My heart is pounding.  The elevator seems exempt from the consequences of time.  The doors slide open.  The waiting room is filled with the presence of seven other women and an almost unbearable tranquility.  I take a seat.  “Breathe, just breathe,” I repeat to evoke solace hidden by the pulsing of my chest.  I am all but exasperated at the thought of seeing him.  Him.  Minutes pass before I’m asked back into a room.  Palms wet and my body shaking, I take off my shoes, socks, pants.  The cold chair meets my naked thighs. Legs pulled unceremoniously apart.  A woman smiles and says something I do not understand.  The chattering of their voices competes with the thoughts in my own head.  Then it happens.  Without warning.  Without ceremony.  Without my consent.  The most degrading, isolating, and sterile experience of my life unfolds and assaults my intimate space.

A curtain is pulled across my torso and face, separating me from my vagina, and the doctor from the rest of me.

The foreground is blurred by the pale blue curtain and the once comforting eyes of the women’s faces disappear.  I cannot see the doctor or any of his female staff.  I try desperately to pull the curtain.  Voices erupt.  I am unable to decipher any of the foreign tongue they are speaking.  A battle erupts between myself and my womanhood.  I feel ashamed.  I feel scared.  I want desperately to rip the curtain away and expose the doctor, the nurses, the metal apparatus, take my vagina and run.  I want to feel connected, not cut off.  Why am I being separated, forced into seclusion?  Is my body, my vagina, so unsightly that to see my face would induce shame?  Metal clamps close and hold my feet to the extensions of the chair.  I feel a brisk breeze… down there.  Then chilled water and rough hands handle my vagina.  Instruments are inserted and reinserted.  Fingers touch and disappear.  It hurts.  The exam begins and I’m in tears.  The words I hear, I do not understand and I can see absolutely nothing, but worse, no one.  My face, my personality, my thoughts… me, have been separated from my front parlor, my bower of bliss, my slash. Loneliness, guilt, ignominy.

The exam concludes.  Finally, I hear some form of the Japanese lexis I understand.

“Finished.”

I keep the curtain a secret, afraid that it might reflect something indisputably ugly about me and my box.  I suffer in the dissonance between my fury and absolute bewilderment for days, weeks.  Finding the courage to ask the very question that haunted me, I approach my female Japanese friends months later.  They blush and admonish me for talking about “that doctor” in public.  The niceties of my apology conclude and they entertain my queries.  The response given forever changed how I understand myself and my silent beard.  In their words, the curtain was to “save face”, to protect a woman’s prestige from the horror of her valley and judgment of others.  As this social theology seeped into my awareness, a prism of self-loathing was cast, enslaving my voice and harnessing my rage.  This inception of separation and the cultivation of hard-earned anxiety is what urged me to search for a map to my own great Divide and muse over the possibilities of genuine appreciation of self.

The curtain exemplifies a world view held common in Japanese culture.  Discrepancy and class are of the utmost importance; and furthermore, disgrace is avoided even at the cost of expendable sanity.  Men work eighty hours a week with no respite from company expectations or concrete slated cubicles; and for women to emote beyond patience or pleasure would relegate both status and composure.  Teachers apologize for the fault of their students, businessmen relinquish reputation for the sake of net gain, and families expel income of grandiose proportion for the aesthetic of daily ceremony.  Thus, “saving face”, the perfect masquerade, is not only a keystone of tradition; it is the glue binding one person to another.  Hence, a woman and her OB/GYN will never meet, exchange glances, shake hands or bow.  Vagina and face will be joined only for the sake of marriage, childbirth, and pornography.  For the Japanese woman, muff munching, penetration and child bearing as a defining characteristic of eroticism are removed. Sexuality is viewed as an action, not an adjective.  A discussed vagina is cultural taboo, not an enjoyed, shared endeavor.

Japanese women are expected to be subservient, pretty faced, and sexually willing house wives.  Forgive my undulation, but might I also mention that Japanese women are intelligent, cunning, and angelically kind, in addition to being beautiful.  My adoration for the olive toned women fueled my ire against Japanese men for three years.  I felt them to be ignorant, debasing, controlling and chauvinistic.  More specifically, I spent those years fearing men and pitying women.  The women were, in my mind, the victims. Husbands and boyfriends alike are allowed to work insurmountable hours without regard to family time or romantic courtship.  Affairs are frequent and encouraged, while wives are expected to raise children and find little time for social excursions, let alone time with other men.  God forbid women pursue management level positions or exude any small hint of evolved intelligence.

But after a time, I felt my anger being redirected.  I stopped detesting the men, and started resenting the women.  Japanese women seemed complacent in their status…and the status of their uterus.  Unwilling to fight for the freedom they deserved and on a daily basis, earned.  They seemed so engrained in the culture that had been created to imprison them.  Pursuing higher education mostly for the attainment of status and spending their life of matrimony preparing dinners for partners that would never come home.  And when the breadwinners finally do make it through the doors of home and cross the welcome mat, they are grey haired and crippled, from years of arduous employment and tireless commitment to the ladder of corporate gain.  Nevertheless, to my horror, they seemed happy.

Or were they?  How could an individual, a gender, a sex, a society, a people, be happy amidst the slow and protracted separation of their bodies from their minds?  Shopping, nail salons, and children’s homework can only kindle a marriage and personal happiness to a point.  What about the happiness of their beaver?  According to Health News and researchers at the University of Chicago, sex is more satisfying in countries where women and men are considered equal.  Big surprise, but Japan ranked lowest in satisfaction at 25.7 percent.  This may be due, in part, to the vacancy of passion after a long day’s work, or to their husband’s penile selfishness.  But fundamentally, most of their dissatisfaction comes from not only the emotional barrenness of their marriages, but from the metaphysical, earthly, and cultural separation from their vaginas.  Japanese women may appear to succumb to the institution of good manners, but they are absolutely candid about one thing – their happiness.  If given the chance to speak, albeit in private, they will give you an answer with remarkable sincerity.

The curtain speaks, the answer is given.

They recognize they are sexually unhappy and different from many of their Western female counterparts.  They look in the mirror every day and live with its reflection; the shape that culture and stereotype have given them.  The longer they look at their silhouette, the more their vaginas tremble with rage.  A movement is happening within Japan, the women are awakening.  Divorce rates are higher, working mothers are more prevalent, and their voices are unifying.  They are seeking autonomy and stultifying the bounds by which they were historically functioning.  Their madges are arousing to the beauty of amalgamation.  The reflection is shattering and the prism that was defining it is being broken.

Are you looking in the mirror?

American women pride themselves on being fierce, independent, and sexually aware.  Women’s suffrage, the right to vote, the right to equal pay, the consequent dismantling of the glass ceiling… the Vagina Monologues.  Arrogant, condescending, land of liberty, beautifully strong women we are.  Yet, I’ll ask again.

Are you looking in the mirror?

Japanese women are simultaneously apprehending and defying the rules of expectation. Working, vacationing, studying, preening skill sets, and all the while raising their families.  This is not different from the Western woman.  Yet the kinesthetic movement on the road of feminine actualization between East and West are elementally dissimilar.  While Japanese women are awakening, American women are bathing in a stagnant political and edifying debate, leaving them drenched in apathy.  The American feminist movement has become gridlocked in the prose and verbiage of policy, public opinion, and ethical ideals, rather than on the pragmatism that serves its female community.

One could argue that cultures evolve at different times and that the West’s apathy is only a temporary plateau on the road of socio-cultural development.  However, apart from a metaphysical geographic qualifier, American women and men are listless to the plight of an ongoing problem.  We have become too satisfied with historic defeats and have stopped fighting the battles of today.  It is a fallacy to believe that Japanese women are more willing to change their imprisonment or better equipped to dissect sexual nuance and its implication of self.  But it is imperative to realize they are fighting the battle of vaginal independence, not a war of historical attrition.  This is not about feminism for them.  It is about a way of life, quality of happiness, and a connectedness to sexuality as it serves their character, not their cause.

I was consumed by the fire, the “spiritual” movement of women’s suffrage in Japan, only to come home and find a feeble flame: lame-duck feminism.  American women seem defined by the struggle; a silent acceptance of a slow evolution to rightful citizens and a refusal to move beyond the cause.  Forgive my grandiose emotive, but the Western feminist movement is a hollow abyss with nothing but taboo and political squabbles to fill its void.  Like many extremist movements, our edition of feminism has detached itself from the soul, leaving only a facade of resonating purpose.

The curtain is taking form right here in America with nothing but our own apathy to fuel its push and pull, its pert game of hide-and-seek.  Take away your patronizing torch and crown of ego, Ms. Liberty and look at your wavering reflection.  You are no more evolved than your Asian friends.  You are serving the same boundaries, the same limits, the same taboos.  You are placating the chains, the shackles, the constructs that separate you from your horny box.  You do this every day that you ignore the constructs that define who we are, by misusing and bastardizing the language that defines your snatch; every day that you idly tolerate the tactless, verbose mouths of men and women that demean or dishonor someone, something, in the name of a vagina.

The blooms of apathy are translucent and its penalty to the vaginal psyche apparent.

Addressing the roots, the origins, of female apathy in the US, while bedrock to the story, are not being contemplated for this article.  Rather, I implore you to marinate on the battle inscribed for today’s perpetrators.  You.  The battle that you have with yourself every time you use the word pussy to name someone weak, or cunt to debase your ex-girlfriends or friends.  Every time you use a woman’s vagina as a metaphor, a vehicle to enact disgrace.  You buy music, impart slang, and feed the credence that keeps women miserable and separated from their sexuality.  You.  You and I are the women and men that warrant retribution for forwarding the vernacular that succumbs to popular use without regard to its implied meaning, or its systematic destruction of our vaginal ego.  Raise both your awareness and conscious in regard to the daily prose you employ to color a woman’s bits and pieces.

In a study by Gartrell and Mosbacher,

“39.8% of males and 29% of females learned correct anatomical names for male genitalia as children. In contrast, only 6.1% of females and 17.7% of males learned correct names for female genitalia. Most respondents learned either euphemisms or no names for female genitalia as children. Whereas male respondents acquired a complete vocabulary for male genitalia by a mean age of 11.5 years, female respondents did not complete their anatomical vocabulary for female genitalia until a mean age of 15.6 years.”

Females were nearly 4 years behind genital vocabulary completion at 15.6 years of age and less accurately learned correct names of their own vaginas.  The use of slang exists to fill a deficit.  The problem lies in the result. Slang is perpetuated without observance of connotation even at a young age.  This offers some insight as to the beginnings of incorporating slang into our lexis, but it does not defend its continued use as an adult.

Consider this:

Cunt: Compact Oxford English Dictionary – Unpleasant or stupid person.

Pussy: Wikipedia sites its uses for cat, genitalia, and weakness.

Snatch: Urban Dictionary – Applied when describing genitals that are presumed to be filthy or disgusting.

Three different dictionaries, three different words.  All illuminate the tantamount flouting of a woman’s valley.  The affray that is brewing between a woman and her camel toe can no longer be ignored.  Apathy is no longer acceptable, it is repugnant.

How is it that Austin Powers can have an entire ten minute parade of fruit and other household objects prancing about as a reckless attempt at penis humor, but to do the same with a woman’s clef would be tasteless, crass, and even rude.  The F.C.C. allows Offspring to chant popular slang for the male genitalia via “Why Don’t You Get a Job”, boasting “dick” every other score.  Yet the same F.C.C. prohibits use of the word “pussy” in Khia’s “Lick My Pussy.”  Is this acronym for the female labia so offensive as to be publicly silenced?  It implies nothing more than a pair of lips between a woman’s legs.  Yet it clearly, according to regulation, warrants ban from radio play. Dick vs Pussy slang: which is the ultimate winner in cultural prohibition?  The F.C.C.’s consistently biased crusade suggests a fundamentally moral juxtaposition.

More over, why do women insist on referring to their vaginas not only as dirty, sexual black holes, but as pretty, nonsexual organic blossoms.  The use of flower is almost as insulting.  When my legs are spread for either a doctor, a man, or a woman, my vulva hardly feels like a flower.  Names, synonyms, colloquialisms, are all important in coloring, texturizing, and sharing the many forms of oral expression that make up our perspectives and world views.  But to do so without honor, tenderness, consideration, and poignancy is robbing a woman of the connection between her and her labia.  It is causing a rift between who we are as women and who we are as individuals.

This language is our curtain and we are pulling its cord.  The historical archetype of a male-dominated society is no longer the culprit of our separation anxiety.  We are a country of equal opportunity and equal rights.  A Western nation governed by vaginas and dicks, donkeys and elephants, and people of all colors.  As a woman who may fit into any or all of these determined modes of description, re-indoctrinate the brush that paints your language.  Uphold the value of a woman’s Divide by reaffirming fidelity of language to its meaning.  Implore that our own tongue can be conscious and your intention gentle.  Reunite your sexual body with your spiritual mind.  This is not a call for the elimination of battered slang, but of the extension of sexual adjective as confidentially beautiful, not morally degrading.  Be the action that preserves integrity, not the hypocrisy that compels the cause.

I will not shed tears or tremble. I will not spread my legs without question and dignity.  I will take my vagina and tear down the curtain that disconnects me from my Divide.  I will not be shamed or scared.  I will not relinquish control or feel fear. I will face my friends, my families, my doctors, my pussy, with gravity and care.

I am my vagina, my vagina is me, and I am the woman behind the curtain.

Tags: American Feminism, Cunt, FCC, Feminist Movement, Japanese Feminism, OB/GYN, Pussy, Social Theory, Vagina, Vagina Monologues

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 and is filed under Features, VOL2009.02. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.