To all you women out there who are comfortable in your skin and with what’s (not) between your legs, the following information may cause consternation or, at the very least, a nasty chaff.
Yes, for those of us who blithely take our vaginas for granted, the news down under isn’t good. Utter the V word in a House of Representatives in Detroit, for instance, and you’ll quickly find yourself in the doghouse, as congresswoman Lisa Brown discovered to her dismay last week.
At the end of her speech during a fiery debate on the passing of controversial abortion regulations, Brown, a Democrat and mother of three, announced: “I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but ‘no’ means ‘no’”. The next day at a different debate she found herself duly and effectively muffled.
A fellow MP, Republican Mike Callton, had this to say on the matter: “It was so offensive. I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.”
Where to start? There are so many issues to take offence at here, and all of them are somehow found in the above quote. How about this? Beneath the political diatribe and the bickering and faux chivalry is a very real and disturbing undercurrent that’s pushing vaginas back into the dark ages (which is, incidentally, about the same time the word first made its appearance).
That is, when our poor vaginas aren’t being neutralised in other far more insidious ways, as I discovered during last week’s episode of Offspring when my viewing pleasure was interrupted by ads for Vagisil Wash.
Now, I get it that the core demographic who tune into Nina (Asher Keddie) and her travails probably have vaginas. And some may even have experienced the discomfort that Vagisil can remedy.
For those who are unfamiliar with Vagisil, it’s a well-known product used to treat common feminine discomforts, such as itching, minor wounds and irritation. And far be it from me to begrudge advertisers capitalizing on our misery, but what was it with the commercial’s preoccupation with how we smell down below?
Putting artistic merit aside (because the 15-second ad sure did), its suggestion that flushing out our vaginas will do wonders for our social life isn’t only disingenuous; it’s Machiavellian.
Forget the innocuous soap opera camera angles. The ad peddles the put down (what other message is to be gleaned from the allusion to our personal hygiene?). Worse, it masquerades as a community announcement while managing to effectively undermine its target audience. (Side note: if you are experiencing weird smells down there, Go See Your Doctor. Pronto.)
There’s another reason it hit a raw nerve.
Somewhere between that mercurial age bracket of 11 and 16, I found my changing body strange, unfamiliar and vaguely terrifying. And so I did what my Catholic upbringing taught me. I began to religiously scrub myself ‘clean’, almost to point of drawing blood. Only when the resultant dryness turned to itching, and then to burning, did I, in absolute desperation and embarrassment, turn to the sealed section of Cosmo Magazine.
Inside those pages I found my salvation. The sensations, the fluids, heck, even the smells, were normal. Normal. But more than that; this was my body in communion with my burgeoning sexuality. It was decoding the messages I would soon be sending out. Cosmo gave me back the confidence, but I had found the language.
And make no mistake, language and power are at the heart of the pussy furor in Detroit, as Lisa Brown pointed out at a news conference the following day: “If I can’t say the word vagina,” she said, “why are we legislating vaginas? What language should I use?”
How fitting that award-winning playwright Eve Ensler, whose seminal work The Vagina Monologue provided women with a wondrous laissez faire vehicle for our sexuality and bodies, added her voice— no, make that, “moan”— to the wave of outrage that followed the silencing of Brown.
“Vagina. If you can’t say it, you can’t protest or complain when it’s violated. It never belonged to you,” she posted on her Twitter account.
Yep. That’s about the only thing that stinks around here. Like Ensler, I, too, am wholly prepared to moan at full volume. And with resonance. Go on. Say it after me. Vagina. Really get your mouth around it. Because when it comes to our vaginas we have our hands on the controls. And we’ll decide when to zip it.
