This model of the feminist vulva and vagina— joined eventually by pornography’s elaboration of this model— was the one that was formative for women of my generation. The vagina and vulva were primarily understood as mediating sexual pleasure. What was important was technique—one’s own masturbatory technique, and the skills one taught to a partner. Feminists and pornographers alike defined the vagina and vulva in terms of the mechanics of orgasm.
But while technique is important, this model leaves a great deal out of the “meaning” of the vagina and vulva. It leaves out the connections to the vagina of spirituality and poetry, art and mysticism, and the context of a relationship in which orgasm may or may not be taking place. It certainly leaves behind the larger question of the quality of a masturbating woman’s relationship to herself.
The Dodson model of the empowered female did a great deal of good, but also caused some harm. The good is that feminism of that era had to break the association of heterosexual female sexual awakening with dependency on a man. The harm is that the feminism of this era successfully broke the association of heterosexual female sexual awakening with dependency on a man. “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” as one seventies-era feminist bumper sticker insisted. The feminist model of heterosexuality—that straight women can fuck like men, or get by with a great vibrator and no other attention to self-love, and be simply instrumentalist about their pleasure—turned out to have created a new set of impossible ideals, foisted, if through the best of intentions, upon “liberated” women. Feminism has evaded the far more difficult question of how to be a liberated heterosexual woman and how to acknowledge deep physical needs for connection with men. As nature organized things, we ideally have a partner in the dance. If we don’t have a partner, there is attention we should give to self-love as self-care. It does not solve straight women’s existential dilemma, the tension between our dependency needs and our needs for independence, simply to declare that the dance has changed.
The harm of this model of female sexuality is that it reaffirms a fractured, commercialized culture’s tendency to see people, including “sexually liberated women,” as isolated, self-absorbed units, and to see pleasure as something one needs to acquire the way one acquires designer shoes, rather than as a medium of profound intimacy with another, or with one’s self, or as a gateway to a higher, more imaginative, fully realized dimension that includes and affects all aspects of one’s life.
Recent data collected in 2009 by sociologist Marcus Buckingham, drawn from multicountry surveys, show that Western women report lower and lower levels of happiness and satisfaction, even as their freedoms and options have grown, relative to men. Both feminists and antifeminist commentators sought to find answers for this broadly confirmed trend: feminists sought to argue that it was inequality or wage differences in the workplace and the “second shift” at home—but the surveys were adjusted to account for sex discrimination. Antifeminist commentators argued, of course, that this was all the fault of feminism, making women seek fulfillment in professional spheres unnatural to them.
I think it is very possible, judging from the tremendous amount of data we have seen about what women need psychologically, which they are generally not getting, that they are saying they are dissatisfied because the “available models of sexuality”—the post-Dodson, post-Hefner, post-porn, married, two-career, hurried, or young and single drunk-with-a-stranger-in-a-bar-or-dorm-room models—are, long term, just plain physically untenable. These models of female sexuality—left to us by a combination of pressures ranging from an incomplete development of feminism in the 1970s, to a marketplace that likes us overemployed and undersexed, to the speeding up of sexual pacing set by pornography—doom women eventually to emotional strain caused by physiological strain. These models of female sexuality are simply extremely physically, emotionally, and existentially unsatisfying. (This model of sex may well doom Western heterosexual men in other ways, deserving of their own book.)
Now that we know that the vagina is a gateway to a woman’s happiness and to her creative life, we can create and engage with an entirely different model of female sexuality, one that cherishes and values women’s sexuality. This is where the “Goddess” model comes in, a model that focuses on “the Goddess Array”—that set of behaviors and practices that should precede or accompany lovemaking. But where is a “Goddess” model to be found in contemporary life?
My search to locate a working “Goddess” model led me first into the past, into the historical differences between Eastern and Western attitudes toward female sexuality. Of course, women were subjugated in the East as well as in the West, but in two cultures in particular—the India of the Tantrists, about fifteen hundred years ago, and the Han dynasty of China about a thousand years ago—women were, for a time, elevated and enjoyed relative freedom. These two cultures viewed the vagina as life-giving and sacred, and, as I noted, they believed that balance and health for men depended upon treating the vagina—and women—extremely well sexually. Both cultures appear to have understood aspects of female sexual response that modern Western science is only now catching up with.
~~Vagina- A New Biography -by- Naomi Wolf
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