There has perhaps never been a greater blasphemy than the idea that God somehow dislikes a hairy cunt. Can you imagine—the gateway of life itself? Nothing could be more synonymous with creation and no place could be chosen to more deeply abase an individual, a sex, or a species. How could that part of the body that has miraculously given birth to every person who has ever lived be evil, uncouth, or impure? That part that has received every seed of conception, that place where two beings literally join and melt together in a union of love and where, nine months later, a new astonished life emerges. Picking roadside blueberries, walking the halls of a library, embracing a lover—everything we’ve ever known came into being there, through the vagina. This is not the center of shame; it is the center of the sacred, the center of life.
And yet, for two thousand years of Christian tradition—and thousands more of other patriarchal cultures—the vagina has been viewed as precisely this: a place of sin, shame, weakness, and corruption. It would be difficult to think of anything more central to life than the vagina, yet its very existence has been shrouded in centuries of silence. It has been a taboo, never spoken of except in derogatory slang that projected the general fear and hatred of the body, of sexuality, and of women. Pussy, slit, bush, cunt, twat—all the common names for the vagina arrive with a poisoned barb, a charge that carries the collective degradation of billions of usages going back hundreds and thousands of years.
I can still remember the shock I felt as a child the first few times I heard these words. They were spoken in a way so charged with derision and scorn, so imbued with baseness and nastiness, and so severed from any organic sense of life that I felt wounded, ashamed, and afraid. Even though I was a boy, I felt ashamed that people would talk about any part of a human being that way, and I did not feel separate from it. I did not feel safe in a world in which intimate parts of the self could be viewed with such abhorrence. If I could feel so wounded as a boy, I can only imagine how ashamed millions of young girls must feel who recognize in these slurs a vision of themselves. And it has been this way for a very long time, generation after generation of innocent girls (and boys) encountering, internalizing, and propagating this tragic, anti-human, life-hating vision.
Of course, the vagina has by no means been the only part of our world to be debased over the past millennia; it has only been the “lowest blow,” the most pointed and perhaps crippling focalization of a pervasive violence toward women, sexuality, the body, and the earth—in other words, toward the entire context of human life, everything that is most intimate to us and on which our existence most depends. Is it any wonder that we now find ourselves in such dire straits?
The first time I heard the word “pussy” I was riding my bike and doing “free-style” bicycle tricks with some neighborhood kids a few blocks from my house. One of the older boys stopped his bike beside mine, scowled, and asked, “Have you even ever seen a pussy?”
His question was like a poison syringe, a pandora’s box in the form of an injection, abruptly stuck into my side. I’m not sure exactly what was in it, but it felt something like history. I felt my innocent world of careless play shrink and shiver, not because he had mentioned sex, but because of the vitrolic feeling he released within the word. His question conveyed a bizzare set of deeply rooted, contradictory beliefs. On the one hand, it was clear from his tone that a pussy was somehow disgusting, a shameful mess, a monstrosity. His voice suggested it was the kind of thing one might brace for by swigging a couple of shots of whiskey. On the other hand, his question implied that seeing a pussy was a matter of accomplishment and status, a badge of honor. So, it was something to be seen and known, but not because of any indwelling beauty or excellence, but rather in spite of, or because of, its ugliness, its lowliness.
I was about ten years old, and—having been homeschooled and largely sheltered to this point in my life—I wasn’t even sure what a pussy was. From how he said it, I recognized it belonged to the world of sex and women, but my exposure to a breast-obsessed culture had given me the impression that “tits” were the central object of desire and sexual voyeurism. So I first thought of breasts, but his use of the singular struck me as odd, and the tone of repulsion was distinctly different from the culture’s gaga mammary enthusiasm. Thus, after briefly entertaining the image of a pussy as a lone tit, I decided it must refer to something else, of which I had only a vague notion. He was waiting for a reply, however, and I knew I would be viewed as deficient if I acknowledged that I had in fact never seen one. So I managed to feign an indignant reply of “What do you think?” Any Hollywood scriptwriter could have supplied his retort:“I don’t think you have—except your mama’s.”
Events like this one may at first seem like mere schoolyard incidents—perhaps a small disturbance to a child, but ultimately of no great consequence—but they are actually the very means by which the prejudices and violences that have governed most of recorded history are passed on. It is precisely in schoolyards and the back rooms of houses and the alleys of streets that the secret, underlying ideology of Western civilization is disseminated. Sometimes, it may take no more than a brief exclamation, a sexual curse uttered with all the intensity and conviction of history behind it, to communicate and transmit an entire worldview. These moments, sandwhiched between lemonade and a bike ride, or between arithmetic and social studies, are one of the means by which an old patriarchal order of degradation reproduces its belief system, however unconsciously, from one generation to the next. However harmless these informal, cultural exchanges may seem, they are, in fact, ritual inductions to hatred.
I was perhaps fortunate to have such a conviction of my own social exile and to be so frightened by the tenor of the older boy’s speech that, though I internalized a sense of sexual inadequacy, I was never actually inducted. I never participated in the cult of sexual degradation, and I never accepted its values. At the same time, I was never exposed, until I was much older, to any other discourse of sexuality, and so I mistook this vitrol for sex itself. Consequently, in rejecting its values, I also rejected my emerging sexuality. For years, I was, in fact, relatively blind to my authentic experience of sexuality. I thought I wasn’t sexual because I didn’t feel anything like the degraded model presented to me. On the whole, however, this was probably a blessing. When I entered my sexuality, insecure as it was, it was at least untarnished—a luxury that millions of people, men and women, are never afforded.
We all know that children act out the subconscious beliefs of their parents and their culture, but it is shocking to confront just what these beliefs are—to see what our culture’s subconscious looks like. It’s not pretty. What’s particularly frightening is to observe how similar the tone of schoolyard sexual banter is to the beliefs articulated by the fathers of Western civilization, in some cases thousands of years ago. Why, we can almost trace a direct unbroken line of transmission extending from St. Augustine to the conversations probably happening down your street or at recess in your local school right now.
Augustine, one of the foremost pilars in the development of Western thought, famously referred to the vagina, the place of birth, as being“between urine and faeces,” a description which makes no show of concealing his repulsion and contempt. When I first read this epithet, I was shocked. I had somehow lived nearly thirty years without encountering the fact that the heroes of Western civilization were essentially women-haters. Augustine was by no means alone. Aristotle characterized women as “defective” men. St. John Crystostom said men experience “a thousand evils” from having to look at women and declared, “the beauty of women is the greatest snare.” He warned fathers to let their sons converse with no woman except their mothers, and to shield them from young women as a “child from the fire.” Clement of Alexandria said “every woman ought to be filled with shame at the thought she is a woman.” Tertullian insisted that each woman must never forget that she is none other than Eve: “You are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die.” In fact, there are few “great thinkers” in the Western canon who have not, at some point or another, opened fire in such a tirade and blamed women for all evil.
As shocked as I was as a child to hear the sexual degradation spoken by other children, I was perhaps more shocked as an adult to encounter the same sexual hatred expressed by the men revered as the fathers of Western civilization. When I first read Augustine’s description of the vagina as the place between piss and shit, I immediately recalled the childhood incident described above and recognized a fundamental lineage. Augustine’s words reverberated with the same disgust I had heard when that nameless teenager adrift in late twentieth century America spoke the word pussy.
Incredibly, Augustine actually argued that all human beings were sinful because they emerged there, through a woman’s vagina. This was much of the reasoning, of course, behind “Original Sin,” a doctrine that became one of the foundations of the Christian Church, and which much of the world is still in therapy recovering from.
Speaking of therapy: nearly fifteen hundred years later, another father of Western Civilization, the not yet sainted Sigmund Freud, described the vagina as an inducer of terror, explaining: “Probably no male human being is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals.” Here seems to be yet another ingredient of what I heard in that first question, not so much the literal threat of castration, but the culture’s insistence that something was horrific about a cunt. Claiming that this terror was the root of both homosexuality and fetishization, Freud said it constituted an inordinate obstacle that a man had to “surmount” in order to achieve a healthy heterosexuality.
I think of this sometimes, in disbelief, when I am kneeling between the legs of my lover, amazed again, at the beauty of her sex, the beauty of the cunt. Beauty is not quite the right word, however; what I feel, staring into and licking the folds of her vulva, is something more primal than our prettified notion of “beauty,” something more akin to an animal awe. Yes, I experience an aesthetic delight for the pink and red, for the smooth exquisite flesh, for the flower of layered petals that opens there in the center of her body, but this response is rooted in a deeper rapture for the hunger and power that dwells there. The animal I am lights up with carnal awe as if I have arrived at the center of the world. It seems to me that this is the most natural experience in the world for a man to have, and it seems somthing has gone deeply wrong when our leading pyschologists views it as a sight that rightfully inspires horror.
I’m aware of feeling exposed as I write this, vulnerable to other men’s responses, to their potential charges of weakness, that I am a sissy, a “pussy.” Strangely, there is something of a masculine taboo against loving women too enthusiastically, a latent hostility to passionate heterosexuality. The masculine cult encourages men to love and fuck women, as long as men don’t take it too far. It’s ok to have sex with women, as long as you (the man) are taking something from each woman, exercising some power over her—as long as you are, at some level, dominant, conflicted, or detached. If you are, instead, giving her something, if you are reflecting her power, giving her power, this is perceived as a threat that must be ridiculed. According to the paradoxical laws of “heterosexual” male culture, to truly love a pussy—not just to “love pussy,” which implies objectification and disassociation—is to be a pussy (you are what you eat). It’s not ok, and if you do it, you are at least expected not to talk about it. Though the male cult will listen for hours to men talking about fucking this bitch and giving it to that ho, as soon as a man talks about really loving a woman’s cunt, everyone gets uncomfortable. Quite simply, the cult of male sexuality is built around maintaining power over women, and nothing threatens this structure more than acknowledging woman’s primordial centrality. The male cult is an attempt to displace and reverse the power that women possess and that men experience women having over them. All of patriarchal culture is fashioned atop this inversion
This reminds me of the popular practice on some college campuses of calling a man a “faggot” if he chooses to spend a Friday night with his girlfriend instead of getting plastered with his fraternity friends. In this case, “faggot” obviously refers not to a sexual preference for men, but to the allegedly effeminate behavior of liking women. To like the company of women, to value and cultivate an emotional relationship with the opposite sex, to love a woman—all of these behaviors are considered “gay” by the masculine cult because they make one too similar to a woman. The limits of heterosexuality, subtly enforced throughout our culture, are here plainly on display: a man’s heterosexual love is expected to maintain at least a subtle power dynamic and to withhold love and emotional engagement. To get drunk and carouse with your male buds or to fuck some hapless drunk partygoer in a back room is considered “heterosexual,” but to love a woman and want to spend time with her is unmanly and forbidden. This inversion, at first nonsensical, only begins to make sense when we realize the extent to which our culture defines male heterosexuality along lines of power and domination. In turn, we recognize the belief that “god does not like a hairy cunt” is little more than such a fraternity ascribing its own beliefs to a divine mascot.
The Christian fathers, of course, no more invented misogyny or sexual hatred than the fraternity brothers at Dartmouth college. The same fraternity that today calls a man gay if he loves a woman might have once burned him as a witch or in Roman times attacked him by calling him a cunnilinguist, a supreme insult sometimes hurled at a despised caesar. The male cult is an ancient order that predates all of these incarnations. What Christianity did, however, was to grant sexual hatred the stamp of divine authority, elevating it to the level of one of the Ten Commandments, inscribing it within our moral order as deeply as the idea that we shall not kill or steal.
At a time when our alienation from the earth threatens to destroy the very balance of life that supports us, we must look closely at healing all the relationships that compose our world. While this certainly includes looking at where our food and clothing come from and reenvisioning our manner of transportation and production, it must also include a new vision of how we relate to each other and to the very miraculous, carnal act and anatomy that stands at the center of life. How can we heal our world as long as men and women remain alienated from each other and we remain uncomfortable accepting, let alone celebrating, the gateway of life? How we relate to anything is, in some sense, how we relate to everything, but the vagina is literally the gateway of everything; our attitudes toward it inscribe the entire world with either sin or celebration, domination or love. At the same time, there are few things with more power to heal and transform our world than the joy generated between woman and man in a state of loving, shameless relationship.
For all the advancements of women’s liberation and all our imagined, 21st century embrace of sexuality, our culture is still built upon the foundation of sexual violence. If it weren’t, St. Augustine would not still be hanging out down by the schoolyard and the unconscious message passed on in children’s banter would not be one of disgust and hatred. Nor would the sexuality so rampantly on display in pornography ritually and tirelessly reenact a script of domination and degradation. It took a long time to accumulate the legacy of alienation we have inherited, and it will take nearly as long to deeply root another vision of life and the human body.
It is absurd that it can take thousands of years to clearly state the obvious, but just to ensure it takes no longer, let us be explicit: God did not command “Thou shall not love the cunt.” If there ever was a God making pronouncements upon loving human genitalia, we can be fairly certain that it would sound more like “Thou shall.” And, in our moment more than ever, we can be sure that any divine presence worth its church would exhort us to passionately articulate this love for the cunt, constructing a foundation for a new millennium built not on hatred, shame, and alienation, but on celebration and relationship
