Woman: An Intimate Geography (11 page)

Read Woman: An Intimate Geography Online

Authors: Natalie Angier

Tags: #test

page_48<br/>
Page 48
But those ten centimeters, O grunting, flailing lady, are not the width of the baby's head. No, the average seven-pound baby has a head five inches across, and some fat-headed infants have skulls nearly six inches wide. While the baby's head does compress into something the shape of a keel as it rams and glides its way to the light thank Ishtar for the sutures, fontanel, and ductile plates of the newborn's skull nonetheless you can count on your vagina's stretching during delivery to proportions unimagined when you had trouble negotiating your first tampon insertion. So the vagina is a balloon, a turtleneck sweater, a model for the universe itself, which, after all, is expanding in all directions even as we sit here and weep.
Yet mouths are expandable clefts too, and who would think of the mouth as a passive receptacle? So it is that the vagina is sometimes thought of as a toothed organ, by analogy with the mouth: a hungry, sucking, masticating, devouring orifice, capable of depleting a man's resources fatally if he gives in to its allure too often. Or the vagina is the moist, soothing, kissing mouth; the word
labia
means lips, of course, and human ethologists such as Desmond Morris have proposed that women wear lipstick to emphasize the resemblance between upper and lower labia, to recapitulate the lines of the hidden genitals on the poster of the face.
Nor is the vagina limited to metaphors of opening. It can be thought of as a closed system, hands pressed together in prayer, the Big Crunch rather than the expanding universe of the Big Bang. Most of the time, a woman's vagina is not a tube or a hole; instead, the walls drape inward and firmly touch each other. The vagina thus can switch states between protected and exposed, introverted and inviting. And so it gives rise to the imagery of flowering, of bursting open: lotuses, lilies, leaves, split pecans, split avocados, the wings of a damselfly. The artist Judy Chicago took the notion of the blooming, procreative vagina and fairly hoisted it up a flagpole in one of her most famous works,
The Dinner Party
, in which such feminist heroines of history and mythology as Mary Wollstonecraft, Kali, and Sappho are seated at a table, preparing to eat from dinner plates shaped like female genitals. Some criticized Chicago's work for its piousness and vulgarity (a neat trick, combining the two), while others attacked it as "reinforcing womb-centered, biologically deterministic ways of thinking," as Jane Ussher recounts in
The Psychol-

 

page_49<br/>
Page 49
ogy of the Female Body
. Whatever the abstract artistic worthiness of
The Dinner Party
may be, Chicago had an excellent germ of an idea: a woman's genitals are a force of nature, and they do have a life, or lives, of their own. I'm not talking about their role in procreation; I refer instead to a very different sort of imagery, that of the niche, the habitat, the ecosystem. The vagina is its own ecosystem, a land of unsung symbiosis and tart vigor. Sure, the traditional concept of the vagina is ''It's a swamp down there!" but "tidal pool" would be more accurate: aqueous, stable, yet in perpetual flux.
Beginning on the border of the vaginal environment, we come to a small mountain, the mons pubis, also called the mons veneris, which means "mountain of Venus," the Love Mount. But let's not get carried away with woozy romance;
veneris
also gives rise to the term
venereal disease
. The mons veneris is made mons by a thick pad of fatty tissue that cushions the pubic symphysis, the slightly movable joint between your left and right pubic bones. The joint, which is relatively delicate and easily bruised by a bad jolt on a bicycle, is further cushioned at adolescence when the carpet of pubic hair grows in (assuming that you have requisite responsiveness to androgens). The pubic hair serves other purposes as well. It traps and concentrates pelvic odors, which can be quite attractive to a mate if they are the odors of health, as I will discuss below. Moreover, the pubic hair is a useful visual cue for us primates, who are, after all, a visually oriented species. The hair showcases the genital area and allows it to stand out from the less significant landscape around it. If women wear lipstick as a subconscious way of evoking their pudenda in public, perhaps they are only following in men's footsteps. By growing a beard, a man turns his face into an echo of his crotch; and the capacity to grow a beard very likely predates the use of cosmetics by a few hundred thousand years.
Extending down from the mons veneris are two long folds of skin, the labia majora, or major lips. The outer sides of the labia are covered with pubic hair, while the inner sides have no follicles but are well supplied with oil and sweat glands. Beneath the skin of the labia majora is a crisscross of connective tissue and fat. The fat of the labia, like that of the breasts and hips but unlike that of the mons veneris is sensitive to estrogen, the hormone of sexual maturity. Thus the labia swell when adolescence sends a surge of estrogen through the body

 

page_50<br/>
Page 50
and retreat when the hormone subsides at menopause. Under the fat is erectile tissue, which is a spongy mesh that engorges with blood during sexual arousal. Because the labia absorb blood so readily, they also become incessantly engorged during pregnancy, when the volume of circulating blood doubles (at the same time, they can turn a coppery maroon color like the punkiest vampire shade of lipstick on the market).
The erotic and mythic taxonomy of our genitals continues. Inside the labia majora are the nymphae, named for the Greek maidens of the fountain, whose libidos were reputedly so robust that they gave birth to the concept of nymphomania.
*
The more pedestrian name for nymphae is labia, minora, or little lips, the exquisite inner origami of flesh that enfolds the vagina and nearby urethral opening. The inner labia have no hair, but the sebaceous, or oil, glands within them can be felt through the thin skin as tiny bumps, like a subcutaneous scattering of grain. The nymphae are among the most variable part of female genitals, differing considerably in size from woman to woman and even between one labium and its partner. Like the labia majora, the labia minora swell with blood during sexual excitement, and to an even more emphatic extent, doubling or trebling their dimensions at peak arousal. Some of our primate relatives have very exaggerated labia minora, which they drag along the ground to dispense pheromones that advertise their ovulatory status. In the spring of 1996, scientists discovered a new species of marmoset in Brazil, whose most outstanding trait is the female's inner labia. Each flap of skin hangs down visibly, fusing at the bottom into a sort of genital garland.
The marmoset's labia sound remarkably like the notorious Hottentot Apron, the absurdly pronounced inner labia that naturalists from Carolus Linnaeus on insisted were a defining feature (or deformity) of the women of South Africa. The best-known Hottentot woman was the so-called Hottentot Venus, who was taken to England and France in the
*
As Ethel Sloane points out in her excellent
Biology of Women
, "Everyone knows that a nymphomaniac is a woman with an excessive sex drive. Why is it that hardly anyone knows the same condition in males is satyriasis?" Is it because in women excessive lust is considered a disease worthy of a name tag, while in men the same drive is considered mandatory?

 

page_51<br/>
Page 51
nineteenth century and given the name Sarah Bartmann. In Europe she was paraded in front of curious spectators as a kind of circus animal though a clothed one and later she was made to strip naked in front of teams of zoologists and physiologists. After her death, her genitals were dissected and preserved in a jar of formalin. Georges Cuvier, the French anatomist who performed the autopsy, declared in his memoirs that his investigations "left no doubt about the nature of her apron." But as the historian Londa Schiebinger comments in
Nature's Body
, the prurient obsession that Western men of science had with Hottentot genitals had less to do with the reality of hypertrophied labia (never proved and rightfully doubted) than with the desire to place African women in a phylogenetic: category closer to orangutan than to human.
Whatever the size of the labia, inner and outer, they sweat. The entire vulval area sweats, with the same insistence as the armpits. If you've ever worked out in a bodysuit, you've probably noticed after a good sweaty session that you have three fetching triangles staining your clothes, one under each arm and a third at the crotch. You probably have felt embarrassed and exposed, the Hottentot Venus in Lycra, or maybe you're worried that others will think you've peed in your pants. Don't be ashamed; be grateful. You need to wick away all that internal body heat if you're going to stay in the running, and frankly, a woman's armpits aren't as efficient as a man's at sweating. Be glad that the female crotch at least is more so.
The vulval area also secretes sebum, a blend of oils, waxes, fats, cholesterol, and cellular debris. The sebum serves as waterproofing, helping to repel with the efficiency of a duck's back the urine, menstrual blood, and pathogenic bacteria that might otherwise settle into the crevices of the mons veneris. The sebum gives the pelvis a sleek and slippery feel, as though everything, including the pubic hairs, had been dipped in a melted candle. Stationed at the outskirts of the genital habitat, the sebum acts as the first line of defense, the Great Wall of Vagina, to thwart disease organisms that seek to colonize the rich world within.
In my career as a science writer, I've encountered all sorts of noble zealots and missionaries, biologists who perform an important if queer sort of spin control. They sing the beauties of nature's rejected and

 

page_52<br/>
Page 52
despised. They speak with Demosthenean eloquence and a mother's love of spiders, flies, scorpions, roaches, vipers, sharks, bats, worms, rats. In each case, they are determined to reform the public image of their pet leper and to make us salute what before we might happily have squashed.
None has quite the task of Sharon Hillier, a gynecologist at Magee-Women's Hospital in Pittsburgh. She is out to buff the image of the vagina. I found her while looking for somebody who could tell me why the vagina has the odor it does. I was thinking human pheromones; I was thinking oil of musk and essence of civet small, silly, trendy things that lock us into the Darwinosphere and glib theories of mate attraction. Then I saw in a conference program the title of a talk she was giving: "The Ecosystem of the Healthy Vagina." I knew I'd found a woman who thought about the big picture, in an area most of us would rather not think about at all.
Hillier knows that people generally think of the vagina as dirty, in every sense of the term. The word
vagina
sounds both dirtier and more clinical than its counterpart,
penis
, while a curse like
cunt
has a much more violent sting to it than
prick
or
dick
, either of which would sound at home on primetime television. As we've seen, American doctors jestingly compare the vagina to the anus. "In Nairobi, the word for vaginal discharges translates as
dirt
," Hillier told me. "Almost all of the women there try to dry the vagina, because a moist, well-lubricated vagina is thought to be disgusting.
"But really, anywhere you go, the story is the same," she said. "Women are taught that their vaginas are dirty. In fact, a normal healthy vagina is the cleanest space in the body. It's much cleaner than the mouth, and much, much cleaner than the rectum." She sighed. "The negative training starts early. My five-year-old daughter came home from school the other day and said, 'Mommy, the vagina is full of germs.'" Part of the brainwashing involves a lot of big fish stories. The vagina is said to have a fishy odor, a source of great merriment to male comedians. ''You've heard the jokes," Hillier said. "My favorite is the one about the blind man who passes by the fish store and says, 'Good morning, ladies.'" Ha-ha. I complained once to a male friend about a line in a movie when a gay male character, in the middle of a discussion about fellatio, turned to a woman and said, "Sorry, hon, I don't eat fish."

 

Other books

Psycho Inside Me by Bonnie R. Paulson
Angel by Katie Price
Here With You by Kate Perry
A Glimpse of the Dream by L. A. Fiore
Gathering Clouds by Andrews, V. C.
How to Live by Sarah Bakewell
Photo Opportunity by Jess Dee
Journey Between Worlds by Sylvia Engdahl