Exalting the Vagina!

Yes, you got that right. This sixty-something, male, never-married Catholic blogger is blogging about something that, in common parlance, is often deemed "naughty," or worse.

The vagina.

I'm writing in response to Ariel Levy's book review in the September 10, 2012, New Yorker, that discusses Naomi Wolf's new book Vagina: A New Biography.

Herewith, a brief summary of what I take Levy to be saying about what Wolf is saying (since, sadly, only New Yorker subscribers can view the full review).

Levy says Wolf slots into the continuing evolution of feminist thought. We who are not exactly frontline feminists may not realize that feminism bifurcated somewhere around the early 1980s over the question of whether to revile pornography as culprit number one in the crime of men "objectifying" women.

Some feminists sided with Susan Brownmiller in working politically to expunge porn from the cultural scene. Others objected that the women of the movement ought not to be "patrolling the erotic imagination": policing what goes on in the heads of, yes, even those feminist sisters who choose to pleasure themselves sexually while looking at porn.

The first group were the "anti-porn" feminists. The latter group became known as the "pro-sex" feminists. (Who knew?)

Now comes Ms. Wolf, who in earlier books had railed against how "strictly and heavily images of female beauty have come to weigh on us." Reducing women to their bodies stood in the way of full women's liberation, thought Wolf. Except ... in this new book, Wolf has it that, "To understand the vagina properly is to realize that it is not only coextensive with the female brain but it is also part of the female soul — it is a gateway to, and medium of, female self-knowledge."

Naomi Wolf

This "profound brain-vagina connection" dawned on Wolf after undergoing successful surgery to remedy spinal compression that was impinging on her pelvic nerve. She knew something was wrong when sex stopped giving her "the usual postcoital rush of a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive."

Apparently, Wolf's pelvic nerve that was amiss connects to the vagina but does not connect to the clitoris, since her clitoral orgasms were still "as strong and pleasurable as ever."

I take the following from this deeply personal experience of Wolf's: Each of us, male or female, is tasked by our human nature with the responsibility of construing ourselves. A big question is, do we construe ourselves as something separate and apart from the rest of "everything alive"?

Another big question is, do we construe our interior selves as separate from our bodies?

The history of western thought — and therefore Catholic thought — runs through the teaching of 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, who famously wrote, "I think, therefore I am." Descartes construes himself fundamentally as a disembodied rational being who can be certain that he exists only because he thinks, because he has the capacity to doubt. His body, perceived through sense experiences, is to him less certain to exist because his senses are notoriously unreliable.

Descartes' interior self is construed by him as separate from his body.

Naomi Wolf's interior self is construed by her as intimately connected to her body, and specifically to her vagina. When her vagina is working properly — when the stimuli arising from sexual pleasure successfully reach her brain — she is infused with creative energy and worldly delight. She feels richly interconnected to one and all.

I can't imagine anything more true of the way I feel about myself. True, I don't have a vagina. I have a penis. My lifetime sexual experience is not extensive, but I can say that sexual feelings of arousal and satisfaction for me are not just in my penis. They suffuse my whole pelvic and perineal area. According to Wikipedia:

The perineum is the region of the body inferior to the pelvic diaphragm and between the legs. It is a diamond-shaped area on the inferior surface of the trunk that includes the anus and, in females, the vagina. Its definition varies: it can refer to only the superficial structures in this region, or it can be used to include both superficial and deep structures.

It's there that sexual arousal begins. The penis may or may not heed the call and get stiff.

The penis is analogous to the clitoris, as the two organs arise from the same embryonic tissue. I have no idea what the female embryo does to create a vagina, but I'd say there has to be an analogy between it and the male perineum. So what Wolf says about her vagina comes to me as no surprise. For me, there is nothing that gives me a God's-in-His-heaven-and-all's-right-with-the-world feeling more than the pelvic-perineal response I feel when a lovely woman smiles at me.

Here, then, we have a topic that I feel needs to be talked about more in Catholic circles: the connection between our bodies, and especially our sexual organs, and how we construe ourselves. Can we break our habits as thoroughgoing Cartesians — victims of the mind-over-matter thought of René Descartes?

Jesus Preaching a Sermon

At stake is an understanding of how we ought to see ourselves in relation to our world. I believe Jesus wanted us to stand together, all for one and one for all. "Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me" (Matthew 25:28). God bless us, every one — no exceptions!

It's a lot easier to get to that beneficent all-inclusiveness from "a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive." I think Naomi Wolf is on to something!