By D.C. McAllister
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Amy Schumer doesn’t seem to know what to do with her
vagina. Nothing makes that more clear than when she tells the audience in “The
Leather Special” that her “p-ssy. . . smells like a small barnyard animal. Not
a f-cked-up llama, but a goat at a small petting zoo.”
If she’s trying to shock, she fails miserably. The
Internet has numbed us to most p-ssy jokes. If she’s trying to get us talking
about her show, she’s done that. But joking about her genitals this way just
makes her an opportunistic hack and not a memorable talent.
If she’s trying to do what comediennes often do—denigrate
oneself before anyone else has a chance to—that falls flat too. We’re inundated
with feminists owning images and words before others do: Slut Walks, C-nt Art,
vagina costumes, p-ssy hats… it’s vaginas on parade and has been for decades.
We’ve gotten the message: “I’ll objectify myself before you do!”
This is why Schumer’s joke isn’t funny, shocking, or
smart. In our current culture, brandishing details about your vagina is
meaningless and trite. It also adds to the ongoing degradation of women, which
is ironic since Schumer and others like her think they’re doing the opposite.
But like the sexual revolution as a whole, the feminist preoccupation with
vaginas has not freed women from objectification, it has furthered it. Before
the 1960s, men were the ones doing the objectifying; now women are objectifying
and disrespecting themselves.
When It Was
Mysterious, It Was Beautiful
There was a time, long, long ago, when a woman’s vagina
was a beautiful mystery. The descriptors used in art and literature weren’t
crass and nasty, but eloquent and respectful. In the Song of Solomon, the
vagina (referred to as “navel”) is described as a “rounded goblet,” a lily in
an abundant pasture. The entire passage is filled with adoration and eroticism
steeped in respect.
Society, however, has moved from refined portrayals, such
as references to the altar of Venus, nature’s treasury, privy counsel, and
Cyprian fountain, to more denigrating terms that predate even our modern times.
The “purse,” a slang term that was popularized in the Victorian era, shows just
how demeaning these terms can be.
The “purse” was a reaction to the “fallen woman” personae
that was popular in art at the time and the pornography pervasive in the
underground of Victorian society. Women’s sexuality was seen as something
dirty, like a prostitute that tempted men away from their virtuous and
“non-sexual” wives. The vagina and its abundant sexuality symbolized a
financial transaction, a dark place where money and a man’s sexual urges were
spent.
In a pornographic text from that period, “Memoirs of
Fanny Hill” by John Cleland, we find this description: “As he stood on one
side, unbuttoning his waistcoat and breeches, her fat brawny thighs hung down,
and the whole greasy landscape lay fairly open to my view; a wide open mouthed
gap, overshaded with a grizzly bush, seemed held out like a beggar’s wallet for
its provision.”
The “beggar’s wallet” is a long fall from a “rounded
goblet.” With a single word, a woman’s sexuality is judged and found guilty.
This reductionist mindset, which negated women with a crude label, inflamed
feminists, making them hell-bent on reclaiming their vaginas and ownership of
their sexuality.
From One Abuse to
Another
It led to the “Vagina Monologues,” Jane Arden’s “Vagina
Rex and the Gas Oven,” and the feminist-labeled “c-nt art” of the 1970s with
Judith Chicago’s 1971 “Red Flag,” which pictured a woman pulling a tampon from
her vagina. Another is Faith Wilding’s “Sacrifice,” in which a woman who has
been disemboweled is lying on a table, covered in bloody cow guts, and
surrounded by sanitary pads.
Wilding famously said the “c-nt is beautiful,” much in
the same way “black is beautiful” for civil rights activists—it’s about
“claiming what has been most derogated as your strength.”
This refusal to be reduced to the embodiment of the
vagina—whether it’s regarded as good or bad—unleashed feminist art and
literature that pushed boundaries for awareness. One particularly disturbing
piece of work came years after the first flush of the feminist insurgency:
Eurydice Kamvisseli’s 1991 novel “f/32” in which the character Ela asks, “This
c-nt or I? Is ‘it’ I?” From this question, the novel horrifically unfolds as
Ela is attacked by a blind man who saws off her genitals before a crowd in New
York City.
Having lost her genitals, Ela must now discover who she
is. Is she still a woman? Is she complete? What’s her true identity?
Kamivisseli shows the absurdity of a woman’s objectification when the vagina
becomes famous in its own right, separate from Ela.
The bizarre sequence, which depicts the vagina as a
disembodied character, creates a shocking image of how women are perceived in a
sexualized culture where they are no longer complete human beings. Mercifully,
Ela is reunited with her vagina at the end of the novel, seeing herself as
inseparable from her sexuality, yet not solely defined by it.
We’re More than
This Body Part We Obsess Over
The sad reality is that feminists today are still in the
middle of Kamivisseli’s novel, trying to figure out who they are. In their
struggle to prove that they’re more than their genitalia, they have reduced
themselves to their genitalia by focusing too much on that aspect of their
identity—and they’ve done it repeatedly in a demeaning way. Their mocking
reaction to objectification by men has become their reality, and they are at
risk of being defined by it.
What purpose are you serving by saying your vagina smells
like a goat? I get that it’s a comedy routine, but comedy is an art form—it is
communicating something meaningful, or should be. But what is the meaning
behind this bit of coarse “humor”? What is Schumer’s intent? There doesn’t seem
to be one. It’s just a revolting example of how feminists have jumped the shark
over their vaginas.
They put their genitalia on parade instead of themselves
as complete women, and the result is dissonance and dysfunction in our society.
Instead of women being respected more, they are respected less. Instead of women
being seen as complete subjects, they are reduced to deficient objects. And
women are doing this to themselves.
Stop Reducing
Yourselves to Shamed Genitals
A woman’s sexuality is beautiful. Her vagina is
beautiful. It is part of her, and her self-esteem should extend to every aspect
of her identity—her mind, spirit, and body. Her sexuality is sacred and should
be treated with dignity and respect, not only by men, but by women. The time
for making crass political and sociological statements about our vaginas is
over. I think men get the point: Women are more than sex.
The slang terms for our genitals will continue, of
course, as it will for men’s; there’s no stopping that. But we can—and
must—bring dignity back to the discussion of our sexuality, even in comedy. If
Schumer is going to make basic jokes about her body parts, let’s hope they’ll
actually be funny. But by rambling on in a contradictory fashion about body
issues and vaginas, she fails as a comedian, a cultural commentator, and a
feminist.
Maybe next time she should try making fun of feminists
who objectify themselves with vulgar commentary about their vaginas. Maybe then
we might just swing the pendulum back into balance where women are respected as
complete human beings whose bodies are treated with dignity, not reduced to
barnyard imagery.
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