surrounded an unpaved courtyard. It was a haunting, Purgatorial setting: for as far as the eye could see, women drifted slowly, aimlessly around the compound, and except for one or two aid workers and the security guards stationed at the compound entrance, there was not a single adult man.
The women showed tremendous courage. They performed a theater piece for us, which used elements of tribal dance to dramatize their emotions. One woman, playing a rapist, “attacked” another woman. The raw violence in the scene was startling.
After the performance, a female doctor introduced us to several of the women. One woman sat in painful silence as the doctor explained that the woman suffered from a vaginal fistula resulting from her attack. “A vaginal fistula,” the doctor explained, “is a tear or puncture in the wall of the vagina, which connects it to another organ, such as the bladder, colon, or rectum.” It was a very common injury in the region. Since there had not been enough antibiotic medication in the woman’s village to treat the woman, the infection in the wound had led to an odor that had driven her husband to repudiate her. That, too, was a fate that had befallen many of the other women at the compound who also suffered from vaginal fistulas.