Review of: Catherine Blackledge, The Story of V: Opening Pandora's Box (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2003), 322 pp.
What in heaven's name is this book about, and why would anybody buy it ? Does it make sense, or is it a fuck-up ? What is "V", is it the 21st letter in the alfabet, or a Latin numeral denoting the number 5 (26-5=21) ? Well I got sucked in, and had a think about what I got sucked into, while seeking to drink from the cup of knowledge. According to the blurb on the front flap, it is about "the seat of female sexual pleasure, the site of the creation of humankind, and the channel of its birth... a potent arouser of sexuality. Yet we know less about the vagina - its structure and function - than we do about any other organ of the human body - why ?". You guessed it, it is a book about vaginas. On the rear flap, we learn that Dr Catherine Blackledge was born in 1968. She completed as science degree and a Phd, and then worked as science journalist and freelance broadcaster. This is her first published book, featuring a black and subtly greenish/grayish cover with the lower half of a woman lifting up her skirt. Probably most class conscious workers wouldn't read it, beyond glancing at the Spanish proverb prefacing the text: "Ella habla por en medio en las piernas" (she speaks from between her legs) and placing it in the introductory popular science category, but yours truly, having graduated in the university discipline of Education, actually dipped into it, thinking of that immortal Rolling Stones number "Paint it black". The motivation behind the book is best explained at the hand of two quotes, the first on page 2: "Having a vagina meant I could be expected to work all my life for less money than if I was minus female genitalia...how could I feel good about or proud to sport female genitalia...? ... my own personal odyssey (was) to discover if there are any other means of understanding female genitalia, and to see if I could gain a more balanced vaginal perspective." I suppose that if the book sells well, a more balanced perspective would result, but for the rest, it probably takes a good stiff prick. But then, I frankly admit I'm biased on this subject. The other quote occurs on page 55, following a discussion of Anne Frank's description of genitalia: "In the twenty-first century, we live increasingly in a world where the most common image of female genitalia is the one pushed by the pornography industry -and is a negative, shaming one. This representation - styled by men for women - bears scant resemblance to the varying beauty of unadulterated vaginas. Typically shorn of public hair, labia snipped into regular lengths, sanitised, neutered and surgically enhanced, pornography creates effigies of female genitalia. And for many men and women, such cunt caricatures are coming to be seen as a normal view of vagina's. This is a sad, narrow and small representation of this amazing female organ of sexual reproduction and pleasure." But that is of course one woman's side of the story - let's not forget most men, whether or not they look like Adonis, have to shave every day - and indeed half the meaning of the book consists of what is not in it, you have to think about that part for yourself. But that is precisely its value - Blackledge's story does raise important issues rather than give pat answers to everything - questions such as why the neolithic people of Crucuno near Carnac in France chose to bury their dead surrounded by symbols of female genitalia ? And, the book does contain a lot of interesting and entertaining information for the genuine pussy lover (which I am) - it is written magazine-style, with lots of clever captions and illustrations, some topics being explored only in a superficial way, others in greater depth, sometimes bordering on the platitudinous but steering well clear of total banality. After a while, this style does became a bit tiresome to me though, the plotline seemed increasingly blurry, and the story threatened to fold, and it took me an effort of persistence to get to the finish. Be that as it may, the story does not fold entirely, and the concluding chapter 7 is appropriately devoted to "the function of the orgasm". The concluding sentence of the book is that "Pride, pleasure and the miracle of creation - this view of the vagina is the real story of V." But why did I end up closing the book with a queasy, empty feeling, even although I had eaten sufficiently prior to that time ? Possibly because "love" is not specifically mentioned in the index, and does not receive explicit treatment in the book. Which again raises the interesting question of whether love is to be found in there, or whether I should have been doing you know what. At what point does conceptualisation become reification, and to what extent can deliberate reification be emancipatory ? In between the beginning and the end, Blackledge acknowledges that the 17th century Dutch anatomist Reinier de Graaf set "Renaissance Gold Standard in understanding female sexual anatomy" in the fifteen chapters of his magnificent magnum opus The Treatise Concerning the Generative Organs of Women (1672). De Graaf peculiarly thought that the word "vulva" or "valva" was derived from "velle" (=want) on the grounds that "it has a great and insatiable want of coitus", recalling the infamous verse from Proverbs, Chapter 30: "There are three things that cannot be sated... Hell, the mouth of the vulva and the earth." The Italian anatomist Matteo Realdo Colombo is also mentioned for his work De re Anatomica (1559) in which he did not overlook the vagina as sexual organ. She also notes how Isidore of Seville used the term valvae (doors) to describe a woman's labia, while the Babylonian Talmud (Fourth century CE) used an expression for hinges. So the organ got a name. We also find out that Blackledge's favourite French clitoral confection is la praline en delire (on page 79), a phrase which translates as "a delirious sugared almond" and she likes the smell of lilies, lotus flowers and vanilla in that order (not surprisingly, she claims ambrosial scents are the perfumes typically used to describe the vagina). But some of her facts seem a bit dubious, such as the reference to "the clitoral downsizing of the nineteenth century" on page 132, here the distinction between fact and metaphor does seem to blur. Flashes of real insight do occur however, such as on page 134: "For Jung, the integration of the anima and the animus... is seen as essential to an individual's emotional, physical and spiritual well-being. However, for the Dogon (of Mali), having a dual nature or soul is deemed to be dangerous in later life, as humans are said to be incapable of maintaining this double nature into adulthood. The Dogon argue it is safer to be straightforward - a woman should be solely female and a man wholly male. Therefore their answer to this perceived problem is to cut off the contrary soul - via excision of a woman's clitoris and cutting off a man's foreskin (male circumcision)." In fact, a genuine attempt is made to internationalise the perspective on vaginal research, for example with reference to the African woman Saartje Baartman, now famous as the Hottentot Venus. So what is the real subtext of all the excursory exegesis ? Chapter 5 is entitled "opening Pandora's box" and on page 165 it gives a clue: "A hungry maw. A gluttonous gullet. A toothed, voracious, ravenous greedy chasm. Vagina dentata - the vagina with teeth - is an ancient anxious image that flows through folklore, mythology, literature, art and humankind's dreamworld. For many, the most powerful of all vaginal myths and superstitions, the vagina dentata is also, perhaps, the most common. Its prevalence around the globe is stunning." Contrast this with Aristotle's detached observation that "The path along which the semen passes in women is of the following nature: they [women] possess a tube (kaulos) - like the penis of the male, but inside the body - and they breathe through this by a small duct which is placed above the place through which women urinate. This is why, when they are eager to make love, this place is not in the same state as it was before they were excited." (cited on page 202 - Blackledge observes elsewhere that Aristotle noted "how during female orgasm a woman's cervix acted as a 'cupping vessel', seeming to draw in semen - p. 270). But the real punchline occurs on page 90: "With her vulval opening fused to form a labial pouch, the spotted hyaena is forced to give birth through her clitoris. As a result, she endures one of the most painful and puzzling parturition experiences witnessed in the animal kingdom. Sadly, for first-time mothers, and first-born pups, birth is far too often a fatal affair." Blackledge also seems to want to demonstrate that it's a fine line between barbarism and civilisation, and not just between pleasure and pain. Thus, we learn on page 211 how "Roman poet Virgil (70-19 BCE), in his epic poem the Aeneid, describes how female and male adulterers were castigated by nasal castration. Anthropology texts from the early twentieth century detail how among the Ashanti of Ghana, and in Afghanistan, an adulteress was chastised by the serving of her nose, whereas in Samoa, an insulted and jealous husband would bite his wife's nose off. Not just nasal amputation, but ears, lips and scalp too were taken as part of the tribal customs of indigenous North Americans." In Blackledge's book, one gets the sense of a real feminine urge to make the unmentionable mentionable, and make the reality behind the style explicit, and therein lies its revolutionary content. To go beyond boundaries, we must know what the boundaries are, otherwise we don't even know that we have crossed them. But there are many angles on the story which she simply does not cover, and in fact I imagine it would take an Encyclopedia Vagina to do full justice to the subject. I don't know, maybe that's just an Amsterdam perspective, but then again, Spinoza wrote his Ethics in Amsterdam. Poor old Spinoza, the glass got to him in the end. The bourgeois penis seeks to rise, feel the hand of power, penetrate and explode the world. The bourgeois vagina seeks to contain it, own it and nurture it. A holiday in Egypt, anyone ? Failing that, how about: "the hand that rocks the penis is the hand that rules the world" ? Perhaps Blackledge's book will achieve precisely the opposite of what she intended. But that remains to be seen, best to keep the book open. There is a lot more to be said about the subject, I am sure. Up to V2. Jurriaan
