Is there something almost too powerful about the place we all came from? The last book that attempted to chart the history of female genitalia didn't even want to use the word in its title. And 'The Great Wall of Vulva' wouldn't really have worked." Poor even-more-rarely-referred-to vulva.īut perhaps it's not surprising that a woman's most intimate parts are held in awe and fascination when they are, to borrow from the French artist Gustave Courbet, "l'origine du monde". When Jamie McCartney, the Brighton-based artist behind The Great Wall of Vagina, an 8m-long plaster-cast frieze of genital close-ups of 400 women, was criticised for naming his sculpture inaccurately, he acknowledged that his critics were right. It is not even an oft-used word and when it is used, it is often used wrongly. But when it comes to the vagina, any mention of the word – from the Latin for "sheath" or "scabbard" – is still problematic. It's interesting that the subject is still seen as controversial. With the focus clearly on the explicit and the unspeakable, Wolf is exploring territory we haven't heard about since Germaine Greer in the 1970s. Wolf claims that there is "an increasing body of scientific evidence that suggests that the vagina has a fundamental connection to female consciousness". This is an angry call to re-establish what women's libbers might once have called pussy power. Perhaps this history will do for 21st-century activism what The Beauty Myth did for 1990s feminists.
At a time when Western women's bodies have never been more highly politicised, the one person who might be able to shine a ray of light into feminism's dark crevices has to be Wolf.
As the Russian government found themselves trapped in an international PR disaster while they quashed their home-grown Pussy Riot, male politicians across the world were busy tying themselves up in knots over definitions of rape. Wolf's tome could not have been better timed. In response to the Lisa Brown incident, Wolf asked playfully, "Are we seeing the beginning of a vagina lobby?" It's high time, says the author of The Beauty Myth: "The culture is just not letting women have a positive relationship to their sexuality, to their vaginas." An epic UK tour is planned, including an audience in front of 400 fans at Intelligence Squared at the Royal Institution in London on Thursday. But Wolf's book – "which goes to the very core of what it means to be a woman" – is likely to be more controversial than entertaining.
0 kommentar(er)
