Not only did they find that “bad stress” lowered female rats’ sex hormones and interfered with their arousal processes, they also projected that such changes on that physiological level could, if sustained over time, affect vaginal tissue itself. The cranky, stressed, and sexually rejecting female rats, and the more receptive, unstressed control female rats, were all killed, and all the rats’ vaginal tissue prepared for sampling: “Tissues were snap-frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored . . . until required.” The results of the vaginal tissue analysis showed biologically measurable changes in the female rats’ vaginal sexual functioning; the Yoon team scientists even projected that changes in the rats’ vaginal tissue, caused by stress, would escalate over time: “If such abnormal hormonal profile changes persist for a long time, secondary tissue changes could occur in the vagina.”
This is a version of the insight reported anecdotally by Mike Lousada, Katrine Cakuls, and other vaginal-work therapists: “bad stress” can apparently affect the very tissue of the vagina.
Lousada did not speculate on the science of this change in vaginal tissue. But these scientists do have a hypothesis: “In the present study, physical stress in female rats induced hormonal and vaginal NOS expression changes and caused observable sexual behavioral changes. We believe that these changes result from multifactorial reactions.” In other words, stress in female rats affects the neuroendocrine system and this induces the various secondary changes in the vagina that affect sexual function. “In female rats under chronic stress, sexual behaviors were changed. We suggest that changes of serum sex hormones, catecholamines, and NOS subtype expressions in the vaginal tissues participate in a multifactorial response in chronically stressed female rats.”8
In other words: stress out female rats, and sooner or later the sexual functioning of their vaginas—with its potential to release pleasure hormones to the female mammalian brain—will suffer as well.
Women experience a sense of something like panic when they realize they are trapped inside an environment in which sexually degrading remarks will be directed at them at random. They intuit that they will suffer from this situation when they are present in it, or away from it, when they are trying to relate to their children and friends, when they are trying to turn to their husbands or lovers in bed, or when they are facing their easels or their journals. They are right.
As we have seen with the difference in the protection of the male and female pelvic nerves, a woman is quite vulnerable physically when she has opened her legs—more vulnerable than a man is. Because of this, and because males are generally larger and often stronger, the sense of safety may not be as important to male sexual response as it is to female sexual response. The vagina responds to the sense of female safety, in that circulation expands, including to the vagina, when a woman feels she is safe; but the blood vessels to the vagina constrict when she feels threatened. This may happen before the woman consciously interprets her setting as threatening. So if you continually verbally threaten or demean the vagina in the university or in the workplace, you continually signal to the woman’s brain and body that she is not safe. “Bad” stress is daily raising her heart rate, pumping adrenaline through her system, circulating catecholamines, and so on. This verbal abuse actually makes it more difficult for her to attend to the professional or academic tasks before her.
Title IX in America is gender-equality legislation that forbids the creation of a “hostile working environment.” When women face jokes, images, insults, or implied threats related to their vaginas in the workplace or at school, it actually becomes more difficult for them to focus on their work or on their books as well as their male peers can who are not being distracted in this way. It actually does create a material disadvantage to them that is bound to be discriminatory, simply because of the way the female brain and body are wired. It actually does create a “performative utterance”—words that have real effects in the real world.
Repeated trauma or verbal threats, contemporary neuroscience points out, rewire the brain: a brain that hears verbal abuse often becomes more reactive. Hearing the vagina debased feels, on an amygdala level, like a threat of sexual assault or other kinds of danger. Verbal abuse and threats of violence hurt the brain. This rewiring effect is another reason why language aimed at the vagina and at female sexuality is so abusive. Verbally abusing the vagina is a way—a socially acceptable way—to abuse and affect the wiring of the female brain. If women never hear sexually abusive language, their brains will be less reactive to threats. One could read this politically as: if you don’t bully a woman by insulting her vagina, her brain is less intimidated than is the brain of the woman whose vagina is insulted regularly.
And the word widely considered to be the most derogatory, the most violent, the most abusive? Cunt. “Somehow every indignity the female suffers ultimately comes to be symbolized in a sexuality that is held to be her responsibility, her shame. . . . It can be summarized in one four-letter word. And the word is not fuck, it’s cunt. Our self-contempt originates in this: in knowing we are cunt,” writes Kate Millet in The Prostitution Papers.9 Philologist Matthew Hunt’s doctoral dissertation traces the etymology of how cunt became equated with “the worst possible thing you can ever call anyone.” “Censorship of both the word ‘cunt’ and the organ to which it refers is symptomatic of a general fear of—and disgust for—the vagina itself,” Hunt concludes.10 Or is it, as I would argue, also a symptom of fear of and disgust for the potential of female power? If you name something in a way that deters pride, exploration, and discovery, you deter the likelihood of women unlocking the chemicals of confidence, creativity, and so on that such discovery might entail.
The citations from Hunt’s thesis bear out the fact that the vagina is considered, philologically, “the worst possible thing,” in the Western tradition at least: “The vagina, according to many feminist writers, is so taboo as to be virtually invisible in Western culture,” writes comparative mythology scholar Lynn Holden. “ ‘Cunt’ is probably the most offensive and censored swearword in the English language.”11 Ruth Wajnryb commented in 2004, “Of all the four-letter words, cunt is easily the most offensive.” Journalist Zoe Williams wrote, “It’s the rudest word we’ve got, in the entire language,” and commentator Nick Ferrari echoed this as well: “[It’s] the worst word in the world . . . I think it’s an utterly grotesque word . . . it’s just a gutteral, ghastly, nasty word.”12 In her study of Australian prison graffiti, Jacqueline Z. Wilson writes that cunt is “the most confronting word in mainstream Australian English, and perhaps in every major variety of English spoken anywhere.” Sarah Westland calls it “the worst insult in the English language,” “the nastiest, dirtiest word,” “the greatest slur,” and “the most horrible word that someone can think of.”13 In her 2011 article “The C-Word: How One Four-Letter Word Holds So Much Power,” Christina Caldwell calls cunt the “nastiest of nasty words.”14
Got it? It’s the worst of the worst. But the word cunt did not begin in all this infamy; indeed, its etymological origins are, like the vagina itself, quite context specific, and it has ranged from neutral to very positive to very negative. Linguist Eric Partridge wrote that the prefix cu is an expression of “quintessential femininity”: “in the unwritten prehistoric Indo-European . . . languages ‘cu’ or ‘koo’ was a word base expressing ‘feminine,’ ‘fecund’ and associated notions.”15 Linguist Thomas Thorne points out that “the Proto-Indo-European ‘cu’ is also cognate with other feminine/vaginal terms, such as the Hebrew ‘cus’; the Arabic ‘cush,’ ‘kush,’ and ‘khunt’; the Nostratic ‘kuni’ (‘woman’); and the Irish ‘cuint’ (‘cunt’). ‘Coo’ and ‘cou’ are modern slang terms for vagina, based on these ancient sounds.”16
The same root relates to gud, which is Indo-European for “enclosure”; it also refers to a cucuteni or “womb-shaped Roman vase.” Cu has associations with “knowledge” as well: can and ken—both of which mean “to know” and possibly even “cognition”—are,
Thorne points out, related to this coo. Sex and knowledge share a strong linguistic connection: ken is “know” and “give birth.” Ken—which relates to the Old English cyn and the Gothic kuni—also connotes the vagina: “[‘Kin’] meant not only matrilineal blood relations but also a cleft or crevice, the Goddess’s genital opening.”17 Historian Gordon Rattray Taylor explores the links between femininity and knowledge: “The root cu appears in countless words from cowrie, Cypris, down to cow; the root cun has two lines of descent, the one emphasising the mother and the other knowledge: Cynthia and . . . cunt, on the one hand, and cunning, on the other.”18 In India, the name of the goddess Cunti-Devi suggests that “cunt” variants originated not as insults but as terms of great respect. Quefen-t, a “cunt” variant, was used by the Egyptian pharaoh Ptah-Hotep when he spoke to a goddess. The earliest cunt citation in the Oxford English Dictionary features the word as part of a London street name: around 1230, in the neighborhood called Southwark, a street called “Gropecuntelane” was where prostitutes worked.19
Charmingly, many cunt-connected words were originally water related: cundy is an “underground water channel”; less charmingly, cuniculus means “passageway” and was used by the ancient Romans to describe their drainage systems. (Cunnilingus, or “vagina tonguing,” is one of the cuni-related words, of course.) Sanskrit cushi/kunthi meant both “ditch” and “vagina.” But the neutral and positive echoes of cunt do not survive widely in our slang. Even Greek and Latin language around the vagina began as fairly neutral, if male-centric: vulva simply means, in Greek, “matrix”; vagina is Latin for “sheath”; labia is Latin for “lips.” (Though, granted, pudendum is Latin for “shame.”) Outright contempt and disgust do not predominate in Western vagina names until Victorian slang made words about the vagina cognate with “the worst.” There have always been negative names for the vagina, as well as positive; but disgust is not necessarily embedded in the language of the vagina.
Many of us feel a kind of existential shudder when we see the reiterated modern connection between cunt and disgusting, stupid, or hateful—or when women are reduced to just cunts. We are continually told to “just relax” about such demeaning language, but there are good reasons, related to the power of such words to represent sexually threatening acts that can wreak “multisystem dysregulation” upon us, why we physiologically can’t.
I experienced firsthand the powerful impact that the words used to communicate about the vagina can have on the female brain. This book had just been signed by a publisher, and I was euphoric, in creative terms, about the research and writing ahead. At the same time, I was anxious about grappling with such a strong social taboo. At that point, a friend—a man whom I will call Alan, and describe as a businessman, who has a complicated sense of humor and enjoys creating social spectacles that heighten tension—said he wanted to throw a party celebrating my book deal. The party became a topic of conversation among his friends, often with a ripple of amusement—with something oblique in it—as an undercurrent.
“Alan” told me that he was going to do a pasta party, at which guests could make vagina-shaped pasta. I thought that was a funny and sort of charming idea, possibly a tribute to the subject matter, or, at the very least, not awful, though it was not a thematic twist I would have chosen myself.
When I arrived at the party, though, there was a slightly ominous, mischievous stir at the far end of the loft where the kitchen was located. Alan was in the kitchen, surrounded by a crowd of guests. I made my way there, with some trepidation.
As I walked toward Alan, I passed the table where the pasta maker had been assembled. A group of people stood around the pasta maker—fashioning, indeed, little handmade vulvas. The objects were rather sweet-looking: like the real thing, the little pasta sculptures varied—each person’s experience (or body, perhaps) informing his or her interpretation. There was an energy of respect and even would-be celebration from that table, from both the men and the women. So the platter of pasta resting on the table seemed to me to be assembled with a kind of love: flowery or feathery, fluted or fanned, each small sculpture was detailed and distinct: lovely little white objects against a handpainted blue Italian ceramic tray.
Alan appeared at my side. “I call those ‘cuntini,’ ” he said, laughing, and my heart contracted. A flash of tension crossed the faces of many of the women present. The men’s faces, which had been so open, and some so tender, became impassive. Something sweet and new, that had barely begun, was already closing down.
I heard a sizzling sound. I looked to the kitchen: the sound was coming from several dozen enormous sausages, ranged in iron skillets on the big industrial stove. I got it: ha, sausages, to go with the “cuntini.” I noticed that the energy of the mixed-gender crowd was now not simple. The room had become more tense—the tension that I was familiar with by now, as I was recognizing those moments when women feel demeaned but are expected to “go with it” and have a “sense of humor.” My heart contracted further.
Finally, someone called my attention to the final featured item on the evening’s menu. On the back burners of the stove, several immense salmon fillets were arranged on another platter. Again: I got it. I got the joke. Women are smelly. Fish-smelling. I flushed, with a kind of despair that was certainly psychological—depression that a friend would think this was funny—but which also felt physical.
But that was not what was really interesting to me about that night. I can deal with a misfired joke, if that was all that the event entailed. What is really interesting to me is that after the “cuntini” party, I could not type a word of the book—not even research notes—for six months, and I had never before suffered from writer’s block. I felt—on both a creative and a physical level—that I had been punished for “going somewhere” that women are not supposed to go.
Because of the evidence of physical consequences to women of sexualized stressors, I understand better now what constituted the connection between the visual “comedy,” the olfactory public insult, and my fingers being unable to type. But at the time, the six months of writer’s block was a mystery.
The theme of the “uppity woman” having her vagina targeted in lieu of her brain is a universal theme still—both in emerging democracies and in the “advanced” West. In Egypt, once part of the British Empire, this practice had an echo: women protesters have played prominent roles in the “Arab Spring” and the uprising in Tahrir Square in 2011–12—and these “unruly” women are being targeted by the state for forced vaginal exams.
Samira Ibrahim, twenty-five, a young Egyptian protester, brought suit against that country’s military in 2011, asserting that after the army had arrested her in Tahrir Square during a protest, she was forced to undergo a vaginal examination against her will. And human rights groups report that this is systemic: many women protesters, they confirm, have been forcibly vaginally “examined”—that is, assaulted—by the Egyptian military upon being taken into custody. Ibrahim posted a moving account of her ordeal on YouTube, describing how she and other female protesters had been first beaten, electrocuted, and accused of being prostitutes (echoes again of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864–66 in Britain); then forced to undergo a vaginal exam, a “virginity test,” performed by a soldier in army fatigues in front of dozens of strangers. An army spokesman defended the forced vaginal “exams”: “We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove they weren’t virgins in the first place,” a military source explained to the news site Al Jazeera.
“When I came out, I was destroyed, physically, mentally and emotionally,” Ibrahim said.20
Could that, given the delicate workings of the ANS in women, and the connection of vagina to brain, of emotional sexual trauma to the biology of chronic suffering—have been the point? Is this not a sign of random brutality—but a technique to suppress revolution, and tamper with the very chemical makeup of potential revolution?
In the West, where actual vaginal assault or
traumatic sexual “exams” are not legal, female verbal insurrection is also routinely met with threats against the vagina and verbal rape. (Though the United States may be moving toward physical aggression by the state against women’s decision making, via violation of the vagina, in the form of recent American states’ proposals to legislate a mandatory invasive transvaginal ultrasound if a woman is considering choosing an abortion.)
Women in the West who “speak out” experience this sex-directed aggression: Vanessa Thorpe and Richard Rogers, in the UK newspaper The Observer, reported that female commentators regularly receive threats of sexual assault. Caroline Farrow, a blogger for Catholic Voices, reports that she receives “at least five sexually threatening emails a day,” which she sees as the result of her taking responsibility for her own views by posting under her own name, with a photo that, she says, seems to make her harassers see her as “a legitimate sexual target.” She notes, “One of the ‘least obscene’ emails read: ‘You’re going to scream when you get what you’ve asked for. Bitch.’ ” Guardian commentator and novelist Linda Grant and feminist nonfiction writer Natasha Walter both report that, as a result of sexually violent comments directed at their writing, they now write less often online. The New Statesman journalist Helen Lewis-Hasteley confirms that rape threats are the most prevalent form of online harassment of women writers in Britain: “I know many people will say that every commentator on the Internet gets abuse, but what really came through to me when I was looking at this [in the experience of other female journalists] was the modus operandi of the attackers, which was to use the rape threat.” “The threat of sexual violence is an attack in itself,” concludes the Observer article.21 The science is now in as to why that is correct.