The Wild Woman Awakens

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/arts/Women-Who-Run-With-the-Wolves.html

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I first spied the book last spring, in the lap of a vaguely witchy young woman pinched between two men on the subway. Soon the book disappeared into a woven bag, her shoulder brushed against mine, and it was as if she had initiated me into a secret club. After that, I saw the book everywhere: in the hands of a tattooed solo diner while she ate a game bird in a Texas restaurant; nestled with the new releases on female rage in a Brooklyn bookstore; on Lana Del Rey’s Instagram.

The book, “Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype,” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, was first published in 1992. Its cover recalls a vintage GeoCities website: black background, underlined gold text, thumbnail-sized etching of a woman and her lupine companion. I cracked open a copy and encountered a fecund landscape: folk tales saturated with pollen, cobwebs, plums, petals, gristle, guts, “uncombed cats” and the bodies of human women.

Estés — a psychoanalyst, poet and cantadora, or “keeper of old stories” — draws from Jungian archetypes, hag lore and wildlife observation to build an alternative feminine mythology. She conjures images of a goddess squatting out a baby, of “the pungent odor of iron from the fresh blood of childbirth,” of the “power of the haunches” and “the spiritual placenta.” In her introduction, she explains why: “Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, overbuilt,” she writes. But “women’s flagging vitality can be restored by extensive ‘psychic-archeological’ digs into the ruins of the female underworld.” It is there that we might reveal “women’s deepest nature” and gain access to “the creative feminine.”

A generation later, “Women Who Run With the Wolves” has returned to a culture suddenly lush with primal visions of women’s bodies — dripping with blood, coursing with hormones and pulsing with pain and arousal. Accounts of menstruation, childbirth, menopause and gender transition howl through the worlds of theater and television, memoir and art. Instagram is overgrown with images of women loping naked through the woods and giving birth in living rooms, tagged #wildwoman or #witch or #laloba, the Spanish feminine for wolf. Related consumer products abound.

When I first picked up Estés’s book, I did so warily. A review printed across the bottom says that it “venerates the female soul,” but I don’t believe in the soul, and I extra don’t believe in “the female soul.” When it was published, “Wolves” read as a retort to the 1990 book “Iron John: A Book About Men,” written by another poet and Jungian enthusiast, Robert Bly, who instructed men to harness their “Zeus energy.” But now, Estés’s premise feels in tension with feminism itself — or at least the part of it that seeks to raze the binary, clear space for trans and nonbinary experiences and cast gender as a performance merely masquerading as a natural event.

But these modes are not as inconsistent as they first appear. There is a self-conscious playfulness to a movement that inspires women to identify with she-wolves constructed from discarded bones or brand themselves witches on social media despite an illiteracy with spellcraft. Like other ’90s touchstones that are recirculating in the culture — stylized covens, Marianne Williamson — the book has returned at a slightly ironic distance. As its cover image spreads across Instagram, the book itself has become a prop in a modern gender play.

Estés tells a story about the ancient Greek goddess Baubo, who appears as a headless torso with nipples for eyes and a vulva for a mouth. In Estés’s telling, Baubo is a gleefully obscene figure, shaking her breasts and telling dirty jokes for an audience of women. Through Baubo’s face, the nipples become “psychic organs,” and the vulva is a portal to women’s stories. As Estés puts it: “A woman feels sensations that others might imagine, but only she knows.”

Cut to “Fleabag” Season 2. Our gleefully obscene heroine, Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), encounters the wise Belinda (Kristin Scott Thomas) at an event honoring the “Best Woman in Business,” and their conversation soon turns to matters of the flesh. The statuette of a woman’s headless torso sits on the bar in front of them. “Women are born with pain built in,” Belinda tells Fleabag. “It’s our physical destiny: period pain, sore boobs, childbirth — you know. We carry it with ourselves throughout our lives. Men don’t. They have to seek it out.” This grants women a special insight. In an attempt to feel something, she says, men dream up Gods, start wars, invent rugby.

In a word, they create. As the novelist Rachel Cusk put it recently, a male artist gives birth “to his own genius.” This is staged as a primal, hypermasculine process. As the male artist lusts after muses, transforming their bodies into art objects, his mystique only grows. But a woman’s body is often cast as the obstacle to her own work, and not just by men. In “The Second Sex,” Simone de Beauvoir describes the pregnant woman as “life’s passive instrument.” The novelist Lucy Ellmann, herself a mother, went further in an interview this year: “You watch people get pregnant,” she said, “and know they’ll be emotionally and intellectually absent for 20 years.”

This new wave of projects reverses that premise. Women’s bodies are reinscribed as the very source of creative power. This movement has bloomed before a conspicuous backdrop: a reckoning on sexual harassment and assault, in which women’s bodies are under attack both literally and rhetorically. As some of those male geniuses have been unmasked as predators, their victims have been cast as their prey. Both women and wolves “have been hounded, harassed and falsely imputed,” Estés writes. “The predation of wolves and women by those who misunderstand them is strikingly similar.”

Locating a woman’s power in her body, even in a metaphorical sense, can make it feel untouchable. It exists in a realm that most men cannot access, in bodily processes they cannot experience and creative outputs they cannot match. Estés situates her feminine underworld in remote locations, deep inside abandoned wells and desert burrows. All of this suggests a different kind of locker-room talk — an artistic discourse formed out of the earshot of the patriarchy.

The action of “Dance Nation,” Clare Barron’s play about a dance troupe snarling at the edge of puberty, ricochets between the girls’ locker room and the dance studio. The girls (and a sweet, lone boy, Luke) execute interpretive dances choreographed by their blandly fascistic Dance Teacher Pat, but as the play unfolds, their transforming bodies unlock new forms of self-expression, and the locker room becomes their stage. One girl smears menstrual blood on her face like war paint; another fantasizes about giving birth, smashing her newborn’s head on the rocks and force-feeding the corpse to her rivals. At their wildest, the girls fuse into a wolf pack, donning fangs and snarling at the moon.

Animal metaphors can be a conduit for gaining access to a female experience that exists beyond social constructs of gender. In “Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life,” Darcey Steinke investigates cultural accounts of menopause and finds them lacking. Instead she searches for clues through a suite of captive, elder female animals: the gorilla Colo; the elephant Ambika; and the killer whale Lolita, who is penned in a tiny concrete pool in a Miami attraction. As human narratives about menopausal women close in around Steinke, she becomes one with Lolita, pacing back and forth in her tiny tank.

What makes a person feel like an animal? Perhaps undergoing a physical experience that has not been inscribed with cultural significance. One of the ironies of womanhood is that some aspects of the body are intently monitored (pregnancy) while others are suppressed or simply ignored (menopause). In the sweaty third season of “Better Things,” Pamela Adlon literally thrusts the menopausal body under an X-ray machine: Sam Fox, Adlon’s actress and single mother, is stopped at the airport by a T.S.A agent who spies something unusual in her pants. “Look, I’m wearing this special underwear, they’re like super thick and absorbent, and kind of — ish — like a diaper, but they’re underwear,” Sam explains at length. “Because I’m having a very heavy, very heavy late-in-life period.”

It is in childbirth that the tension between creation and the body reaches its crisis point. Motherhood can constrict a woman’s experience, tethering her to home and baby, but it also opens a portal to uncharted territory. (“If you have a deep scar,” Estés writes, “that is a door.”) In “Hard Knock Wife,” her 2018 Netflix special, new parent Ali Wong returns with an unsparing account of the bizarre physical trials of the “wack-ass job” that is motherhood: “Breastfeeding is this savage ritual that just reminds you that your body is a cafeteria now!” The hour is underscored by a dark visual punch line: Wong is deeply pregnant with her second child, on the verge of being pulled offstage and back to her other job.

Heji Shin’s photographs of babies crowning, featured at the Whitney Biennial this year, also situates childbirth as a work itself. Shin captures human heads emerging in anguish, with wrinkled foreheads and purpled lips, caked in blood and other unarticulated substances. “No one wants to look at women like that,” Kelly Taxter, a curator at the Jewish Museum, said in praise of the series. “No one wants to see a vagina like that.” In fact the vagina is barely discernible in the photographs. The women’s bodies appear as soft, undulating curves, as if they are fabric backdrops hung to present their beautiful and monstrous creations. There’s a reason they call it “labor.”

The vagina, by the way, is big right now. In “Dance Nation,” the girls (and Luke) center their creative potential in their “perfect” vaginas; their self-esteem seems to emanate straight from the crotch. In the music video for Janelle Monáe’s 2018 song “Pynk,” which transposes Aerosmith’s “Pink” into a queer context, Monáe poses in the desert in a billowing pair of vulva pants. As she dances, the vulva opens and closes like a mouth, then crosses into the abstract; at one point, the head of Tessa Thompson emerges between the folds.

The vagina, as a badge of womanhood, is simultaneously charged and depleted. It is oversaturated with meaning but obscured from public view. It’s taboo in the culture at large but contested within feminism, where it has acquired an essentialist reputation, as an emblem of the erasure of trans women. In her essay “The Pink,” Andrea Long Chu contemplates the symbolism of the vagina in the context of the feminist movement and her own gender transition, and ultimately argues on behalf of “a vaginal imaginary”: Just before she undergoes surgery to “get a vagina,” she has a geometric vulva tattooed on her forearm.

One danger of any “essential” image is wearing it out, losing it to cliché. Some of the most intriguing perspectives on the body are coming from women working beyond the cisgender symbology of womanhood. In her latest show, “Interfertility Industrial Complex: Snatch The Calf Back,” the artist Juliana Huxtable depicts women fused with animals, not as romanticized interspecies friendship but as a psychedelic sexual spectacle. Huxtable scrambles the images of the natural and the domesticated, the primal and the futuristic: fallopian tubes collapse into octopus tentacles; breasts multiply down a human torso like udders; a woman’s face melts into an obscene bovine cartoon body. Tabloid covers plant her figures in an absurdist discourse, satirizing the politicization of trans bodies. One reads: “‘Please stop’ — Feminists plead with cow-identified YouTuber to leave intersectionality alone.”

It’s notable that in many of these artworks, the natural is fused with the supernatural. Steinke compares menopause to a religious conversion, a witch’s spell and the Incredible Hulk. In “Better Things,” Sam’s menopause is so powerful that it disrupts her environment: The cockpit of her plane lights on fire; the thermostat in her on-set trailer is stuck at 92 degrees. Relaying tales of natural women through a supernatural grammar flips essentialism on its head; these accounts offer up feminine bodies and performance at once. The witch may collect natural elements to feed her caldron, but what emerges is supernatural.

In 2017, when “Wolves” was selected for Emma Watson’s digital feminist book club, a reader asked Estés what the book holds for trans and nonbinary people, and she replied, “There is not, as far as I know, and I have over my lifetime consulted with myriad crones, hobbits, faeries, gnomes and leprechauns, any final saying so about what is a woman.” Each individual, she wrote, is “made from divine and mundane ingredients available to us all.”

Such bodily insights are now being discussed on such a wide scale that they may be converted into the currency of the internet: data. I use a period tracker called Flo that solicits information on my menstrual blood, vaginal mucus and stool. It asks if I feel irritated, anxious, guilty; it wants to know every time I have sex. These reports can help users avoid pregnancy, or encourage it, but they also add up to something like memoir, a story of the relationship between women’s physical and emotional lives.

When you log onto Flo to input your “symptoms,” you’re beckoned to converse anonymously with other users in a corner of the app called “Secret Chats.” Inside, users represented by little hedgehogs and bunny rabbits write passionately about oral sex, compare breast shapes, and chronicle their efforts to conceive. Users are always “sprinkling baby dust ✨” across the app, willing other women to get pregnant. They are like digital fertility goddesses of the crowdsourced feminine underworld.

To tech companies, these insights are suddenly valuable in a more transactional sense. (My period app might as well ask me if I’m in the mood for some retail therapy.) The ingredients of embodied feminism have been extracted, bottled and sold back to us. “Feminine products” have long been proffered to tame the wild woman’s body, and now those items are being repackaged with the imagery reversed. The razor company Billie razors produces ads championing women with fuzzy legs and overgrown armpits, even as it sells a product for razing those features, if you so choose. GOOP, which outfits what it calls the “divine feminine,” channels this alternative feminine mythology in the service of a conventional feminine aesthetic.

Miki Agrawal, a self-styled feminist “She-E. O.,” is the leading capitalist cheerleader of this mode, having introduced products for menstruation (free-bleed into her Thinx underwear), pee (leak into her Icon underwear) and poo (rinse off with her Tushy bidet toilet attachment.)

In 2017, Agrawal was cast out of Thinx just as a former employee filed a complaint claiming that Agrawal groped a staff member’s breasts, exposed herself in the office and propositioned an employee. Agrawal denied the charges, and now she has returned to the public eye with a defiant book: “Disrupt-Her: A Manifesto For the Modern Woman.” In it, Agrawal demonizes the figure of the she-wolf, illustrating a female reporter as a lupine menace sent to consume the visionary female businesswoman.

Earlier this year, I attended a press gathering in Agrawal’s home with a dozen other women journalists. A spiritual adviser in a golden floral headband instructed us to dance sensually together as another woman snapped photographs for an undisclosed purpose, as if collecting kompromat. Agrawal had trapped all of the wolves in her den, circling us with her friends and interns. At the end of the evening, she screened an ad for her book in which she emerges from a bleeding vagina and delivers a spoken-word poem. We were finally released into the street hours later, clutching bidets, brains dulled from the creation that had just been birthed. Gender is a performance, but some acts are better than others.