The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History

by Emma L.E. Rees

From South Park to Kathy Acker, and from Lars Von Trier to Sex and the City , women's sexual organs are demonized. Rees traces the fascinating evolution of this demonization, considering how calling the ‘c-word' obscene both legitimates and perpetuates the fractured identities of women globally. Rees demonstrates how writers, artists, and filmmakers contend with the dilemma of the vagina's puzzlingly ‘covert visibility'.

In our postmodern, porn-obsessed culture, vaginas appear to be everywhere, literally or symbolically but, crucially, they are as silenced as they are objectified. The A Literary and Cultural History examines the paradox of female genitalia through five fields of artistic literature, film, TV, visual, and performance art.

There is a peculiar paradox – unlike any other – regarding female genitalia. Rees focuses on this paradox of what is termed the ‘covert visibility' of the vagina and on its monstrous manifestations. That is, what happens when the female body refuses to be pathologized, eroticized, or rendered subordinate to the will or intention of another? Common, and often offensive, slang terms for the vagina can be seen as an attempt to divert attention away from the reality of women's lived sexual experiences such that we don't ‘look' at the vagina itself – slang offers a convenient distraction to something so taboo. The A Literary and Cultural History is an important contribution to the ongoing debate in understanding the feminine identity

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, History, Sexuality, Womens, Gender, Gender Studies

352 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2013

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

• David M Friedman, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, Robert Hale 2009 [2002]
• Emma LE Rees, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, Bloomsbury 2015 [2013]

A brace of books about the sex organs and what they mean, books that benefit enormously from being read in tandem – even though doing so does serve to erode some of the claims to uniqueness made by each of them. Both, in their own way, try to examine how and why the cultural taboos about concealing the genitals have been variously enacted, reinforced and challenged over time, and to consider how such attitudes have made individual people feel about themselves, about their bodies, and about others.

In the western world at least, the taboos about penises and vaginas became mixed up early on with religious prohibitions. This is something Friedman examines through art history, noting the abandonment of Classical nakedness in favour of a rather body-phobic tradition of fig leaves and the like.

But – in a process that is central to both books – this censorship only makes their invisible presence more powerfully felt. Rees describes this concept as ‘covert visibility’. Consider, for instance, a painting like Maerten van Heemskerck's Man of Sorrows, where the one part that's covered up ends up, in consequence, demanding all your attention (not least because this work notoriously shows Jesus in a decidedly tumescent state):


Maerten van Heemskerck, Man of Sorrows (1532)

One consequence of this is the confusion over motivations when artists or writers do try deliberately to focus on the genitals. Are such efforts laudatory attempts to undo the effects of centuries of oppressive censorship, revealing the unseen? Or are they somehow perpetuating the same old stereotypes, by allowing free rein to an audience's erotic fascination?

An important representative case study for Rees is Courbet's L'Origine du monde. The painting is unromantic, demystifying, somehow honest. It works contrary to the conservative traditions that have often made women's bodies an unknown quantity even to themselves. But at the same time, by cropping out the subject's head, arms and legs, it is also seriously reductive: woman as cunt.


Gustave Courbet, L'Origine du monde (1866)

Friedman's book throws up a fascinating parallel. In a very interesting discussion on the way the penis has often been central to ideas of colonialism and racism, he brings in the controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, especially his collection of black male nudes, Black Book (1986).


Robert Mapplethorpe, Man in Polyester Suit (1980)

Here again we have a subject whose head and other extremities have been removed from frame to focus attention on the genitals. Part of the shock value here, it's suggested, comes from the fact that it was still a novel concept to present naked black men as a fitting subject for artistic photography – Friedman notes for instance that not one of the portraits in Sullivan's canonical Nude: Photographs 1850-1980 is of a black man. But at the same time, Man in a Polyester Suit is inextricably tangled up with racist stereotypes of black man = big cock.

But again – why is this image so shocking (and it is shocking)? What is it about this one body part that is so objectifying, so shameful?

For Rees, this tight, dehumanising focus is part of a tradition for what, in the context of her book, she refers to as the ‘autonomised cunt’ – the genitals considered as somehow separate from one's identity. The same is true of the penis, of course, as the title of Friedman's book reminds us. For some reason, the sex organs are a part of the body that many people feel are not quite part of themseves – that leave people, in Rees's academic jargon, ‘radically disaggregated’. She traces an interesting genealogy of independent, talking vulvas – from the magic cunts of French fabliaux (later picked up in Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets) all the way through to the giant talking clitoris in South Park: The Movie.

This psychological ‘disaggregation’ of the genitals is linked to another equally strong tradition of their being severed – made literally independent. Rees discusses the violently severed vulva of Eurydice Kamvisseli's f/32, as well as Charlotte Gainsbourg's terrifying homemade clitorodectomy in Lars von Trier's Antichrist. This has obvious connections with ritualised practices like female genital mutilation, which Rees mentions briefly but emotionally in her conclusion; in Friedman's book, the subject is explored in a little more detail through the tradition of castrati (many of whom were ‘fully shaved’, as it was euphemistically called: testicles crushed between stones and then the penis sliced off) as well as a brief outline of how the United States bought into circumcision as part of the nineteenth-century anti-masturbation movement.


Jamie McCartney, Great Wall of Vagina (2011)

More parallels emerge in the modern ‘medicalisation’ of the genitals – for women, this concerns how they look, in the form of labiaplasties and so-called designer vaginas; for men, it's about new chemicals that can guarantee their performance and behaviour. I should point out that in making this comparison I am not trying to suggest equivalence – having an erection is genuinely necessary for lots of kinds of sex, whereas having some kind of Platonically ideal perfecto-cunt is not. Still, there are revealing similarities in the way that people's attitudes to their bodies have become co-opted by the medical industry. Friedman's explanation of how Viagra was developed is extraordinary. British physiologist Giles Brindley demonstrated his breakthrough in front of a packed convention in Las Vegas, with the kind of practical show-and-tell that you don't expect from a professional forum:

After calmly presenting his data from behind the podium, Brindley stepped in front of it and pulled down his pants. Moments earlier, you see, he had gone to the men's room and secretly injected himself [with papaverine]. And now, before a room full of strangers, there it was: the, uh, ‘evidence’.

The audience gasped. Brindley did not want the urologists to think he was fooling them with a silicone prosthesis, so he headed into the crowd, proof in hand, and asked them to inspect it. ‘I had been wondering why Brindley was wearing sweatpants,’ says Dr Arnold Melman…

Leonardo da Vinci, ‘coition figure’ (from the Notebooks) (c. 1500)

Despite the many points of connection, it must be said that Rees and Friedman have written very different books, which represent totally divergent choices in terms of scope and tone. Friedman works chronologically from the ancient world to the modern age, identifying various key transitional moments along the way – the Renaissance boom in anatomy, Freud, feminism, modern medicine etc. Rees's book is much shallower – it's really a study in avant-garde art and popular culture from the last sixty years, and everything before that is unfortunately corralled into an introductory chapter of ‘Antecedents’.

This is a great shame. When she suddenly dips back from Judy Chicago to consider the baroque painter Artemisia Genlieschi, you can feel the whole book acquire new depth and scope almost within the space of a couple of paragraphs. She has many interesting things to say here and her book needs much more of this stuff – I would much rather have jettisoned some of the discussion of Sex and the City in favour of more detailed examination of the so-called ‘antecedents’. And while Friedman examines Freudian theory from, as it were, the outside, Rees simply accepts the jargon of psychiatry and makes unquestioning asides about, for example, how Moby-Dick reflects castration anxiety. Her terminology is in general a bit too woolly for my liking – there is a lot of wordplay about how ‘the c-word’ is ‘the unseen-word’ or even ‘ob/seen’, all of which I found extremely tiresome. She also keeps her research restricted to the library, whereas Friedman talks to many of the people concerned, including a very sensitive and sympathetic interview with Andrea Dworkin.

I guess Friedman has a penis of his own, but it's kept very much zipped up – his narrative voice goes for a measured, detached neutrality. Rees, by contrast, regularly breaks out into first-person comments which leave some sections looking more like a political rant than a cultural history. In fact she expresses a hope that ‘political engagement’ will be one of the consequences of her book. Although I share much of her anger, I think this tone weakens, not strengthens, her argument: the fact that there is indeed much to get angry about only makes it more important (in my opinion, anyway) for the narrative voice to retain a certain objective distance. I suppose that's my journalistic background speaking.

(While I'm complaining. There is also the odd throwaway comment that rubbed me the wrong way in Rees, such as when she describes male sex toys as being ‘for people who don't get out much […] a house shared with your mother and your unfulfilled dreams for company’. No comment on the much larger, apparently sexually healthy market in dildos and vibrators.)

All the same, Rees's book grew on me a lot once I got used to it. It's misleadingly titled, but it does what it tries to do very well.

Anyway, I suspect that this tonal difference is a clue to the gendered nature of the debate. Men perhaps feel able to consider their cocks historically, objectively, whereas for many women vaginas are in important ways still a political issue. Whether this difference should be leveraged or ignored, I'm not sure. The language itself – as Rees constantly reminds us – does not help; she has to spend too much time in her introduction explaining that despite her title, she does in fact understand the difference between a vulva and a vagina in anatomical terms. Her word of choice in most of the text is cunt, which she hopes to restore to a purely denotative (she calls it ‘orthophemistic’) realm.

I feel differently; I think it's pretty cool having such a powerful word in your corner (pardon the image). I also can't help feeling that – though huge strides absolutely need to be taken, especially in certain parts of the world – still there are advantages to retaining a little taboo-ness when it comes to what's in your pants. It's possible to imagine being completely without issues or prejudices and seeing a vagina as neutrally as I see an elbow. But I'm pleased I don't.

[Vartika · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the outset, I'd like to give credit where it's due: Emma L.E. Rees is very creative with her section headings — they are the main reason I purchased this book.

The Vagina examines the silencing and objectification of the everpresent 'cunt' in western culture, tracing its "covert visibility" through various fields of artistic expression. It turns careful attention towards the myths surrounding women's sexuality in general and the autonomised cunt in specific, using its representations — and even the lack thereof — in forms ranging from slang and the slippery road of language, from myths like that of the vagina dentata, to the more complex and conscious construction of art.

As a literary and cultural history of female genitalia, The Vagina has many triumphs, but far more in the latter realm: I found the section concerning Visual Art extremely interesting and illuminating, but in most other sections I was wondering why a very specific niche was being consulted. For a book dealing with the "covert visibility" of the cunt, perhaps an examination of less 'bold' representations (strictly for the lack of a better word) in the literary and performing arts could have possibly been far more pathbreaking.

This was also not an easy read, partly because as cultural history it contains long elucidatory passages on representational instances/myths of mutilation and penetration, but also because the very quality of writing sometimes wavered: punny, witty and snarky in some parts and dry academese in others. At some points, I found the author's arguments as and against critics to be somewhat forced and unconvincing. This was especially disconcerting because the genitalia has long been a contentious topic amongst schools of feminism as a legitimate symbol of womanhood, and the author's arguments were quite frankly far too centrist for those with good emancipatory tastes.

Nevertheless, on a whole The Vagina was an engaging and informative read. The concluding chapter in its wholehearted embracing of such forms of personal as political added a lot of perspective to this book, but I really do wish it were a tad longer. I LOVED how this book briefly, but adeptly, addressed the problem with aesthetic genital augmentation procedures. I was unsure about the way it identified and examined the (problems with our) disjoint between the female identity and the female body, but its arguments for visibility were fair.

Either way, Rees' book was good exposure for a topic so unjustly taboo. I'd say this book is worth a read for the truly curious.

Do it for your cunt.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

While this is more of a cultural history rather than a literary one, it is still a very interesting and enlightening read about how the vagina is seen, or rather not seen within society, how this has changed over the years, and how it continues to change. Rees uses some very inventive chapter titles to discuss the vagina in literature, visual arts, film/TV, and performance art after an intriguing introduction that explains what triggered her to write this book, how it was writing it (including references to her time at the Gladstone Library which is where I read it and where I currently am reviewing it, rather pleasing side note there), and how the words used to refer to it has developed and changed over time. Most importantly, Rees discusses the use of the word cunt and how it is technically more accurate than vagina but how it's viewed in society makes it unlikely to become the conventional term for it, despite efforts to make it so (personally I love the word cunt and use it often, both properly and as a swear, as I do the word fuck).

[Yoruichi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book relates a clearly more cultural than historical study of the vagina. It is still interesting though and helps accepting the c-word. As my mother tongue is French, a language where the word doesn't have as potent a connotation as in English, I have no problem with the c-word. Yet, it was a good overview of how the inner and outer parts of women reproductive organs are thought in the Anglo-Saxon cultures. Too bad Rees doesn't explain why she chose the works of art she's talking about and not others. But this was a pleasant book to read.

[Hannah Hethmon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The introduction was fascinating, but I had to put the book down for good around page 80 as the academic jargon was just too dense and the rapid fire references too obscure for me to follow. If you like reading/regularly read academic journals and monographs, then you’ll find some fascinating insight here, but the unnecessarily wordy academic sentences frustrated me and distracted me from the content as I repeatedly had to stop to decipher them.

[Marian Leica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first started this book when I was writting an essay about the depiction of the vagina in art and cinema. It proved to be an excellent academic source as it is well written and documented. Occasionally abundant in details, it asks for the reader's commitment and patience.

[Onyx · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very interesting analysis of historical representations of the vulva and very much appreciated the utilisation of witty and yet impactful word play (e.g the un/seen word and seen or obscene?). There was a decent amount of subject matter covered, however it pretty much exclusively focused on western interpretations of the female organs. It was also painstakingly repetitive and had excessive use of jargon and extravagant vocabulary which just made this text hard to wade through. It could have definitely been cut down or covered more realms of art in its 350 pages or so. I am also utterly confused and concerned at why the introduction seemed so fixedly desperate to compare cunt to the n word? Why is that even relevant to this debate, as a white woman especially she came off exceptionally uneducated, quoting a white man claiming there is no offence in white people saying slurs against Black people to “add” to her argument? Like ah yes let’s add another white person to wager in on something which has nothing to do with them? They have no say in that?
I also left this book feeling unconvinced at the authors argument that “cunt” should be de-stigmatised and removed from its association with vulgarity as even if this was true, what would it achieve? Institutional oppression and violent discrimination would still be rife against women and their now “cunts” as apposed to vaginas/vulvas. This plight of activism came across privileged and dare i say insignificant when femicide has been declared now as a national emergency, violence against women has skyrocketed, FGM is still prevalent, female children are being married to their rapists under corrupt “Islamic” states to avoid persecution of the perpetrator (Headscarves and Hymens by Mona Eltahaway), medical racism leads to Black women being 3x more likely to die during childbirth and the prosecution of rapists in the justice system being less than 1%. I get her sentiment that female genitals serve as a center point of misogyny and this needs to be urgently rectified but decensoring “cunt” will not have that impact.

[Davina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps, as a man, the best thing I could do would be to keep my mouth shut. That said, I struggled with this work. I meticulously avoid art history, and art criticism at University, because I always felt intimidated, and defended my fear by believing that the whole genre was nothing but utter nonsense, where anyone can spout off regarding the meaning of a work without any grounding at all, other than a theory without empirical basis. I feel at times that fear that I am not familiar with most of the works discussed, but still wonder of the theory and method of critique are valid. Asking then, if a lot of the discussion is relevant and gives us any better insight in to the experience of being a woman, and, then if the overall these is built on a solid foundation. I don't disagree with many of the authors points, even when I am left unsure if the preceding narrative adequately argued her point. Certainly the conclusion is powerful, and felt like a huge shift from the prior chapters. The conclusion feels grounded in a lived experience, and asks powerful and important questions. I am grateful to have read this, I will say I found it a difficult read for my own reasons. My hesitation to recommend is based on the density of the argument, and my own questions as to a lot of the relevance of her examples. I learned a lot, and am glad for that.

[Anna Sicard · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to this book. I could barely finish it, the entire thing was extremely dry. I had no idea what the author was trying to get at the majority of the time with her "concepts". I would only recommend if you need a book to help you fall asleep.

[dangerous at every speed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wandered slightly, intensely academic (which was a shock to begin with, but just resulted in a better analysis) and impeccably researched.

[Ellison · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Feels' like a term paper with a 40 page introduction. Mentions various sections of society that data appears within. B/W pix, color pix. Occasional insight.

[Faras_bookclub · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was so not for me 😢 I’m not sure what I was expecting when I bought it, I don’t think I properly looked into it… This might be for someone into art/ art history maybe. For me personally it was too graphic at times and boring, I had a hard time getting through this one…