Vagina

Naomi Wolf

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062319470
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Feminismus & feministische Theorie

An astonishing work of cutting–edge science and cultural history from one of our most respected cultural critics and thinkers, Naomi Wolf, author of the modern classic The Beauty Myth

When an unexpected medical crisis sends Naomi Wolf on a journey to tease out the intersections between sexuality and creativity, she discovers—much to her own astonishment—an increasing body of scientific evidence that documents new insights about female sexual response. These breakthrough discoveries show that the vagina, clitoris, and labia—the female sexual centers—are not "merely flesh, " but directly affect the female brain, and that the female brain directly affects, in newly documented ways, the vagina and female sexual centers. The vagina thus has a fundamental relationship to female consciousness itself. Utterly enthralling and totally fascinating, Vagina draws on this set of insights about "the mind-vagina connection" to reveal new information about what women really need, on many different levels, and considers what sexual relationships—and a woman's relationship to her self, as well as to her own desire and pleasure—transformed by these insights, may look like.

A brilliant and nuanced synthesis of physiology, history, and cultural criticism, Vagina explores the physical, political, and spiritual implications for women—and for society as a whole—in this startling series of new scientific breakthroughs from a writer whose conviction and keen intelligence have propelled her works to the tops of bestseller lists, and firmly into the realm of modern classics.

Two

History: Conquest and Control

6

The Traumatized Vagina

Scapegoating the victim—saying that she brought the situation on herself—is necessary . . . just as the efficacy of ritual sacrifice once depended on the delusion that the victim was responsible for the sins of the world.

—Peggy Reeves Sanday, Fraternity Gang Rape

Just as good sexual experience in the vagina drives joy and creativity into the female brain, the obverse is also true, due to the same neural pathways: the traumatized vagina, the abused vagina, the vagina that is part of a neural network that is being neglected by a withholding or sexually selfish mate—literally cannot effectively condition the female brain with the chemicals that constitute the emotions of confidence, courage, connection, and joy.

So if you are to subdue and suppress women, and in such a way that you don’t need to actually pen them in or lock them up—in such a way that they come to “do it to themselves,” to suppress themselves, to lose joy and self-direction, to have no pleasure, to distrust the strength of love, to think human connection frail and unreliable—you must target the vagina.

As I learned about the incredible connection of the pelvic neural network to women’s minds and emotions, I could not help thinking about women I had met, from all walks of life, who had been terribly injured in just the ways that would harm or interfere with that mind-body circuitry. I could not get their faces out of my mind. I could not forget certain things they said, certain aspects of their affect, which so many of them had shared. I wondered if there were connections that we were blind to, in the way in which we were currently interpreting this kind of suffering. I realized that women I had met who had suffered vaginal illness, trauma, or injury, across many cultures and of many different ages, often shared in common certain ways of holding themselves; of standing and moving; and a certain expression in their eyes. I kept hearing how the phrase “I feel like I am dirty—like damaged goods” echoed in the words of so many women I had met: from women at a refugee camp in Sierra Leone, many of whom had suffered vaginal fistulas as a result of having been raped as an act of war, to women calling in to a rape crisis center in Edinburgh, Scotland, to the woman I met at a crowded café in Chelsea, Manhattan, who suffered from vulvodynia.

Were we missing the significance of vaginal trauma—just as we were missing the significance of female sexual pleasure—by reading vaginal trauma as “just” physical, or by misunderstanding the trauma of rape as “just” a PTSD-type reaction to a violent act? Were we missing what could be a much more profound and delicate understanding of just what was being harmed when a woman’s vagina was harmed?

I knew that for women, a fully functioning pelvic nerve is crucial for producing the dopamine, oxytocin, and other chemicals that raise levels of perception, confidence, and feistiness. Would injury or trauma to the vagina and the pelvic nerves materially interfere with the neural pathway’s delivery of those intoxicating chemicals to the female brain? And then, another vista swung open: Could that be why women’s vaginas were targeted with violence millennium after millennium? I could not argue that this was consciously tactical. But could it have been established, subconsciously, over the millennia, because it is effectively tactical? It is hard to repress and control a majority of the human population. What if this targeting had been discovered as an efficient tool?

In other words, just as men over the course of generations, in our earliest history would have noticed what we can now understand as a biologically based link between a sexually empowered woman and her high levels of happiness, hopefulness, and confidence—would they have noticed the effect of a corresponding biologically based link between a sexually traumatized woman and a lowered ability to muster happiness, hopefulness, and confidence?

When you spend time in a rape crisis center, as I have done, it is hard to avoid wondering if men are monsters. Why is rape a constant in every society?

Why does war always include mass rape of the enemy’s women? Why do so many men rape in a context of war? Feminists such as Kate Millett in Sexual Politics (1970), who argues that “rape is generally the result of male sadism and hatred of women,” and Susan Brownmiller, in Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), who argues that war turns men into perverts in order to turn them into rapists, tend to follow the individualized reading of sexuality posited by Freud. Thus they tend to psychologize all rape, which leads to the alarming possible conclusion that all men as individuals are potential sadists. But what if some rape is not personal, but instrumental and systemic?

In 2004, I went to Sierra Leone to report on the mass sexual violence that had been part of the brutal civil war that tore the country apart. The International Rescue Committee took me and several other supporters and journalists to recently rebel-held territory; there, we encountered hundreds of women who had been raped in the war, and in separate visits we met with dozens of rapists from the conflict. It was this trip that persuaded me that the Western model of rape—in which rape results from individual dysfunction, hostility, or perversion—could not account for the instrumentality of rape in the context of war.

We met the women in various settings, but on one visit we went to a refugee center, a walled compound—set in the midst of an open, barren plain—that housed what seemed like thousands of women who had been violently raped in the recent conflict. A single tree provided a little shade, and low, simple concrete structures that housed the women surrounded an unpaved courtyard. It was a haunting, purgatorial setting: for as far as the eye could see, women drifted slowly, aimlessly around the compound, and except for one or two aid workers and the security guards stationed at the compound entrance, there was not a single adult man.

The women showed tremendous courage. They performed a theater piece for us, which used elements of tribal dance to dramatize their emotions. One woman, playing a rapist, “attacked” another woman. The raw violence in the scene was startling.

After the performance, a female doctor introduced us to several of the women. One woman sat in painful silence as the doctor explained that the woman suffered from a vaginal fistula resulting from her attack. “A vaginal fistula,” the doctor explained, “is a tear or puncture in the wall of the vagina, which connects it to another organ, such as the bladder, colon, or rectum.” It was a very common injury in the region. Since there had not been enough antibiotic medication in the woman’s village to treat the woman, the infection in the wound had led to an odor that had driven her husband to repudiate her. That, too, was a fate that had befallen many of the other women at the compound who also suffered from vaginal fistulas.

At another point, we met a woman—a child really, fifteen years old—who had been kidnapped in Liberia (fifteen thousand teenage girls suffered a similar fate in the conflict), held as a sex slave, and raped repeatedly. She had managed to trick her kidnapper, take her year-old baby (whose father had been her captor), and escape. She had walked through the bush, eating wild yams, until she had made it across the border to an IRC compound, and relative safety.

These women were different from the women we met who were traumatized by amputations, or by gunfire, or by being forced to work in the diamond mines. There was something about what had happened to the rape victims that had efficiently switched a light off in them. These women, rejected by their tribes and families, moved in great groups together over the dusty mounds of earth as if they were adrift together. In spite of their individual courage, what was unmistakable was that aspects of their very souls, in some profound way, had been hollowed out of them. In any one woman, this dimming of vitality was notable; but when you saw this nation of drifting women, it was impossible to ignore. Something systemic had been done to them that had somehow, in a way unique to this trauma, blunted them at the level of engagement, curiosity, and will.

The doctor explained exactly how these women had sustained their injuries. The women had been shredded internally; deliberately. By the points of bayonets; by sharpened sticks; by broken bottles; by knives. Tens of thousands of women had been injured in exactly these ways. The doctor spoke about these injuries not as resulting from deviant acts perpetrated by random perverts, but as a common outcome in the conflict.

Why would thousands and thousands of soldiers, in a conflict situation, have used sharp objects to destroy the vaginas of thousands and thousands of women? There was nothing about the rapes, with these injuries, that seemed sexual to me or even psychodynamic. I now believe, given my understanding of the pelvic nerve and its relationship to female confidence, creativity, and will, that these tens of thousands of men were not “getting off” on damaging the internal pelvic structures of these tens of thousands of women.

Women are brutalized in conflicts in Africa and around the world in this way decade after decade. It was the commanders in Sierra Leone and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who ordered this kind of atrocity, and who ordered their troops to rape. Individual soldiers the IRC has interviewed have explained that they had no choice but to follow these orders—lest they be shot themselves. Why would such an order go out from a commander in an armed conflict? Could these commanders be giving these orders on the basis of something that is a kind of folk wisdom? In other words, could these commanders be ordering their troops to engage in atrocities that damage the female pelvic nerve, because centuries of experience have shown that a consequence of this kind of violence is that the women who experience it will be easier to subjugate?

I later interviewed others who work with women who have been violently raped in war. Jimmie Briggs, founder of the global antirape and antiviolence organization Man Up (Briggs was named a GQ Man of the Year in 2011 for his work on behalf of women traumatized by rape in war), travels frequently to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is one of the Ground Zeros of this practice: the United Nations estimates that four hundred thousand women have been raped during the recent civil war in that country.¹ Briggs has written a book on the subject of rape in war: “There is something different about victims of violent rape,” he said. “I will go on the record about this. I have interviewed people who have been traumatized just as severely in other ways and there is not this same outcome. I have seen the difference of the result of this kind of trauma from other kinds of trauma. It is indeed as if a light has gone out of these women’s eyes.”²

In another very different refugee camp, in a room with concrete walls painted blue-green, where white light slanted in from high unglassed windows and a few English sentences had been scratched onto a makeshift blackboard, I was introduced to some of Sierra Leone’s most brutal rapists: they were twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-year-old boys—child soldiers. They were being rehabilitated by the IRC, which was working to educate them and provide them with a safe harbor. Their eyes were overcast with pain; their polo shorts were ragged; drugs and terror had stunted their growth. These were simply children, who had themselves been kidnapped and traumatized, forced at gunpoint to rape. These children, who played soccer in a dusty courtyard after we had spoken with them, obviously did not do what they had done to the women in the other camp out of perverse pathology. The Freudian model that violent rape is the result of individual sexual deviancy simply does not account for the systemic use of violent rape in war.

Radical feminism sees rape as simply a demonstration of unequal power relations and takes as its motto the assertion that rape is about power, not sex. This is closer to what I now believe to be the truth, but it still misses the ultimate insight: If it is just about power, why involve the sex? Why not just beat, threaten, starve, or imprison a woman? You can get plenty of power over women in ways that are nonsexual.

But if your goal is to break a woman psychologically, it is efficient to do violence to her vagina. You will break her faster and more thoroughly than if you simply beat her—because of the vulnerability of the vagina as a mediator of consciousness. Trauma to the vagina imprints deeply on the female brain, conditioning and influencing the rest of her body and mind.

Rape is part of the standard tool kit in the deployment of genocidal army tactics. This insight allows us to understand that many men who rape—and perhaps most men who rape in war—are not doing this as a function of personal perversion. Understood in this way, rape is instrumental. Rape is a strategy of actual physical and psychological control of women, traumatizing via the vagina as a way to imprint the consequences of trauma on the female brain.

If we understand this, we understand that what happens to a woman’s vagina is far more important, for better and for worse, than we have realized. We can see that rape is a far more serious crime than the model of rape as a “sex crime” or a form of “violence” that lasts for the duration of the crime, and then perhaps posttraumatically. We should understand that while healing is possible, one never fully “recovers” from rape; one is never just the same after as before. Rape, properly understood, is more like an injury to the brain than a violent variation on sex. Rape, properly understood, is always aimed not just at the female sex organ but at the female brain.

RAPE STAYS IN THE FEMALE BRAIN

According to aid workers, body workers, and doctors I’ve interviewed, as well as according to some pioneering ne...