More performative utterances

"In Han dynasty China (206 BCE–220 CE) or Indian fifteen hundred years ago or in the thirteenth-century Japan, when the vagina was portrayed as the most sacred spot in the most sacred temple in a sacred universe, that was how woman's brains experienced their vaginas. When, as in  medieval Europe during the witch hunts the culture cast the vagina as the devil's playground and the gateway to hell, a woman in that culture felt herself to be built up around a core of existential shame. If, as in Elizabethan England, a culture portrays the vagina as a hole, a woman in that culture will feel that she is centered around emptiness or worthlessness; when, as in Germany and England and America after Freud, a woman's culture portrays the vagina's response as a test of womanliness, she is likely to feel herself insufficiently womanly. When a woman's culture – as in today's women's magazine-type sexual athleticism in the West – casts the ideal vagina as a producer of multiple orgasms on call, she will feel herself put to a continual, impossible test. When mass culture represents any given vagina as just one in ten million available orifices, as in today's porn industry, a woman will feel her sexual self to be replaceable, not important and not sacred.
And all this is not superficial: these perceptions are constructed at the level of neural synapses. In other words, the female brain changes physically over time in response to these kinds of repeated triggers in the environment. These triggers also affect her confidence and sense of hope."
Naomi Wolf, Vagina