Raising the Skirt: The Unsung Power of the Vagina

by Catherine Blackledge

'A meticulous guide not only to the vagina but to changing perceptions of womanhood' OBSERVER
'An empowering and enlightening book' IRISH TIMES

The vagina is the ultimate symbol of female power. Sexual power, creative power and the power to prevent harm. For too long, though, the true extent of vaginal power has been ignored, hidden and misrepresented.

Raising the skirt: the unsung power of the vagina reveals this revolutionary view of female genitalia and points the way to a new understanding of what it means to be female. An inspiration for millennia, the vagina is actually a muscular marvel of engineering - sensitive and strong, fluid and flexible. Far from being a passive vessel, female genitalia control the most important role of all: the survival of the species.

Originally published as THE STORY OF V: OPENING PANDORA'S BOX

Genres: Nonfiction

400 pages, Paperback

Published February 20, 2020

Reviews

[Nikayla Reize · Rating 5 out of 5]

Western Christian authors writing about sexual ethics should have to read up about the history of this stuff!

Thesis: “The idea of the vagina as a passive vessel, a simple sheath to surround the penis, is one of science’s greatest misconceptions. What science is now revealing is that female genitalia are all about control – active control – and that the internally-fertilising female is a supremely successful sexual and reproductive strategist.” Pg 13

1. The Origin of the World: summarizes the many different examples throughout history and across the globe of women “lifting their skirts” to change the world.

“Accounts of how mighty the vagina is – raising the skirt stories – are astonishingly common and long-standing: look at the history, folklore or mythology of any country or culture and you’ll soon find them... Displaying the vagina in this way gives women the power to control the elements: calming the sea to protect sea-faring spouses, subduing storms, and quieting and dispelling whirlwinds, hailstorms and lightning. Raising the skirt is also an apotropaic act – capable of averting evil: vaginal display scares away attacking bears or lions, exorcises demons and drives out the devil.” Pg 11

“In 551 BCE, collective vulval display changed the outcome of war between the forces of Media and Persia; in nineteenth-century China, rows of older women would stand on the top of the city wall and expose their genitals to frighten off enemies. This is raising the skirt to shock and bring opponents to their senses. Just over sixty years ago, in 1958, seven thousand women in west Cameroon, Africa raised their skirts in an incredible display of vaginal power to protest against government regulations changing for the worse the way the women farmed their land. The women won.” Pg 11

“Terracotta statues from Alexandria, Egypt (2-3 CE) depict women standing proud in full-length gowns, heads adorned with decorated and detailed headdresses. Facing forwards, eyes direct, they gracefully raise their fancy frocks to reveal their naked vaginas to all. Cylinder seals from Syria feature some of the oldest skirt-lifting images (1400 BCE); fast forward across millennia and continents and an eighteenth-century statue of Shinto-Buddhist goddess Kannon raising her skirt is still venerated today." pg 12

“The fairy tale of Snow White, is suggested to have arisen from an ancient Italian ritual designed to enhance the fecundity of the earth itself. A beautiful, noble girl would be sent down a mine which was running low in iron ore in order to expose Mother Earth to her vital female essence or energy.” Pg 38

“How a woman’s egg is 80,000 times bigger than a man’s sperm. We talk about how science now shows that it’s not the active sperm swimming to the passive egg – rather the egg pulls the sperm to it, and at the final moment of conception, it’s not a minuscule sperm actively penetrating a passive egg, it’s a massive egg actively choosing and engulfing a tiny sperm.” Pg 23

“Staggeringly, studies are beginning to show that in many, if not all, cases it is the female, courtesy of her intelligent genitalia, who decides whether or not a male will have a chance to become a father.” Pg 27

“The major western religion, Christianity, is famously renowned for being sex-negative and sexist. For centuries the men of the Christian church pushed the notion that sex was not for pleasure, but solely for procreation. Indeed, in their eyes, intercourse for pleasure was contrary to natural law and hence sinful. The result of this line of reasoning was some very binding sex laws. In England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the church declared sex illegal on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, as well as for forty days before Easter and Christmas.” Pg 87-88

“For centuries, women could only take an active role in Christian life if they renounced their genitalia – and took a vow of celibacy.” Pg 88

“One of the most influential theologians of the early Christian church, St Augustine (354–430), made his view of the vagina clear with his infamous comment that we are all born inter faeces et urinam, ‘between shit and piss’. Resonances of this belief are found in language – one German word for vagina is, bluntly, Damm, the dam between faeces and urine, an unclean place.” Pg 89

“Names can also be used to make a political point or emphasise a particular idea. The words ‘genitals’ and ‘genitalia’ derive from the depiction of these organs as parts of generation. .. Conceiving children is certainly not the most common use the vagina and penis are put to. Significantly, what this terminology omits to mention is that these organs are also organs of ecstasy and pleasure, capable of generating orgasm as well as offspring.” Pg 87

“Some manuscripts seemed to declare that women had two penises – a vaginal penis and a clitoral one too. Thomas Bartholin’s 1668 Anatomy was one of these – despite his defence of women’s genitalia differing from men’s. For Bartholin, the vagina ‘becomes longer or shorter, broader or narrower, and swells sundry ways according to the lust of the woman’. It ‘is of a hard and nervous flesh, and somewhat spongy, like the Yard’. However, the clitoris is also for Bartholin akin to ‘the female yard or prick’, as it ‘resembles a man’s yard in situation, substance, composition, repletion with spirits and erection’, and it also ‘hath somewhat like the nut and foreskin of a Man’s Yard’” pg 120

Thought: If God’s design for sex is reproduction, why doesn’t the male ejaculate directly onto the egg? Why the long and winding journey between point A and B? Theological implications….

“Not only are these ducts extremely narrow and extraordinarily convoluted in design; they also place a female’s eggs far beyond the immediate reach of sperm. In female elephants, the distance from vulva to ovary can measure more than three and a half metres. Yet beetles manage to take the biscuit for distance. The tiny female plant beetle (Charidotella propinqua) has such a long, twisted duct system, spiralling one way and then another, looping around and frequently doubling back on itself, that, if it is stretched out, it measures more than twenty times the length of her body. From a transport efficiency viewpoint, it appears the general design of a female’s genitalic ducts does not fit the theory of female genitalia acting as a straightforward conduit for sperm and offspring.” Pg 142

“The vagina, it seems, is designed to enable females to exert an extraordinary influence over which sperm will successfully fertilise their eggs. A female’s genitals are not a simple thoroughfare for sperm, but comprise an exquisitely structured organ with the complexity and sensitivity to determine the paternity of a female’s offspring. Indeed, it is now realised that it is the drive to determine paternity that has led to the evolution of a female’s amazing, beautiful, awe-inspiring internally fertilising genitals. Astonishingly, female control of paternity can be wielded either before, during or after copulation. In stark contrast to her previous incarnation as a passive creature, the picture that is emerging of the internally fertilising female is of a supremely successful sexual and reproductive strategist. Across different species, female traits influence who gains access to their gametes in a myriad subtle, yet striking ways. Copulation, insemination and fertilisation all take place within the female’s body, on her turf. Consequently, it is her sexual biology and sexual behaviour that set the ground rules for successful sexual reproduction. In this game of life, it is the female’s big brooding body against a mass of minuscule sperm. It’s her long ovarian obstacle course that the male’s spermatozoa must traverse on their odyssey to the egg. Hence it is female genital structure that lies at the heart of reproductive control. Courtesy of their sensitive, muscular, complex genitalia, females control the paternity of their offspring.” Pg 149

The female’s body sorts the sperm and chooses exactly which sperm is best for HER – the narrative of the victorious little sperm making it to the egg to penetrate and conquer is not based on reality –

“Depending on the female, the sperm’s destination could be her sperm-storage sac, her sperm-digesting pouch, her fertilisation site or the exit to the outside world.” Pg 163

Chapter 4: Eve’s Secrets
“Although it is impossible to know for certain, and absolutely, why a large body of clitoral information disappeared sometime between 1672 and 1998, there are some clues. In de Graaf’s day, it was felt that female sexual pleasure within marriage was morally acceptable, as female orgasm was understood to be essential for conception to occur …However, this perspective on the clitoris (and other aspects of female genitalia) began to change in the late eighteenth century as the realisation that female orgasm was not necessary for conception to occur started to sink in... For the clitoris, this shift in scientific thinking regarding female orgasm meant that it was stripped of its role in reproduction. And without a reproductive function, the clitoris (and female sexual pleasure) could both be frowned upon freely by the Christian church.” Pg 184

“It is shocking to realise the clitoral downsizing of the nineteenth century was not confined to anatomy textbooks in the west. Redefined as a non-reproductive, i.e. non-essential sexual organ, this portion of the vagina became open to vilification – a scapegoat for supposed female sexual sins. .. Instead of being prized, the clitoris became something to be purged. In the second half of the nineteenth century, and over a period of ten years, the British surgeon Isaac Baker Brown performed clitoridectomies – removal of the clitoris – at his clinic, the London Surgical Home for the Reception of Gentlewomen and Females of Respectability suffering from Curable Surgical Disorders. Science sanctioned these excisions using the convenient ‘theory’ that removing the clitoris could cure conditions as varied as incontinence, uterine haemorrhaging, hysteria, and mania brought on by masturbation. Indeed, Brown was so renowned for his skills as a surgeon that in 1865 he was elected president of the Medical Society of London. The following year he produced a book promoting clitoral excision – On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy and Hysteria in Females. A review of Brown’s book in the Christian publication, The Church Times, contained the suggestion that the surgical procedure should be recommended to ‘suitable’ parishioners.” Pg 186

“While cutting out the clitoris was seen as one way of preventing women from masturbating, in the US, cornflakes king J.H. Kellogg had another remedy. He advocated applying ‘pure carbolic acid to the clitoris’, if girls would not stop pleasuring themselves. These attitudes towards the clitoris and female sexual pleasure were found elsewhere in the west. Swiss anti-masturbation doctor Tissot pushed propaganda claiming that female masturbation was responsible for clitoral scabbing, and other female ‘problems’. According to him, these included vapours, hysteria, incurable jaundice and a uterine fury that, ‘depriving them of their modesty and reason, reduced them to the level of the most lascivious of brutes’.” Pg 186

“The hymen appears to be an elusive creature for many. … The first text in Greek medical literature to mention the hymen focuses on denying the idea of it tearing during a female’s first experience of sexual intercourse. … Despite such shaky foundations, the hymen has, over the centuries, been invested with more social, moral and even legal significance than any other piece of human flesh.” Pg 198

“The issue it came to represent was that of virginity – the condition of never having had sexual intercourse. The importance of guaranteeing the virginity of a bride-to-be has its origins in the desire of men to ensure as far as possible that any offspring born to the woman they marry are their own...The hymen, because it was seen, wrongly, as the anatomical guarantee of female virginity, became both the sign and symbol of vaginal virtue. As a result, vaginal bleeding was seen as an essential part of a woman’s first experience of sexual intercourse. In many cultures, if blood on the sheets was not forthcoming, a woman was in trouble – brides in biblical times could be stoned to death for failing the bloodied sheet test.” Pg 199

“The veneration of female virginity and the elevated importance of delicate tissue has led to some strange beliefs and sexual practices. Two of the central tenets of Christian faith focus on virginity – namely, the belief in Mary’s Immaculate Conception of her son, Jesus, and his subsequent virgin birth. This double hymen miracle is highlighted in the Apocryphal Gospels, which has a suspicious Salome feeling with her fingers to ascertain the truth or not of Mary’s virgin birth. But as Salome placed her fingers on Mary’s vagina, she screamed with pain and withdrew them. Apparently, this divine intervention convinced her that Mary still had a hymen – a miracle had occurred.” Pg 200

Did you know that males have a clitoris?

“Firstly, the clitoris has a purpose other than pleasure. Secondly, the clitoris is not unique to females. Males have a clitoris too. And the role that a male’s clitoris plays is the same role as performed by a female’s.” pg 208

“For humans, if the Y chromosome did not exist, it appears we would all be women, or at least all have ovaries, because the basic human blueprint is female. Both ovaries and testes have a common starting point – the genital or gonadal ridge, a nub of tissue which develops during the first three weeks of all embryos’ lives. And for just over forty days and forty nights (forty-two to be precise), female and male embryos are indistinguishable from each other.” Pg 208

“In the female, genital tissue tends to open up, flowering or spreading, whereas in the male the equivalent structures tend to pull in or fuse. This can be seen with the female’s inner lips, which unfurl and fan outwards, while in the male, the same tissue comes together, fusing in what is called the peno-scrotal raphe or midline. This is why men have what can appear to be a scar running the length of the underside of their penis and scrotal sac. ..Genitalia are unique in showing this visible seam of creation.” Pg 210

“Crown, corpus and crura: this is the three-part structure of a man’s corpora cavernosa. Does anything sound familiar? This is the male clitoris. Together the urethra, the corpus spongiosum and the corpora cavernosa make up the main components of the external genital apparatus known as the penis.” Pg 213

“A woman’s clitoris is, in fact, made up of exactly the same type of tissue that a man’s corpora cavernosa is. That is, the structure that is called a clitoris in women is found in men too, but in men it is called the corpora cavernosa. Men have a clitoris. This is why it is inaccurate to say that a woman’s clitoris is a penile remnant, or a homologue of the penis. A woman’s clitoris (her corpora cavernosa) is analagous to a man’s corpora cavernosa (his clitoris). This fact has been recognised before, but was not appreciated and did not become common knowledge. It is spelt out very clearly in the 1987 book Eve’s Secrets: A New Theory of Female Sexuality by Josephine Lowndes Sevely.” Pg 216

“Female sexual arousal, just like male sexual arousal, can be triggered by a seemingly infinite variety of sources. Moreover, the way in which a woman’s clitoris, or corpora cavernosa tissue, becomes engorged and erect with blood mirrors the mechanism followed in men (this is why Viagra works for women too).” Pg 218

“This mechanism of arousal is also at play when women are not conscious of it. During sleep, in particular during periods of REM sleep, which occur in approximately 90–100–minute cycles four or five times a night, woman experience nocturnal erections affecting their clitoris, labia and vagina (as well as an increase in uterine contractions). These tumescent episodes, which result from increased genital blood flow, parallel men’s nocturnal erections of their corpora cavernosa, and are evident from early infancy and throughout adult life.” Pg 219

Ch 7 The Function of the Orgasm .. did you know – women don’t ovulate every month? They ovulate less than 50% of the time (seems like the purpose of sex isn’t just procreation)

“Whether a woman has sex or not is a factor in whether she ovulates or not, and it seems that the more sex, the greater the likelihood of ovulating. Intriguingly, studies show that women experiencing regular sexual activity with men ovulated in over 90 per cent of their cycles, and had regular ovarian rhythms of around 29.5 days, whereas women who abstained from, or participated in only sporadic sexual activity, did not ovulate in over 50 per cent of their cycles.” Pg 322

“The other in question was the latest tool of the medical profession – the vibrator. Vibration therapy, as detailed beautifully in Rachel Maines’ book The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria’, the Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, was the answer to all tired medics’ prayers. Whether steam-powered, water-propelled, foot-operated or, from 1883 onwards, thanks to English doctor and inventor Joseph Mortimer Granville, electromechanical, vibrators provided much-needed relief for physicians and their patients. Female orgasms could now be provided at the flick of a switch. Business, it seemed, boomed. In 1873, it was estimated that in the US ‘more than three-fourths of all the practice of the [medical] profession are devoted to the treatment of diseases peculiar to women’, with the annual estimated aggregate income which ‘physicians must thank frail women for’ totalling around $150 million.” Pg 340

“Vibrators took off at home, as well as in the doctor’s surgery. In the US in the 1890s, women could purchase a $5 portable vibrator – ‘perfect for weekend trips’, ran the advertisement – rather than paying at least $2 a pop for a visit to the physician. Delightfully, the vibrator was the fifth household appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, kettle and toaster. And as vibrators became available for home use, the ancient art of physician-prescribed vaginal massage to orgasm slowly became defunct. Male medical hands were increasingly freed to perform other healing tasks.” Pg 341

“Moreover, it should be said that although ejaculation is classically associated as an integral part of male orgasm, strictly speaking this is incorrect. Ejaculation and orgasm are two separate physiological mechanisms. While orgasm is a perception accompanied by motor or muscular activity, ejaculation is just a reflex, a motor pattern that can occur independent of the brain (for example, in a spinal-cord-transected human or animal).” Pg 359

“One of the most startling recent discoveries about the characteristics of orgasm is that these muscle contractions are one of the first sensations humans ever experience. That is, incredibly, both female and male foetuses orgasm in the womb.” Pg 360

“The authors concluded their astonishing account of in utero female orgasm by saying: ‘The current observation seems to show not only that the excitement reflex can be evoked in female fetuses at the third trimester of gestation but also that the orgasmic reflex can be elicited during intrauterine life.’ Perhaps it’s not surprising to hear that male foetuses too have been found pleasuring themselves in the womb. Indeed, it’s not unusual for parents-to-be to see their embryonic son grasping his erect penis in utero, while moving his hands in a repetitive masturbatory fashion, for up to fifteen minutes at a time.” Pg 360

[Henry Le Nav · Rating 4 out of 5]

At some point in the past decade, I ran into a quote by Catherine Blackledge about two of her favorite smells. The quote was from her 2003 book The Story of V : Opening Pandora's Box. Some would find the quote offensive, but I found it so blatantly honest that to me it was charming. Due to the fact that one of her favorite smells is also one of mine (reappropriated to my wife), this single quote fired a craving to want to read this book. Unfortunately the book was available only in dead tree versions and not Kindle. I am too old and decrepit to mess with dead tree books any longer so every once in a while I would check Amazon and click the “Tell the Publisher! I'd like to read this book on Kindle” button. I was delighted to find that Blackledge had updated the book and released it under a new title Raising the Skirt: The Unsung Power of the Vagina and was now available in a Kindle version at a very reasonable price.

Generally I found the book to be quite enjoyable, well written and I learned a few things that I didn’t know. I enjoyed the historical aspects and the myths, and the phenomena of baring one’s nethers to ward off evil. I found a few more blatant quotes that further charmed me. I enjoyed the book, but…

My interest is really limited to human beings. I have lost any sense of wonder of drawing lessons about human sexuality from the members of the animal kingdom. I have read about prairie voles and bonobos to the point of my eyes glaze over at their mere mention. So I was somewhat disappointed with the amount of cunning stunts (the author’s words) that she related from the natural world to overturn “the idea of the vagina as a passive vessel – acting simply as a channel for the passage of sperm in one direction and offspring in the other.” There seemed to be an endless menagerie of birds, insects, primates, snakes, spiders all with some “steely” vagina that could detect lousy sperm and somehow divert, digest, or eject it. The author seemed to take some sort of feminine pride in these feats.

I have been to the zoo a few times and once I observed the seemingly prehensile pecker of an elephant sniffing around a female. It almost seemed like another trunk. It was rather an elegant solution for the question, how to mate when you weigh 4 tons. I also saw a giraffe whose rather long erection formed and retracted at a moment’s notice. It looked like the piston in a hydraulic cylinder. These are really amazing prick tricks, but I can’t say that they in any way made me proud to be male or take pride in what is between my legs.

It is a good book and I enjoyed it, but I found the amount of gyne-zoology to be tedious and a bit weird in its abundance. You are preaching to the choir, a few examples would have sufficed. it reduced what should have been a 5 star rating to 4.

[Poppy Ysabella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book in bookclub - a truly eye opening, mind boggling read. My only ‘complaint’ is that I feel it weren’t written for the average reader, and could have been simplified a tiny bit in certain areas. Every woman and man should read this book. Power to the pussy!

[Norbertt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un estudio bien documentado sobre la historia social, antropológica, psicológica y biológica de cómo ha ido cambiando la percepción de la vagina, el clítoris, la vulva y el útero.

"Una de las ideas sobre los genitales femeninos que ha perdurado es que la vagina es un recipiente pasivo..." a lo largo de este libro se demuestra que al contrario tiene mucha más influencia de la que se cree.

Aporta muchos datos que desconocía y que me hicieron ver de forma diferente a este conjunto de órganos, si, también aporta datos biológicos que me hicieron volver a maravillar con su anatomía y fisiología, el cuerpo es tan maravilloso y la vagina lo es aun más

[Mónica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Claramente es un gran lugar para cuestionar el papel de la vulva en la historia, pero al ser uno de los primeros no deja detrás el binarismo, que evidentemente es necesario para entender cómo estamos construidos, pero no lo cuestiona y se deja guiar por él. No sé. Se siente insatisfactorio.

Por otra parte, no sé qué tan relevante es que la mitad del libro hable de la biología de otros animales.