The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, by Emma L. E. Rees

Towards the end of The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, a challenging new study by Emma Rees, the author confesses to having toyed with a number of alternative titles, among them Can’t, punningly risqué, and Vulvanomics, a wry twist on Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s 2005 blockbuster Freakonomics. Vulvanomics, one imagines, might have made for an appealing sales pitch to an opportunistic publisher, but it smacks, too, of a flippancy not in keeping with what is a polemical and deeply anxious book in many ways. Since so much of this book is concerned with how we speak of and about female sexual and reproductive organs, Rees is probably right and sensible in opting for the implacably straightforward The Vagina, and this direct mode of address and, often, redress is characteristic of its approach more broadly. If the book eschews mischievous puns and pudenda-related playfulness, it does so as a sober assertion of its academic intent.

This seriousness is important not least in so far as issues of misogyny, sexual inequality and reproductive rights continue to warrant urgent attention. But it is also important because Rees’ book follows in the wake of Naomi Wolf’s similarly titled, high-profile and roundly damned 2012 book for Virago, Vagina: A New Biography. Wolf volunteers her own judgement on the back cover of this new study, generously acknowledging Rees’ book as “richly researched”. It is, and it is a blessed relief that it is so, since the book presents a modest effort at repairing some of the damage done to the body of critical feminist writing by Wolf’s botched patchwork of cod neuroscience and wearyingly unselfconscious exaltations of privileged, liberal, narcissistic and normative heterosexual life.

Rees’ The Vagina is no memoir masquerading as cultural history; rather, it is a sensibly researched study that catalogues a range of artistic and literary representations of female genitalia, and demonstrates an understanding of the various aesthetic, intellectual and political discussions that frame them. It is a study that critically scrutinises our (in)abilities and (dis)inclinations to acknowledge the place of female sex, sexuality and sexual health in discourse. This is not to say it is a book that is revelatory in any profound way, but it is an informed, often interesting and decently historicising effort – and thus also the kind of work upon which we might call if we are minded to provide a scholarly context to some crucial contemporary debates. And indeed, we might and should. The abjection of female sexual organs, or what Rees calls their “dysphemistic” (the rendering offensive of something inoffensive) usage, has a long and fascinating history, and one that might inform our analysis of the recent spate of misogynistic online persecutions. We know to condemn the Twitter trolling suffered by campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, Labour MP Stella Creasy and academic Mary Beard, among others, but from Rees’ book, we know better the various ways in which female sexual organs and female sexuality have been the particular points of misogynistic attack for centuries, and the complicated ways in which our language continues to obscure, abhor and deny them.

The “indecent” nature of the word “cunt” was, Rees speculates, established in the 19th century, but its usage dates from about 1230. Arrestingly, it appears in medieval street names, now long lost – the various Gropecuntelanes of London, Oxford and Bristol, quietly retitled Grape, Magpie and Nelson Street respectively. Rees relishes in “Clawecunt”, “Clevecunt”, “Cruskunt” and “Blunthercuntesaker”, taking them as “evidence to support the idea that what might now be regarded as ‘obscene’ place names” were, in fact, relatively common. “Cunt”, she speculates, could have derived, variously, from Old Norse, Icelandic and Latin. Its Old English origin coincides with terms for hollow, gulley and cleft, where topography and anatomy are one – Rees’ point being that there is nothing inherently obscene, rather something insistently ordinary, about “cunt”. How, then, do those with a “cunt” come to be at odds with a society that regards it as an obscenity? And do we seek to reclaim and rehabilitate the word, or disavow it for its anatomical as well as its affective inaccuracy? Rees is sharp here in dissecting a fascinating debate, although she remains unable to offer a decided judgement.

Equally interesting is this book’s long excursion into the history of the vagina dentata, the mythical and monstrously “toothed” genitals represented in the 11th-century myth bowls of the Native American Mimbres people, repeated in Madhya Pradesh Indian folklore, and later revived by Freud. The horror of the vagina dentata, Rees argues, haunts and feeds castration fantasy, and thereby justifies the pre-emptive maiming of women’s bodies. This vaginal fantasy/fear extends, she suggests, into contemporary culture, invidious even where its manifestations might appear only crass, comic, vulgar or absurd. Sharon Stone’s infamously knickerless leg uncrossing in Paul Verhoeven’s 1992 film Basic Instinct, sexualised as it is, refigures those mythical teeth as metaphor; the vagina, still dark, dangerous and vicious. Those moments when Rees draws on cultural history to shed light upon the present can be persuasive, informative and interesting. Her history of sanitary products and the increasing euphemisation and sanitisation of menstruation is particularly illuminating, if brief.

The problem, though, is that there are, perhaps understandably, long gaps in the occasionally cursory history that Rees provides. Her scholarly background in early modern and Renaissance culture tells, supplying her with engaging and unusual material, but it is a long stretch from there to now, and so the study presents what is a sometimes sporadic history. The attention paid to obscure performance arts and avant-garde installations can be difficult to follow or care for, and there is a niggling question of judgement in the selection of some of the contemporary material. The analysis of the already dated Sex and the City franchise is distinctly unilluminating, and Rees might have braved sacrificing this “popular” touch for longer, subtler, more careful engagements with Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du Monde, Frida Kahlo’s painting Flor de la Vida (1943) or Lars von Trier’s film Antichrist (2009), which she rightly flags as deserving of inspection.

Predictably, the usual critique of a predominantly Western feminism applies here, and one might overlook this shortcoming (it is genuinely difficult to cast a wider net), except that Rees is not as careful or considered in her discussion of female genital mutilation as she could be, and latching on to Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a feminist thinker capable of speaking for non-Western women is profoundly disappointing. But this is an ambitious study with the best of intentions, seeking to cover a large terrain. It is work that evidently has a significant archive of scholarly research behind it, and Rees might have tested her nerve and rewarded her readers by pushing for a more substantially academic and less generally commercial book.

The details of the early modern history she presents are curious, interesting and unusual, and too often, one suspects, shelved in favour of more generalised debate. The writing is occasionally declamatory, anecdotal and hectoring when it need not be, since the research here is itself inherently polemical, pertinent and educative. Rees’ book is the kind of work we need more of if we are to challenge and reconfigure how we understand women and sexuality in contemporary discourse.