- Eve Ensler, in reference to the word "vagina", in her preface to the 1998 edition of The Vagina Monologues
"Because that word is either so taboo or surrounded with negative connotations or draped in shame or medicalised, it's really important to take it back."
- Naomi Wolf, on her choice of title for Vagina, as quoted in the Guardian in 2012
Naomi Wolf is a little late to the party on this one. In 1996, 16 years ago, Eve Ensler decided to write a series of monologues addressing issues of female sexuality, violence against women, reproduction, and all sorts of things connected with women's bodies. In her preface to the 1998 edition of the book, Ensler indicated that she had been ambivalent on the question of what word should be used to encapsulate the physical locus of so much female experience - the "entire area and all its parts" - and acknowledged the fact that she was warping an established term. This is what she said:
"I say it because we haven't come up with a word that's more inclusive, that really describes the entire area and all its parts. 'Pussy' is probably a better word, but it has so much baggage connected with it. And besides, I don't think most of us have a clear idea of what we're talking about when we say 'pussy'. 'Vulva' is a good word; it speaks more specifically, but I don't think most of us are clear what the vulva includes."
Really? Because thanks to you, Ms. Ensler, most of us are no longer clear on what the vagina includes.
This adoption of the word "vagina" to mean "the entire area" took root when the Vagina Monologues went supernova. A very good friend gave me a copy of the book in 2002. I was pleased to have received it, but disappointed by a lot of its content. It had been billed as revolutionary, and for the most part I felt it vacillated between decontextualized and sensationalist images of sexual violence, and vaudevillian representations of costumed, talking genitalia. I think Ensler meant well, and was on to something important. She sought to find and employ a word that was relatively neutral, not connected to so much baggage, that would express the often invisible but fundamental physicality of female sexuality - the point at which so much awareness, pleasure, violence, and even the creation of life occurs, but which is so often overlooked or ignored.
Sixteen years later, it appears that what she got instead was: people dressing up in giant inflammation-pink labia costumes, chocolate vulva pops, and Naomi Wolf parading about as if she invented vaginas and orgasms and the fetishization of female sexuality as an expression of the divine. What she got was a public, including journalists, who have no idea what a vulva is. What she got was people talking superficially about vaginas, not even really knowing what the word meant, in a shock value, schticky way that penises have never had to suffer. The costumed genitalia and the agenda of bringing women's sexual organs out of the shadows (which, although I applaud the desire to confront sexual violence and shaming, I find deeply problematic) essentially resulted in our society referring to the external portions of women's genitals as the "vagina," but otherwise carrying on with seeing women as separate from their sexual organs, or as custodians of sexual organs that society has a greater interest in than the women themselves do - but now against the backdrop of a technicolor three-ring gynecology circus. On this point, Eve Ensler has a lot to answer for.
Here's the thing. Vaginas are great. They can be a wonderful source of enjoyment and intimacy. They are also the path by which most of us still enter the world. But they are not "the entire area and all its parts", they are not the be-all, end-all, and the word "vagina" is a remarkably poor descriptor for much of the female experience. As fantastic, and mysterious, and life-assisting as vaginas are, they are generally conduits. Their primary biological function is to allow sperm to meet egg, infant to meet world. There is a passivity to the vagina, which is after all a passage. It is very much one part of a greater whole, and arguably not the most important or "female" part. The vagina is not, usually, the main source of female sexual gratification. It can be imagined as the inverse of the penis, or as a void to be filled. The Latin root of the word means "sheath". Making it the spokesorgan for female identity is troubling.
There is also something terribly presumptive and dismissive about assigning a part to stand for the whole, and then insisting that the whole be so called. Can you imagine the backlash were we to persistently call the male reproductive network, penis included, "testes" or "vas deferens"? Can you imagine the response if we were to get annoyed and huffy any time a man said he didn't feel like calling his penis "testes" accurately expressed his experience or his body? And yet this is exactly where we find ourselves with the adoption of "vagina" to mean "all the lady parts".
Terms like pussy and cunt, problematic and baggage-heavy though they are, might present riper fodder for reclamation precisely because they are vague, nonspecific, non-scientific terms, and so can be more easily molded to a new meaning. In a sense by the very virtue of their controversy they are better poised to be appropriated, in the manner that "queer" has been. Ensler herself recognized this, and in one of the monologues discusses "cunt". Still, many people bluntly refuse to hear the word cunt because they find it offensive. Naomi Wolf claims that she was traumatised to the point of extended writer's block (the horror) when presented with "cuntini" - novelty vulva-shaped pasta. I'd have found it traumatic too, but mostly because I don't want genital pasta, of any persuasion, and the whole thing seems in poor taste.
Eschewing some words because they might carry baggage or offend also flies in the face of the professed agenda to reclaim and unchain that which lies in ladies' laps, although I appreciate that in the beginning Ensler may have been trying to keep the focus away from the choice of word and on the message. However, there's a disconnect between Ensler's stated goal of fostering discussion and reflection on women's sexual realities and selves, on the one hand, and the way in which she and those who have followed her lead have acted in attempting to acheive that goal. The discomfort and the scandal remain, because despite eschewing more inflammatory words, the approach has tended toward the shocking and provocative. I worry that Wolf's latest essay merely illustrates a broader trend of brash but precarious and ultimately superficial feminism, underpinned by a persistent distrust and confusion regarding the female body.
By way of example: a few years ago, I was walking across UBC campus with a friend when a brightly adorned young woman bounded up to us. "Wanna buy a chocolate vagina?" she asked, brandishing a cocoa-coloured Georgia O'Keefe and sounding a little like the dodgy letter-selling muppet on Sesame Street. "That's a vulva," my friend deadpanned. The young woman was taken aback. "It's for raising money to fight violence against women," she flustered. "That's a good goal," I allowed. Turning to me, my friend said "do you want a chocolate vulva?" "I don't know," I said. "I do like a good vulva. But a chocolate vulva seems like a recipe for a yeast infection. Do YOU want a chocolate vulva?" By now the young woman was visibly discomfited. Why did we keep saying "vulva"? Well, admittedly we were teasing. But, tellingly, the word "vulva" was making her squeamish, in just the way she was trying to point out to other people that the word "vagina" made them squeamish.
I wanted to tell her that there was something tawdry and objectifying about labia costumes and chocolate vulvas, that cutting out and isolating the exterior portion of "the entire area and all its parts" and inaccurately calling it a vagina, when it already had its own name and was a whole other body part connected to and separate from the vagina, actually served to obscure, erase, obfuscate, and undermine the goal of female sexual empowerment. I also wanted to point out to her that it was natural to be made uncomfortable by people babbling on about genitalia, because our society doesn't usually truck with that kind of talk. And I wanted to suggest that the fact she was uncomfortable with "vulva" implied that she was not so much enlightened with respect to female sexual fantasticness, as she was jumping on a giggling vagina bandwagon. But instead I just sighed and bought a stupid chocolate vulva. The whole business was silly and tacky and not empowering anybody.
In 1996, Ensler tried to pull a relatively baggage-free, invisible word out of dusty anatomy texts and into current language. Sixteen years later, Wolf has looked at what that word has become and has decided that she needs to take it back because it is associated with shame and the taboo. We should learn something from this. But what we should learn is not that the word needs to be reclaimed. You can't change an entrenched notion by changing the definition of a word, or by changing the name by which a thing is called. Grafting a word onto an problem is a bandaid solution, and calling a woman's genitalia her vagina is reductive, inaccurate, and simplistic. We need to go to the root of the problem, which is the disparaging and distrust of women's sexual organs and sexuality, and work on that first - preferably with maturity and respect, rather than with giant labia costumes, publicity stunts, and novelty candy. And in keeping with that respect and maturity, we should probably call body parts by the most accurate, neutral terms we can muster.
For my own part, I'm happy to call a vagina a vagina (on the rare occasion when I feel compelled to mention it, specific discussions on the topic notwithstanding), but if we're talking about the whole area, why can we not use a term like the one I've used comfortably throughout my diatribe: genitalia? It's accurate, it's gender neutral but can be modified by a gendered term, and it's relatively baggage-free. It won't sell tickets to off-Broadway shows, or create buzz for pop psychology books, but it might actually be a tool by which we can get past our giggling and gasping about girl parts, and get on with working toward a society in which all people enjoy their bodies more, with more respect and less violence.
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