Vagina (19 page)

Even the nature of female desire became hypothetical and contested in the classical period. Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BCE) believed that both women and men needed to climax—both “bursting forth seed”—in order for conception to occur, but Aristotle (384–322 BCE) noted, in contrast, that women did not need to be aroused in order to conceive.

The Roman physician Galen (129–c. 200 CE) believed that the vagina was an inside-out penis: as Thomas Laqueur expresses the Galenic paradigm, “Women . . . are inverted, and hence less perfect, men. They have exactly the same organs but in exactly the wrong places.”
¹¹
Galen’s influence extended for centuries after he was rediscovered in the Middle Ages. (He also recommended that single women masturbate for the sake of their health.) The Greeks maintained a concept of the floating uterus—they believed that the uterus traveled throughout a woman’s body, and they developed the notion that women’s nervous aspect and other diseases were caused by these agitations of the uterus, a belief the Romans adopted (the root of the term
hysteria
—
hyster
—comes from the Greek word for “womb”).

THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN VAGINA: THE EVOLUTION OF SHAME

Woman is defective and misbegotten.

—Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theologica

While the Hebrew Bible was intent on condemning the “harlotry” of the sacred prostitutes of the polytheistic religions that dominated in the Fertile Crescent, as we saw, it almost never mentions the vagina directly, except euphemistically. But it does contain passages that eloquently express female sexual desire. The Song of Songs contains many subtle metaphors for female arousal and orgasm. The Hebrew tradition had not promoted a mind-body split, and sex was still sacred within the confines of marriage: rabbinical exigesis in the post-Exilic period insisted that a devout man must satisfy his wife sexually at least weekly, depending on his profession.

But Paul, a Hellenized Jew, introduced to the first-century-CE Jewish-Christian and pagan-Christian communities around the Mediterranean the Hellenic concept that the mind and the body are at war with each other. His letters codified the notion—so influential in the next two millennia—that sexuality is shameful and wrong, and that unbridled female sexuality, even within marriage, is particularly shameful and wrong. With the rise of the church in Europe and the spread of the Holy Roman Empire, Paul’s teachings become synonymous with Christianity, and Christianity, with Western culture itself.

THE CHURCH FATHERS: THE HATEFUL VAGINA

The rise of a Western ideology that cast the vagina as being especially hateful, and that portrayed female sexuality in general as a toxic lure to perdition, reached its formative point with Paul then with the Church Fathers of the subsequent four centuries. The Hebrew Bible certainly excoriates female sexuality that circumvents the boundaries of marriage—you can stone your daughter to death for fornication, for instance—but it also has harsh words condemning male infidelity and excess. Within marriage, both male and female sexuality are seen as blessings. The vagina is addressed, in Leviticus and in the Mishnah, in terms of menstrual uncleanness: women must abstain from sex, take ritual baths, and, the Mishnah maintains, use “testing-rags” in the “depressions and folds” of the vagina to ensure they are free of blood after the menses, and before sex.
^12
,
13

But the vagina that is hateful even within marriage, and the ideal of female virginity as a sexual status, arose only in the four post-Pauline centuries, especially around North Africa. The Church Fathers, who were practicing very extreme forms of asceticism in all-male environments and abasing the flesh in various ways, sought to outdo one another in reviling the flesh of women as sexual beings in particular. Paul had written, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman . . . [I]f they have not constancy, let them marry, for it is better to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9). But Tertullian took this Pauline idea much further: now, intercourse was only for the begetting of children; and he cast women as seductresses luring men into a Satanic abyss of sexuality.
¹⁴
To him the vagina was “a temple built over a sewer,” “the Devil’s gateway”: “And do you know that you are [each] an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too.
You
are the devil’s gateway;
you
are the unsealer of that [forbidden] tree: you are the first deserter of the Divine law . . . on account of
your
desert—that is, death—even the Son of Man had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself?”
¹⁵

The imprint of the equation of a female “virgin” with someone who is “good” and “pure” is so deep we scarcely think about whether those terms have any actual relationship; we assume the equation is an ancient notion, but the idea of the “pure” Christian virgin is fairly recent. Biblical scholars generally agree that the ideology of Mary’s sacred virginity was a much belated construct of the Church, and that it cannot be confirmed in the original texts of the New Testament, which suggest that Mary had several children. The complex creed about Mary’s virginity that we inherit was accepted, indeed, only five centuries after the events described or narrated in the New Testament—officially only in 451 CE, at the Council of Chalcedon.
¹⁶

Little evidence survives of how the vagina was portrayed or understood in the Dark Ages, and the little there is comes from medical texts. In spite of the Church Fathers, for the first fifteen hundred years CE, Western women were still seen as needing sexual satisfaction if reproduction was to take place. Sexual frustration in women was understood for a millennium and a half as causing disease and mental suffering; in Hippocrates’ era, doctors used genital massage on their female patients, or tasked a midwife with the therapy. The practice of prescribing medicinal genital massage to orgasm, as a remedy for “hysteria,” lasted until the Tudor and Stuart periods in England.

As noted earlier, Galen, whose influence resurfaced in the Middle Ages, had developed a model of the female genitals’ being an outside-in version of the male. The ancient Greeks had also maintained that women ejected semen, which contributed to conception. Since the uterus was understood to migrate around the body, women who had no sexual outlet were seen as being at risk of suffering from the unexpelled semen in their wombs corrupting their bodies, and sending “filthy vapors to the brain.”
¹⁷

Well into the Middle Ages, informal affection alternated with official condemnation of the vagina. A fair amount of folklore and bawdry in the late Middle Ages treat the vagina with a kind of colloquial affection—as in the play on the word
queynte
in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale” in
The Canterbury Tales,
which dates to the end of the fourteenth century. In “The Miller’s Tale,” at line 90, we read, “Pryvely he caughte hire by the queynte.”
¹⁸
(In 1380,
queynte
was pronounced “cunt.”) In
The Canterbury Tales,
Chaucer uses the word
cunt
not as an obscenity, but as it was used commonly in that era—in a simply lusty, descriptive manner.

This era, in spite of ideals of courtly love, also saw the beginnings of practices aimed at harming or constraining the vagina in new ways. The chastity belt, for instance, was invented in the early Middle Ages. Its use continued into the high Middle Ages. These were not delicate garments, but actual body locks made of metal. The device surrounded the wearer’s hips with two iron bands, and a third iron band went between her legs. That band was closed with a lock. A woman’s husband, if he wished to travel or was departing for a war, would literally lock up his wife’s vagina, and take the key with him. The device did not simply prevent intercourse; it also made hygiene difficult, caused severe abrasions, and is best seen as a domestic instrument of torture.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the “witch craze” swept through Europe. Its effect was to target female sexuality in multiple and terrifying new ways. In community after community, the women identified by inquisitors or by their fellow villagers as “witches” were often those who were seen as too sexual, or too free. And forms of torture focused on their sexuality. The “Pear of Anguish” was a torture device used on victims of all genders. It was a pear-shaped object made of iron that expanded inside the victim as the torturer turned screws. When it was inflicted on men, it was introduced into the mouth. But when it was used on women accused of witchcraft, or of inducing abortion, it was inserted into the vagina and expanded. During the witch craze in Europe in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, women’s vaginas were targeted in searches for the “witches’ mark” or “devil’s mark” sought in their body cavities. Inquisitors also had suspected heretical women’s vaginas mutilated.
¹⁹

The Renaissance period in Europe saw the rise of the study of anatomy and, once again, the rediscovery of the clitoris. In this period, women were seen as sexually inexhaustible, and female sexuality was viewed as more overpowering than male sexual response—it was still taken for granted that women had to reach orgasm in order to conceive.

Dr. Emma Rees, a British literary scholar at the University of Chester who has written about the vagina in Elizabethan and Victorian literature, argues that Elizabethans intentionally elided the meanings of “lips” and “labia.” She shows the similarities between two technologies of control from that era—chastity belts and “scold’s bridles”—and she argues that Elizabethan audiences saw verbal and sexual license in women in similar ways. The chastity belt rigidly locked around the female pudenda, she argues, forcing a woman to be sexually inactive or “silent”; and, in the same way, the “scold’s bridle” was a similarly constructed device, made of iron and leather, that locked around a talkative or argumentative woman’s head, and gagged her mouth.
²⁰

Shakespeare, ever the neologist, innovated dozens of slang terms for the vagina, from “blackness” in
Othello
to “boat” in
King Lear.
Dr. Rees looks at all the vaginas in Shakespeare: she cites, for instance, the “detested, dark, blood-drinking pit” of
Titus Andronicus.
In this play, the heroine, Lavinia, is raped, and her rapists cut out her tongue. Dr. Rees argues that in this mutilation images of lips and labia collide: Lavinia’s mouth and vagina are both assaulted in repeated acts of silencing and control.
²¹

The idea of the female body as topography, and the vagina as either a sulfurous pit in that landscape, or else a bucolic spring, also became a standard part of Renaissance rhetoric. For a more pleasing version of the vagina/landscape analogy, see Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” as Venus offers herself to Adonis:

I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer.

Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale;

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,

Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
²²

With
King Lear,
Dr. Rees interprets Cordelia’s resistance to doing as her father insists, in the context of the Elizabethan word
nothing
as slang for the vagina. Dr. Rees’s theory is that, in Shakespeare, the vagina is often punned upon and used as a metaphor for the “otherness” of femininity, the unruliness of female sexuality, and the “diseased” and “contaminating” natures of both the female body and female speech, as they were understood at the time.

CORDELIA:
What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.
(Aside)
. . . Nothing, my lord.

LEAR:
Nothing?

CORDELIA:
Nothing.

LEAR:
How, nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.

CORDELIA:
Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. I love your majesty according to my bond, no more nor less.
²³

“The vagina,” Dr. Rees writes, “is emblematic of the chaos, of the ‘can’t’ ”—this is a Midlands pronunciation of
cunt;
Dr. Rees is punning—“that gapes at the play’s heart.” She writes, “
Nothing
is forced to take on the form of
something
through Lear’s insistence upon it and his fascination with it prior to his agonies on the heath: ‘nothing can be made out of nothing’ (I.iv.130). But what remains the play’s preoccupation is the fact that something
can
be made of nothing: if the vagina is the cipher, the absence, then what about when it brings forth a child? . . . When the Fool tells Lear that ‘thou art an O without a figure’ (I.iv.183–84), the ‘O’ could be read as emblematic of the vagina, and may suggest the increasing sense of emasculation Lear experiences.”
²⁴
Lear’s emasculation, she writes, led to his curse of one of his two daughters’ organs of reproduction:

Into her womb convey sterility,