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Pelvic confidence and vaginal aesthetics
I’ve been thinking more than usual about women’s pleasure–and lack of it. About women’s conformity to media and other cultural conventions. For example, undergraduate women showing up at a Duke University fraternity party obeying the written invitation to dress slutty. Or all the attention given to the film Black Swan when it was released–a dopey movie, so boring in its superficial “beauty”–of the ballet and ballerinas–and so slow in its crescendoing comic-book tensions of women hating themselves and hating other women, that I had to tell myself to watch the whole thing so that if I wanted to write about the movie I could do so from the integrity of having sat through it all.
Pelvic confidence, that’s what’s needed! Women’s confidence about their bodies, their beauty, and their sexuality, so that they can be true to themselves. Below is, I hope, a contribution to female pelvic confidence–some writing of mine about vaginal aesthetics.
[The following passage is found in the following publications: Joanna Frueh, "Vaginal Aesthetics," Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 18.4 (Fall/Winter 2003), 142-43; and Joanna Frueh, Swooning Beauty: A Memoir of Pleasure (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2006), 210-12.]
Steinem lovingly claims for herself, for all women, the value of knowing that their genitals are sacred. She especially revels in the fact that naves are vaginal. Feeling pride, she writes, “I walk down the vaginal aisle,” as if she has wedded her own body and now loves and honors it. Her knowledge and sentiment move and comfort me. Yet reading Steinmen I feel restless, and I feel stuck in history, not because as a feminist and an art historian I have known for many years that naves are vaginal, but because Steinem’s passage is written as a discovery.
Poignant and joyful feminist discoveries like hers can result in revolutions of thinking and behavior that are inspiring and humane, and such discoveries can seem outrageous–outrageously good or outrageously offensive–to those who are unfamiliar with them. Steinmen appreciates the voices in The Vagina Monologues as “outrageous,” and on the back cover of the book, Patricia Bosworth calls the play “a revolutionary piece of theater.” Ensler’s endeavor is revolutionary. However, for someone who, as a just plain girl and a just plain woman, has loved and thought about her vagina for almost her whole life and who, as a feminist scholar of the erotic, has researched and written about women’s sexual pleasure, The Vagina Monologues is neither outrageous nor revolutionary enough. Reading it, I felt a disappointment similar to that when I read Elizabeth Grosz’s “Animal Sex,” in which she considers revealing her own experience of sexual pleasure and then, giving reasons, decides not to. Cunt-experience, written from the perspective of this brilliant feminist philosopher, would have deepened, enriched, and complicated her essay.
As I read Ensler and Grosz, my initial excitement turned to disappointment because I wanted more–more (self-)knowledge and more pleasure, both from the authors and for myself, and more revelations about the vagina’s explicit sensuousness–which is its aesthetics. Replete with the truth of women’s experiences, The Vagina Monologues is a feminist treasure, yet it hurts–so much shame and squelching, so much injury. Feminist revolution enlarges with every telling of women’s truths, and trauma can be a tool for transformation. Yet, as a midlife woman who has called herself a feminist for over thirty years, I am invested in pleasure and dedicated to it, to the erotic revolution whose possibility thrilled me when I read Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization in college. Revolution is women focusing on their greatest pleasure–their beauty–difficult as that may be.
I regret my often lapsed divinity. Perhaps I am an incarnation of Cunti, Yoni of the Universe, of Flora, whose festival, the Floralia, permitted celebrants to dance naked and to enjoy their lasciviousness. Maybe I’m an incarnation of every fucking goddess ever dreamed up. If this is true, I ask, as avatar especially of Cunti, Flora, Shakti, Aphrodite, and Astarte, I ask, as simply a woman, I ask you, you gorgeous quartet, to remove the curse of reinventing the wheel. Then I can stop being an ugly cunt, a silly cunt, a dumb cunt, because people will no longer have to pretend that the vagina is a trivial, idiot, repellent, and inarticulate organ.
I see through and around the tunnel of love, the birth canal, the toxic wasteland, the chamber of horrors, the stink pot and the honey pot, the resting place–the tomb–of man’s desire; the adventurers and heroes who continue to explore the “dark continent”–a poetic Freudian phrase deserving of remembrance but much less repetition; the detectives who investigate in theory and practice the crime of basic black–woman’s elegant interior–in order to expunge themselves of too much poetic license; the no-man’s-land until his flesh or the results of his seed make it into woman, which means make it his, which means make it into him. I design a vision from the inside out, from soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body: from my vagina’s folds and textures; from nuances, of slipperiness and stickiness and minute lubrication, of succulent fishiness and old roses; from pubococcygeal pressures; from itches and orgasms.
I have read too much about how you can’t go home again, how we are refugees from the mother’s plenitude, lost within a misperception, “that hole you left behind when you came into the world,” in the words of Luce Irigaray. I did not leave a hollow, an emptiness. I did not leave some inconsequential conduit, defined in Webster’s New World Dictionary of American English as “the canal between the vulva and the uterus” (s.v. “vagina”). The eroticized skin and space I moved through eroticized me. My mother’s jubilant vagina transferred its joy to me, soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body. The vagina’s touch, its capacity for hugging and stretching, its ability to grasp and still be flexible, is always with us. If I were to leave behind my mother’s vagina, I would be bereft of my own. My voracious and welcoming beauty.
- September 12, 2011
- Filed under: Women's Pleasure and Beauty
- Comments 2
Beautiful. Thank you.
Excited to see a new post from you today when I spontaneously thought to visit your site Joanna.
I love this writing. It brings full-circle for me so many parts of your past works, and leaves me eager for more.