Vagina Variations

Read a very nice piece in Marita's blog about The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler. I read it a couple of years back, my copy smuggled over from Singapore. It’s banned here because of the V-word. The play was put on at a local theatre, but someone who felt that they had to role-play the act of outraged moral guardian complained, the police moved in and the show was closed down. It can’t be staged again because it won’t be given a license.

We in Malaysia are not supposed to know that vaginas exist apparently. It might corrupt us beyond all measure. If we are privy to this secret knowledge, what kind of power might this give us over our men?

Magazines from abroad are censored here. Any naked woman’s body has a neat little bikini drawn on it by the censor’s thick black pen pen. (If the sight of a naked boob can so corrupt us, the censors must be hairy werewolves hunchbacked with the weight of all that perversion they carry.)

I once bought a copy of Cosmopolitan because there was apparently a special section on how to have earth-shattering orgasms. When I got the copy home, I found that the censors had cut out the pages with the article. We’re apparently not supposed to know about orgasms either.

Even though I come from the wicked west, my own sex education at school was nothing to shout about ... could have played marriage guidance counsellor for frogs and rabbits, mind you.

But much of my sex education over the years has come from books, starting the section of my parents' medical dictionary which told you what to do on your wedding night in instruction book prose that made sex sound no more exciting than changing the washer on a tap or fixing the washing machine.

Ah, but my true sex education really began when I read Harold Robbins' The Carpet Baggers which I used to sneak off the bookshelf to go and read in the park. I can still remember the sex scenes almost word for word. ("When he saw her breasts he thought of milk and honey." Sigh.)

Fortunately, real life filled in the gaps between frogs and Robbins most pleasantly. But of course, I kept reading because you can always improve your game.

Along the way I encountered The Hite Report. Devoured it. Here were the voices of other women talking about their sex lives. I’d never, in my whole life, discussed sex with another woman. Still haven’t actually. Too shy, too embarrassed. So until I read that book, I didn’t know how other women thought about, experienced, sex. I actually cried in parts of it, particularly when I recognised myself in some of the stories.

I have the new edition of The Joy of Sex, Alex Comfort’s classic book which seems a little tame and dated. I preferred the pictures of the hairy hippies in the original line drawings anyway.

And then there’s Nancy Friday’s Women on Top, from which I learned that the XXX happenings behind my eyes were no stranger than those of other women – tamer even, give or take an Alsatian dog here and there!

Anyway, Eve Ensler’s play is a marvel and I hope I get a chance to see it performed one day. Ensler interviewed woman and used their voices in monologues which cover all aspects of women’s sexuality. I laughed at the responses to her question “If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear”?. Among the answers:

A beret
A leather jacket
Silk stockings
Mink
A pink boa
A male tuxedo

And the one I like best:

A hat full of flowers!

I cried with the elderly woman who had never even seen her vagina. “She had only touched herself when washing in the shower, but never with any conscious intention. She had never had an orgasm. At seventy-two she went into therapy, and with the encouragement of her therapist, she went home one afternoon by herself, lit some candles, played some comforting music, and discovered her vagina. She said it took her over an hour, because she was arthritic by then, but when she finally found her clitoris, she said, she cried.”

Did you know, incidentally, that the Indo-Europena word "cunt" was derived from the Indian goddess Kali's title of Kunda or Cunti and shares the same root as kin and country. Puts a new spin on patriotism, doesn't it?