Viva la Vulva

Libresse - Viva La Vulva from Kim Gehrig on Vimeo.

"That delicious cleft of flesh… a moist inviting entrance… delicately soft and pouting… Now with the tenderest attention not to shock, or alarm her too suddenly, he, by degrees, rather stole… up her petticoats… Then lay expos'd, so to speak more properly, display'd the greatest parade in nature of female charms. The whole company… seem'd as much dazzled, surprised, and delighted as any one could be… Beauties so excessive could not but enjoy the privileges of eternal novelty… no! Nothing in nature could be of a beautifuller cut than the dark umbrage of the downy spring-moss that over-arched it… a touching warmth, a tender finishing, beyond the expression of words… with one hand he gently disclosed the lips of that luscious mouth of nature… the soft laboratory of love… he awaken'd, roused and touch'd her so to the heart… till the raging stings of the pleasure, rising toward the point, made her wild with the intolerable sensations of it… as she lay lost in the sweet transport…"
John Cleland, Fanny Hill - Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 1748

The Beloved is me

"The Dodson model of the empowered female did a great deal of good, but also caused some harm. The good is that feminism of that era had to break the association of heterosexual female sexual awakening with dependency on a man. The harm is that the feminism of this era successfully broke the association of heterosexual female sexual awakening with dependency on a man. "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle," as one seventies-era feminist bumper sticker insisted. The feminist model of heterosexuality – that straight women can fuck like men, or get by with a great vibrator and no other attention to self-love, and be simply instrumentalist about their pleasure – turned out to have created a new set of impossible ideals, foisted, if through the best of intentions, upon "liberated" women. Feminism has evaded the far more difficult question of how to be a liberated heterosexual woman and how to acknowledge deep physical needs for connection with men. As nature organized things, we ideally have a partner in the dance. If we don't have a partner, there is attention we should give to self-love as self-care. It does not solve straight women's existential dilemma, the tension between our dependency needs and our needs for independence, simply to declare that the dance has changed.

The harm of this model of female sexuality is that it reaffirms a fractured, commercialized culture's tendency to see people, including "sexually liberated women," as isolated, self-absorbed units, and to see pleasure as something one needs to acquire the way one acquires designer shoes, rather than as a medium of profound intimacy with another, or with one's self, or as a gateway to a higher, more imaginative, fully realized dimension that includes and affects all aspects of one's life.

[...] I think it is very possible, judging from tremendous amount of data we have seen about what women need psychologically, which they are generally not getting, that they are saying they are dissatisfied because the "available models of sexuality" – the post-Dodson, post-Hefner, post-porn, married two-career, hurried, or young and single drunk-with-a-stranger-in-a-bar-or-dorm-room models – are, long term, just plain physically untenable. These models of female sexuality – left to us by a combination of pressures ranging from an incomplete development of feminism in the 1970's, to a marketplace that likes us overemployed and undersexed, to the speeding up of sexual pacing set by pornography – doom women eventually to emotional strain caused by physiological strain. These models of female sexuality are simply extremely physically, emotionally, and existentially unsatisfying. (This model of sex may well doom Western heterosexual men in other ways, deserving of their own book.)"

Naomi Wolf, Vagina

Female Sexuality

Aqui

In a different voice

The really beloved bad boys of women's literature don't bully or abuse the heroine, but they continually provoke and tease her – they are teasing her to release her own latent wildness. Ando one thing the romantic heroes of women's fiction, even the bad boys, who can be brusque or verge on rudeness, never, ever do is actually snap at, that is, negatively startle, the heroine; think of the edgy but grudgingly respectful repartee of Darcy and Elizabeth. Virtually every women's genre romance novel follows a script of a man who seems bad – insensitive, corrupt, womanizing – but turns out to be good. It also often features a heroine who begins demure and unripe – "Poor, obscure, plain and little" in Jane Eyre's speech – but who becomes herself, under the provocation of this bad boy who is secretly good.
This seeming paradox or politically incorrect fantasy is, I would argue, an essential archetype of the female heterosexual journey. A skilled, even at times slightly dangerous, male provocateur can help the female sexual journey to begin. "Badness" is not literal badness – it is otherness, wildness, the dimensions of the unknown. The motorcycle boots, the Harley – they are about her adventures, her penchant for the open road, erotically and in terms of her own creativity and subcersiveness, that society has generally repressed in her and forbidden her to claim as a longing, let alone as part of her "good girl" identity. His male "badness" is simply the projected dark animus of her own unacknowledged wild self."

Naomi Wolf, Vagina

Investment behaviour

"Dr. Helen Fisher pointed out, in The Anatomy of Love, that women's evolutionary need to have a partner to help her during the vulnerable first two years of a child's life predisposes women to value behaviour from men that indicates that they are cherished and being committed to. I call this "investment behaviour." This is different, as Dr. Fisher herself points out, from the old canard of evolutionary biologists who insist that fertile young women will respond sexually to older men with money and power.
Dr. Fisher's persuasive theory about women benefiting in evolutionary terms by responding sexually to men (or, presumably, women partner) who demonstrate that they can partner effectively for the baby's vulnerable years, and who show that they can keep mother and baby safe, led me to wonder — given that this was so valuable evolutionarily to women, their bodies, indeed their vaginas — if it might prompt them to "notice" or register such actions in potential mates before their minds had paid attention, in the same way that recent science has established a biological basis for the "gut response" to others."

Naomi Wolf, Vagina

Das partes e do todo

Back in the 70s...

" The vagina and vulva were primarily understood as mediating sexual pleasure. What was important was technique — one's own masturbatory technique,, and the skills one taught to a partner. Feminists and pornographers alike defined the vagina and vulva in terms of the mechanics of orgasm. [...] The harm of this model of female sexuality is that it reaffirms a fractured, commercialized culture's tendency to see people, including "sexually liberated women," as isolated, self-absorbed units, and to see pleasure as something one needs to acquire the way one acquires designer shoes, rather than as a medium of profound intimacy with one another, or with one's self, or as a gateway to a higher, more imaginative, fully realized dimension that includes and affects all aspects of life."
Naomi Wolf, Vagina

Slow to heat and slow to cool: Water

"As historian Douglas Wile describes it in his book Art of the Bedchamber: The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics, "At the very least, a man must delay his climax to adjust for difference in arousal time between 'fire and water' and to ensure the woman's full satisfaction." Wile elucidates the Taoist philosophy further: "The woman was said to love slowness (hsu) and duration (chiu), and abhor haste (chi) and violance (pao)... The woman expresses her desire through sounds (yin), movements (tung), and signs (cheng or tao). In her sexual responses she is compared to the element water, 'slow to heat and slow to cool.'... Prolonged foreplay is always presented as the precondition for orgasm.""

Aqui

Adiar a recompensa

"Unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. As the first, soon we hardly notice anymore the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the promise of reward that will come after a long, difficult, and worthy task. The other consequence is that, after awhile, we even habituate to those artificial deluges of intensity.... Our tragedy is that we just become hungrier. Thanks to the way our brains work, chronic over-stimulation fails to satisfy; it can leave a person nearly insatiable. Someone may find himself wondering automatically about every woman, "Would she engage in...?" Also, any resentment that arises from the mismatch between his virtual reality and his physical reality may raise doubts about his partner/union, making him uncharacteristically irritable and self-absorbed. He'll focus on what his relationship doesn't offer, not on what it does. Nor does dissatisfaction necessarily stop there. Humans tend to project such feelings automatically onto other aspects of life as well... sadly, distorted perception born of neurochemical dysregulation can make a person extremely resistant to understanding what's really driving him or what would ease his misery. His limbic brain has him firmly convinced that only his drug of choice will restore his good feelings. It can take an uncomfortable month or two to restore normal perception after habitual overstimulation. But as ravenous feelings ease, it's easier to find satisfaction in every aspect of life." Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

The porn myth

"For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn."

Naomi Wolf

"After the article's publication, I was flooded by distressed — and distressing — emails from men who reported that what I described had happened to them. They were distraught. They wrote to me that, over time, they felt a need to watch more and more porn to achieve arousal at all; they felt less and less choice about whether or not to use it; and they were experiencing escalating sexual difficulty in bed with their girlfriends or wives, to whom they had previously been very attracted. These men were a perfectly "normal" cross section of people with no apparent axe to grind; they had no ideological objections to porn use in general, and were not "crusaders" — they were just suffering, and frightened. What really struck me was that haunting sense many had of a loss of choice; these were often men who were perfectly in control in most or all other areas of their lives, and they were writing to me about feeling themselves to be at the mercy of something in their lives over which they felt powerless."
Naomi Wolf, Vagina

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

Speech act theory

Speech Act Theory

Cunt: A Cultural History of the C-Word

Death Jump, by Alfred Kubin

"The c-word, 'cunt', is perhaps the most offensive word in the English language, and consequently it has never been researched in depth. Hugh Rawson's Dictionary Of Invective contains the most detailed study of what he calls "The most heavily tabooed of all English words" (1989), though his article is only five pages long. Cunt: A Cultural History Of The C-Word is therefore intended as the first comprehensive analysis of this ancient and powerful word."
Aqui

Performative utterances

"The theme of the "uppity woman" having her vagina targeted in lieu of her brain is a universal theme still — both in emerging democracies and in the "advanced" West. In Egypt, once part of the British Empire, this practice had an echo: women protesters have played prominent roles in the"Arab Spring" and the uprising in Tahrir Square in 2011–12 — and these "unruly" women are being targeted by the state for forced vaginal exams."
Naomi Wolf, Vagina


Activist: Verdict has shamed military


Women bloggers call for a stop to 'hateful' trolling by misogynist men:
The Guardian

On cunts

Q: What's the difference between a pussy and a cunt?
A: A pussy is a sweet, juicy, succulent, warm, fun and useful thing. The cunt is the thing that owns it.
[jokes4us.com, "Vagina Jokes"]

"When a woman faces a workplace in which her male peers want to show her she is unwelcome, similar words or images targeting or insulting the vagina will often surface [...]
Of course, cultural and psychological motivations play a part in this form of harassment. But the role of manipulating female stress in targeting the vagina should not be ignored. This behavior — ridiculing the vagina — makes perfect instinctive sense. These acts are often impersonal and tactical — strategies for directing a kind of pressure at women that is not consciously understood but may be widely intuited, and even survive in folk memory, as eliciting a wider neuropsychological "bad stress" response that actually debilitates women."
Naomi Wolf, Vagina

On good sex

Rather like a darts player I once interviewed, she believes that women who don't get good sex regularly, who are denied the soothing benefits of dopamine and oxytocin, both stimulated by orgasm, will inevitably be "emotionally irritable". Men who don't indulge in serious and lengthy foreplay, employing what she calls the "Goddess array" to turn their partners on, should ask themselves: "Do I want to be married to a Goddess or a bitch?" (Wolf's favoured terms for the vagina are "Goddess" and "yoni".) She believes that, having come to understand neural wiring, "we should respect the potential for enslavement to sexual love in women".
Aqui

“I think it’s entirely possible that Naomi is overstating the case for emphasis, but when you piss enough people off, you reach a critical threshold for people to be talking about it and working on it,” he said.

Or as the sex therapist Nancy Fish, who is also quoted in the book, put it, “People sometimes have to go to extremes to get people to talk about a topic.”

She added: “In 2012 we’re still living in the Victorian age when it comes to sexuality. Vagina has to be a household word. It should be a topic discussed at the dinner table when you’re having a dinner party.”
Aqui

How to do things with words

A "performative utterance" is a word or phrase that actually accomplishes something in the real world. When a judge says, "Guilty," to a defendant, or a groom says, "I do," the words alter material reality. Words about the vagina create environments that directly affect women's bodies. The words women hear being used about their vaginas change, for better or for worse, what they purport to describe. Because of their effect on female autonomic nervous system (ANS), words about the vagina can either help or hurt actual vaginal response. New studies, as we saw, show that the autonomic nervous system in women is directly connected to optimal sexual arousal functionality in vaginal tissue, circulation, and lubrication itself — so verbal threats or verbal admiration or reassurances can directly affect the sexual functioning of the vagina.

Vagina, Naomi Wolf

How to do Things With Words

Sex is sexist / On th liberating of the vagina

"This ideology [the Libertarian 'Sex as Play'] – descending from Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, via, in debasd 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.
But is what one does in bed with someone else – with all the hopes, intimacies, and possibilities for grief involved – really just "a dream you are in"? The next three decades would call the worldview's vision of consequence-free sex and fantasy into question."
Naomi Wolf, Vagina

More links:
Inga Muscio
Joani Blank
Andrea Dworkin
Steven Seidman
Germaine Greer
Judy Chicago
Shere Hite
Eve Ensler
Feministing.com
Vulvavelvet.com

The Dinner Party - Judy Chicago

Shere Hite speaking about her report. 

Shere Hite press conference (1985)

"Not biologically based but culturally encouraged" – Shere Hite

the brain-vagina connection

"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 startingly 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."
Naomi Wolf, in Vagina

on pleasure and interdependence

"A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle," the Second Wave feminist slogan assured us, but maybe the fact is, well, no. I now think that denial of this need for men for sexual pleasure in straight women's lives was not actually feminist and did not actually help heterosexual women. Obviously, straight women do not need just any man. It is an insult to these women to dismiss their longing for the one they feel is 'the' man, or to decide their morning if he is gone. Nor does this denial of the paradox of our feminine autonomy, coexisting unsettedly with our feminine need for interdependence, help lesbians or bisexual women understand why, so often, the need for the lover is so intense. This ideology does not help women of any sexuality understand why, often, the vibrator and a pint of Häagen-Dazs are pleasurable but that other longings for connections can remain strong. Men, too, find self-knowledge in facing their needs for connection."
Naomi Wolf, in Vagina

addicted to love

"But to respect the central paradox of the female condition — the sexual/emotional need of the Vagina and cervix — might mean that we need to face the fact that women are, in a sense, more easily addicted to love and to good sex with the person who triggers that heady chemical bath, than men are. The work of Dr. Daniel G. Amen, in 'The Brain in Love', along with that of many other neurobiologists whose work has not yet been "translated" into mainstream culture, suggests that some of women's behaviors currently seen as needy or masochistic are in fact better understood as natural and probably evolutionary responses to the brain changes caused by female orgasm. Good sex is, in other words, 'actually' addictive for women biochemically in certain ways that are different from the experience of men — meaning that one experiences discomfort when this stimulus is removed and a craving to secure it again. Bad sex with a selfish or distracted partner — is 'actually' chemically dispiriting and damaging psychologically to women in a way that is different from men's experience."
Naomi Wolf, in Vagina