The vagina dialogue

FOUR writers offer their perspectives on Naomi Wolf's controversial biography of an intimate part of her anatomy.

Naomi Wolf

FOUR writers offer their perspectives on Naomi Wolf's controversial biography of an intimate part of her anatomy.

Rosemary Neill

NAOMI Wolf could have called this book My Vagina: A New Biography. It begins and ends with an account of how the author lost her sexual mojo when her pelvic nerve became trapped by misaligned vertebrae. Because of this, Wolf, a middle-aged, divorced mother of two, no longer experienced sex "in a poetic dimension".

She writes that she felt despair over this "incredible, traumatic loss", which she compares to "a horror movie". Yet she was still having orgasms and enjoying a wonderful relationship with a new partner.

Given this, the celebrity feminist's descriptions of her pelvic nerve problem seem extraordinarily self-pitying. Even when describing her need for urgent spinal surgery, her primary concern is regaining sexual satisfaction.

The loss of perspective continues. When a male friend makes a tasteless joke about rape in war, she lies down and weeps. When another male friend throws a party to celebrate her book and makes vulva-shaped pastas he calls "c . ntini", this misfired joke means she cannot write for six months.

Can this be the same feminist who in 1990 wrote The Beauty Myth - her first and best book - in an inspired rush of white-hot anger? Who drew parallels between post-9/11 America and Nazi Germany in her incendiary 2007 polemic, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot?

Vagina is frustratingly uneven: Wolf's analysis of how modern pornography devalues the vagina is as lucid and pithy as her faith in Tantric sexual healers is credulous and dewy-eyed. More compelling is her exploration of the history of female sexuality, from ancient Sumerians worshipping a goddess's "lap of honey" to the 19th-century French doctor who whipped a female patient for engaging in "the solitary vice".

Her examination of how and why the vagina is still mutilated and denigrated, from war-torn Africa to the porn-saturated West, is equally insightful. Worth reading, too, is her take on new theories about the vagina, though these passages are often clotted with lumpy scientific detail. These theories suggest this organ is more complex than previously supposed: that intricate neural pathways connect it to the brain; that there are more sites of pleasure than the vaginal v clitoral orgasm debate allows.

But Wolf's conclusions about the "profound vagina-brain connection" - about how the vagina directly affects women's consciousness, confidence and creativity - are a worry. They imply that the more sexually satisfied you are, the more confident and creative you will be. Where does this excitable notion leave those celebrated spinsters Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson and Miles Franklin? Or countless divorced, widowed and single women who end up celibate? Is Wolf arguing these women are incomplete?

While she dispenses advice about the "goddess array" (seduction techniques to arouse women), Wolf gives short shrift to the biggest libido killer of them all: the exhaustion of women working the triple shift (housework, paid work, childcare) or looking after young children unaided. Author Kathy Lette quipped recently: "What a woman really wants in bed is breakfast." I suspect this gag speaks to women more directly than Wolf's hazy, new-age probing of sacred spot massage and yoni tapping.

Rosemary Neill is a senior journalist on The Australian.

Benjamin Law

WE'RE often told vaginas are complicated. Penises? Oh they're easy. All you need is a firm grip and repetitive motion and, presto: a grown man has been brought to orgasm. But vaginas? "It's almost as if you have to speak to it and tell it that it's pretty," a female friend said recently. We laughed at the time, imagining the vagina as a shy, pigeon-toed debutante who needed to be sweet-talked before she could loosen up and go wild on the turps.

My friend was joking. Yet Naomi Wolf seems entirely serious about the prospect of speaking to vaginas. That much is clear from the opening section of this book, which is titled, seemingly without irony, Part I: Does the Vagina Have a Consciousness?

Indeed, placed alongside each other, the titles of Wolf's sub-chapters read like the syllabus for a series of terrible yonic-focused literary workshops in regional Oregon: Porn and Vaginal Illiteracy; Modernism: The "Liberated" Vagina; Is the Vagina an Addict? and - hauntingly - The Blues Vagina.

To begin with, however, Vagina: A New Biography delivers punch and insight. After Wolf receives treatment for lower back degenerative disease, her gynaecologist explains that every woman's nerve branches are mapped differently. Some women's nerve maps are geared towards the clitoris, while other women's bodies prefer the perineum or the mouth of the cervix. It's why, Wolf explains, the ways in which different women receive pleasure are so variable. That revelation alone is a vital antidote to women's magazines offering definitive advice on how all women can achieve orgasm.

However, the way Wolf goes on discussing vaginas can be difficult to take seriously. "The vagina delivers to women the feelings that lead them to want to create," she writes at one point. Elsewhere she avers that if someone's "vagina is targeted verbally, her heart rate, blood pressure, circulation and many other systems will suffer chronically". It's as though Wolf has recast the vagina as some mystical, sentient attachment, like Kuato, the baby-sized mutant from Total Recall, who is fused to a full-sized human and renders his host unconscious when speaking.

Wolf's finer chapters - such as her examination of vaginal trauma, rape and sexual violence - are powerful but lose impact when following chapters stagger into self-parody. One chapter towards the end is devoted to a "sacred spot massage weekend" she attends, which is followed by sections with titles such as Do Whatever She Likes to her Nipples and Does Male Ejaculate Affect Women's Feelings? By this point, scientific research is more or less shelved for anecdotes of women such as "Julia, a graphic designer" and "Anastasia, a student in New York City".

Vagina should have been a timely and necessary book. It has been four decades since Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch, yet Australians still feel such profound uneasiness with the words vagina and discharge that television viewers file complaints to broadcasters. Wolf may have aimed to demystify the vagina for everyone, but in the process has created a whole other suite of generalisations about female anatomy that are cheerily odd at best and reductive at worst.

Benjamin Law's new book is Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East.

Emily Maguire

IN this "biography", Naomi Wolf sets out to "explore the ways in which the vagina has been misunderstood", explain "how modern pressures ... are desensitising both men and women in relation to the life of the vagina" and to teach women how to "reframe our sense of the vagina ... in the context of its actual neurological task of being a mediator and protector of women's highest, most joyful and most unbroken sense of self".

To those ends, Wolf spends the first three-quarters of this book taking a stroll through the cultural and social context of how we think about and treat vaginas and the people who have them. It's all quite interesting (though scientifically and historically patchy) and Wolf makes some excellent points about the links between language and violence and between casual misogyny and systemic discrimination.

The real problems emerge in the final quarter, when Wolf, assuming that what she's written so far has proven that "the vagina is a gateway to women's happiness and to her creative life" (it hasn't: see "scientifically and historically patchy", above), attempts to prescribe ways to, er, open that gateway and let the happiness and creativity flow.

The result reads like a cross between Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and a Tantric sex manual. Wolf suggests husbands ask themselves "Do I want to be married to a Goddess - or a bitch?", because apparently "there is not, physiologically, much middle ground ... Either [women] are extremely well treated sexually, or else they become physically uncomfortable and emotionally irritable".

Assuming they want the goddess, men are advised to learn "the Goddess Array": a "set of words, actions and gestures that women cannot do without". Wolf goes on to describe this array in great detail and with considerable help from a "sexual healer" who performs "yoni tapping" for £100 ($153) an hour.

If Wolf and the women she quotes reached nirvana after their partners spent hours gazing into their eyes and stroking them, that's terrific. But to extrapolate this to some great truth about what women need to be confident and creative is hooey.

At one point Wolf asks how women would feel if the words used about their vaginas made them think of themselves "as a source of wisdom, as precious, fragrant, a treasure". Me? I'd feel annoyed. Look, I like my vagina fine, but I strongly reject the idea that any wisdom I possess comes from how it is described and treated by other people.

I'm not overstating the case. Wolf is insistent on the link between an orgasmic vagina and female fulfilment and achievement. I wonder, did Elizabeth I feel fragrant and precious and have powerful, Technicolor orgasms at the hands of men who asked permission of her inner-goddess before touching her "sacred spot"? Did Emily Dickinson or Virginia Woolf? Does Hillary Clinton? Aung San Suu Kyi?

One thing Wolf is dead right about is that "the way in which any given culture treats the vagina ... is a metaphor for how women in general in that place and time are treated". That's precisely why this book is a worry. Precious, fragrant and requiring (which is very different from desiring) careful ministrations by kindly men? Yikes.

Emily Maguire is a novelist and nonfiction writer. Her books include Your Skirt's Too Short: Sex, Power, Choice.

Jack Marx

IN a traditional biography the author speaks to as many as possible, past and present, who have been intimately close to the subject. This method would have presented Naomi Wolf with an interesting challenge, the time consumed by the "interviews" offset by the brevity of the transcription process. Penises don't have a lot to say for themselves, especially in Wolf's universe.

But Vagina isn't really a book about the vagina; it's an idea dreamed up by Wolf as another reason to get a book done in the service of women.

There is precious little serious anatomical or social study here (the vagina is intrinsically attached to the cerebrum through the central nervous system - well I'll be blowed!) and a whole lot of prayers delivered to the vagina that will make many women feel good about themselves. That's great, but it's all a bit over the top.

According to Wolf, vaginas are geniuses of human anatomy, intimately in tune with a woman's brain, the mistress and maid of every sensual and intelligent thought that explodes through the female synapse.

The female mind and vagina are friends, engaged in a wonderful marriage that men don't understand. It's rather like a feminist version of the old maxim that "men think with their dicks", only this time, the relationship is sanctified by some sort of holiness.

By contrast, the male brain and penis is a criminal cabal. This message is clear, if delivered through a quagmire of sloppy and often unsupported academia.

I can't pretend to reference the great feminist authors when reviewing Wolf. But I can report on what Wolf doesn't know and I do. On that score, pornography is something she just doesn't understand.

One of her greatest gaffes is repeatedly referring to Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy, as some sort of evil P. T. Barnum of the vagina. Had Wolf done a fraction of the research I have done into the golden years of Playboy, she'd know that vaginas were basically absent. There was pubic hair, but any man who thinks pubic hair is a vagina is going to disappoint his partner terribly.

What Wolf and so many other feminists fail to acknowledge is that most men, even stupid ones, know the difference between a photograph and a person. They know the women in Playboy are fantasies, and that the women they work with, or meet in bars, are members of the human race.

I know lots of women who are infatuated with Dexter Morgan, as played by Michael C. Hall in the TV series, but none who want to shack up with a serial killer. Like men, women know the difference between fantasy and reality, and know that fantasy is fun and reality is tough. Wolf wants fantasy to be tough, too. What a shocking killjoy.

The irony is that Wolf's vision of the future unwittingly predicts porn as the ultimate saviour of the penis. Wolf's vagina is so complex and wise, so independently capable of ingenuity, that surely it will ultimately render the penis redundant. No living organ with such neurological creativity could possibly require the attentions of an invasive partner for more than a few thousand years.

When that time comes, when the vagina becomes entirely self-sufficient, there will be nothing left for the penis but the hand of its master, and ancient photographs of women, undressed or not, but simply wanting to be loved.

Jack Marx is a journalist and author.  

Vagina: A New Biography
By Naomi Wolf
Virago, 336pp, $32.99