I have a group of fifteen close female friends. Not one of them is alike to any other. We are all different. We all have our different laughter, smiles, farts, hair textures, skin colour, shoe sizes, height, weight, eyebrows, noses, hips, buttocks, breasts, navels, teeth, tongues, hairlines, toes, knees, and vaginas. Not one of these mentioned things are the same to any other. We are a group of women, but we are so vastly different, and of course love to appreciate our differences and celebrate them.
When I read articles about “What women want”, or “Women on top”, or “How to please a woman”, I shudder at the manner in which our differences are collapsed and how we are all viewed as some kind of homogenous goo that morphs into each other to create this enigma called woman. Furthermore, the enigma fails to serve us; it only works against us and our bountiful differences. We are increasingly becoming an arithmetic equation where the rest of the world is perpetually solving for x, the “woman issue”.
In the last week I was impressed by an array of “womanist” topics circulating on social networks; they all fight for the same course: women are neither aliens from Venus nor are they peripatetic assemblages to be rooted by men. One campaign read, “What do you call a woman who enjoys sex?”, and the answer was, “you call her by her first name”—sharing the same sentiment with the slogan, “my vagina my rules”. This is in response to another age-old patriarchal inscription of women as typically occupying the “Madonna” or “whore” dichotomy.
The Madonna-whore dichotomy, or the “Mother Africa trope”, as Florence Stratton (Google and read) has called it, is the reason why the label “nymphomaniac” is a deriding and offensive label applied to women who enjoy sex, whilst a man with the same sexual appetite, or even worse, is somewhat celebrated (think Charlie Sheen) and diagnosed with sex addiction. While on the topic, women who commit infidelity are scorned and made to carry the cross reminiscent of the Victorian era ala Scarlet Letter, whilst men who do are hailed as alpha-males. I am yet to come across the omega-female in popular culture and modern dictionaries, never mind in history.
There is no omega-female in this world; there is only the Madonna or the whore. The Madonna is a construction of patriarchy and is mostly equated with the earth, mother earth, or mother Africa, who bears child-bearing hips, and an equal amount of threshold to bear all the pain of being subservient to the male world. This woman is suffering the sins of her ancestor, Eve, who dared to eat from the fruit tree bequeathed to both her and her husband. She must know her place now. She must let her husband eat before she may do so. She is of the rib of her husband so she must treat him as superior and superlative. She must not question him, nor talk back to him. She must not look him in the eyes. She must serve him. She is the Madonna, and will be celebrated if she behaves in that manner.
This highly problematic stance that has caused so many heinous crimes and continue to sow atrocious social ills that are beyond comprehension (think child brides; war soldiers raping women; domestic violence; corrective rape; incest; the pull her down syndrome amongst women because they have internalised centuries of this discourse; systematic rape that results in marrying the perpetrator; etc) still continues to ravage the fabric of society. In today’s time women still face the patriarchal blade on their throats: men are intimidated by successful women and plot to deface them; whether with acid, or by impregnating them as a form of control, or by targeting their mother instinct as an Achilles heel, or barring them from economic/social/cultural/(non)religious/education/trade participation.
This brings me to the second campaign I wish to comment on, which is called the “Abused Goddesses” (above), with images of bruised Hindu goddesses – Saraswati, Durga and Lakshmi – executed as an attempt to spread a strong message against domestic violence against women in India. This campaign, as powerful as it is in addressing an age-long social ill through locally-relevant, and immediate symbols and images, functions to perpetuate the exact issue that I’m trying to drive home in this post. Women are different; and even reiterating it like this seems absurd. Women do not neatly fall into categories of madonnas and whores, and are neither strictly goddesses or ungodly—the sooner this is understood the sooner we can realise that no woman deserves a beating, no matter how ‘ungodly’. These “abused goddesses” in India are not goddesses; they are suffering women who are victims of patriarchy and modern day slavery.
These campaigns that I have foregrounded have roused in me a need to celebrate our differences as a group of friends, and as women around the world, in all our bountiful and admirable differences. As I have mentioned earlier on, in a group of fifteen close female friends that I have, we all have different laughter, smiles, farts, hair textures, skin colour, shoe sizes, height, weight, eyebrows, noses, hips, buttocks, breasts, navels, teeth, tongues, hairlines, toes, knees, and vaginas. Yes, true indeed, we have different vaginas. No vagina is the same as another. We realise that when we look at Jamie McCartney’s “The great wall of vagina” (please see below): from the surface itself it is a beautiful marvel. But every vagina has its own unique features: they differ in texture, colour, shape, size, and taste…
Out of my fifteen close friends we all get our periods. Some had their first periods before they were 10 and others had their first period well into high school. Some use tampons, some use pads, and some go au naturale without any preventative method. Out of those who use tampons, the sizes vary. Not according to vagina size but according to the blood flow. There are some of my friends who have a light flow, and there are those who bleed intensely. There are those who bleed for three days and there are those who bleed for ten days. There are those who have to change their tampon every two hours and there are those who change it once a day. There are also those who have forgotten to remove their last tampon, finding it during a sexual act.
I have friends who do not touch themselves, and I have friends who enjoy playing with themselves. Out of those who touch themselves I have friends whose erogenous zones are on the exterior, on their clitoris, and those whose g-spot are in the vagina. I have friends who use vibrators and I have friends who prefer dildos (know the difference). I have friends who love rough sex, and I have friends who enjoy both rough and gentle. I have friends who don’t enjoy sex at all. I have friends who like it deep or nothing at all. I have friends who give blow jobs like their lives depends on it, and I have friends who don’t enjoy the act. I have friends who curl their toes during culliningus and those who abhor it. I also have friends with what I call a “peeing vagina”: one that does not function on any sexual level, but is only for peeing.
I have friends who don’t like to talk so explicitly about sex, and I have those who feel ashamed after masturbating. I have friends who are uncomfortable or shocked at these truths… In furthering the cause of celebrating our differences as women through these stories I tell, I hope to also expose another factor: most women are uncomfortable with open talk about sex, blow jobs, masturbating, and culliningus precisely because of the Madonna-whore dichotomy. To be sexually liberated is to be mentally liberated from that dichotomy that seeks to classify a “good woman”, or a “goddess”, as one who is essentially a virgin. Yes, in a patriarchal world a Madonna can bear children of man without the sexual act, like our famous Mary. Think about how long your father thought of you as “pure” and a virgin? He probably still thinks that of you. And that’s why you are often prudish and riddled with Catholic guilt when it comes to sexual enjoyment.
The worst thing that can happen to us as women is to internalise this patriarchal inscription of ourselves any further, to a point where we find it hard to enjoy sex with our partners/husbands (over 50% of women have never experienced an orgasm), where we are self-bashing and ashamed after masturbating, and where we defensively target and deride other women for living a life that we wished we lived. We are neither Madonna nor whore; neither godly nor ungodly; and certainly not saintly or desecrated. We are human. Emancipation of any kind can only happen when we take the reigns of this horse called life into our own hands, and ride it into the kind of destinies that serve us in the most powerful and human way possible.
Please also read and empower yourself on the functioning of the cervix, and how it prepares itself for monthly menstruals every cycle here:
http://www.beautifulcervix.com/cervix-photo-galleries/photos-of-cervix/
I found this site to be overwhelmingly educational. Claim your body and vagina back!!
MostlyUhuru 