Naomi Wolf: 'Neural wiring explained vaginal v clitoral orgasms. Not culture. Not Freud'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/sep/02/naomi-wolf-women-orgasm-neural-wiring

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Naomi Wolf has been one of the world's most famous feminists for more than 20 years and she herself admits it is a very odd job. When she wrote The Beauty Myth in 1991, she was 27 years old, enrolled on a PhD course and not intending to make her career in the field of feminist criticism. "It's not a job that anyone had described as a possibility," she says and laughs. The success of that book, and the vitriol it attracted, launched her as a figure of some cultural import – part pop academic (she is just now getting around to finishing the PhD), part pundit and, more recently, part civil rights activist in the Occupy movement – and if she carries herself with a slight Joan of Arc air it is not without cause; public feminists don't, generally, attract the sanest mailbag. "Oh, without doubt," says Wolf on the question of whether, when she writes about women, she gets a higher ratio of abuse than when she writes about anything else. "So what?"

We are in New York, where Wolf lives with her two children and works between PhD commitments at Oxford. Her new book, Vagina, is attracting a lot of attention, not least for the title, a canny piece of marketing that she didn't hesitate to use, she says, "because that word is either so taboo or surrounded with negative connotations or draped in shame or medicalised, it's really important to take it back". The book is part memoir, part cultural history and part scientific journey around women's sexuality, the best elements of which illuminate how little women generally know about their own anatomy – a kind of brainy sex manual – the worst of which founders on the kind of academic jargon Wolf is fond of, and that has to be squeezed hard to elicit much meaning. (Sample: "... nor does this denial of the paradox of our feminine autonomy co-existing unsettledly with our feminine need for interdependence ...")

There is some discussion about what constitutes the "female soul". Looking back on a walk she took with a group of female scientists, Wolf recounts "that slightly wild, slightly inexplicable moment – when the wind, the grass and the animals had all seemed a part of what we were learning about ourselves". It's these kind of moments that have, over the years, contributed to a vague sense that while her heart is undoubtedly in the right place, Wolf is also full of hot air.

So it is with Vagina, a generally noble enterprise to unshackle female sexual pleasure from millennia of cultural baggage by locating it in scientific fact – as she puts it, "this amazing set of discoveries; this incredible, to me, revelatory science". It all started with a problem Wolf was having in her own sex life; the quality of her orgasms suddenly changed from being full of light and colour and what she describes in terms of transcendental experience, to something dull and lifeless. She went to see "New York's pelvic nerve man", which required a certain presence of mind. A lot of people in her place would have gone to see a psychotherapist.

"I'm not that crazy," she says. "I knew that there was something physically wrong. It was physical. It was a physical experience."

Wolf was absolutely right. The doctor diagnosed a mild form of spina bifida and told her that her spine, which was out of alignment, was compressing one branch of the pelvic nerve. He then explained to her the science of orgasm; that impulses from the pelvic nerve travelled up to the "female brain", or as she later summarised in the book, "how the genitals connect to the lower spinal cord, which in turn connects to the brain". This explained why she was suffering a lack of psychic as well as physical response during sex.

"I almost fell off the edge of the exam table in my astonishment," she writes. "That's what explained vaginal versus clitoral orgasms? Neural wiring? Not culture, not upbringing, not patriarchy, not feminism, not Freud?"

She continues: "I had never read that how you best reached orgasm, as a woman, was largely due to basic neural wiring."

Wolf underwent an operation to put a metal plate in her back, after which, thankfully, all is well. But she has a profound new understanding of the way in which the vagina, in its hitherto underpublicised connection with the brain, "mediates consciousness".

There will be many women (and men) whom this strikes at a less than revelatory level, not because it is common knowledge, but because it seems that every other week these days a book comes out ascribing various human states and behaviours – love/happiness/anger/addiction – to brain chemistry or neural wiring, accompanied by data from a scanner and a set of demoralised lab rats. The meaning of life might as well just be: neuroscience. So what?

Well, says Wolf, her mission with the book was "to get rid of that extra layer of shame and ignorance and confusion and blaming of the self for things that evolution or anatomy have constructed". Since feminists – and anti-feminists – of yore spent so much time scrapping over the politics of female orgasm, it is useful to get the basic physiology down. "Freud was wrong and Shere Hite didn't have the whole picture, and the feminists of the 70s were waging a battle to prioritise the clitoris over the vagina that is actually beside the point, because every woman is wired differently," says Wolf. "Why didn't they tell us in eighth grade? No one let us know. That whole revelation, about the neural system, and how complex it is, and its relationship to the spine and to the brain, was absolutely revelatory to me. It's changed my whole sense of how we're put together."

All of which is good and sensible. But having taken politics out of the equation, Wolf then reintroduces them. Part of her investigation revolves around the various hormones and neurotransmitters activated in a woman's body during a "successful" sexual encounter, eg dopamine, "which boosts the chemical construct of confidence, motivation, focus, all of these feminist qualities. Goal orientedness. Assertiveness".

In the book, she writes, "dopamine is the ultimate feminist chemical in the female brain," a guffy-sounding PR line that sits awkwardly alongside the scientific language. Oxytocin, meanwhile "is women's emotional superpower". The vagina is "not only coextensive with the female brain but also is part of the female soul". And, finally, "if femininity resided anywhere," writes Wolf, "I would say it resides there, in that electric inward network extending from pelvis to brain". (I'm not sure an abstract noun can reside anywhere. George Bush would be the one to ask).

It's the kind of language to make scientists scream. I wonder if she hesitated to use terms such as "soul"?

"You're zeroing in on exactly the parts of the book that took the most care and struggle," she says. "I know why it's risky to invoke that dimension or even that discourse. And that's why I was so careful in defining it so narrowly. There's this linear syllogism in the book. I'm not using that language without grounding it very carefully in the physical. William James said there are these transcendental experiences that many people had, and he got that from a lot of interviews. And then various neuroscientists have been mapping out where transcendence happens in the brain. One of my favourite quotes about the book is from a doctor that I had asked to read the manuscript, who, when I said something like – you know, we're just talking about states of consciousness – he said, but the only way we have of experiencing states of consciousness is in the physical, which doesn't make them less real."

When Wolf was growing up in 70s San Francisco, the daughter of two academics, the kind of states of consciousness she writes about were frowned upon by many women activists as not feminist. Being in love, with its sense, as Wolf puts it, of "longing, dependency, need", was considered undermining of female independence. "The discourse that I inherited," says Wolf, "was like, you keep [these feelings] at a distance, don't acknowledge them, they're shameful, they're weaknesses. I always felt that that was buying into a sexist or traditionally masculinist view of human nature. And I thought, if women feel these things so regularly, it's not enough to say that it's just masochism."

This was the era of a-woman-needs-a-man-like-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle, since when feminism has moved on. Nonetheless, there will be feminist critics who read her book and are alarmed by its essentialism; who receive her efforts to find a neurological definition of "femininity" – something they spent years arguing was mostly a cultural construct – as reductive and reactionary.

"I get it. And I know these schools of analysis and they're very very helpful conceptually, and in dealing with literature and philosophy. But they are being challenged all the time by what's going on in the labs. I saw rats – rats do not theorise their existence – behaving like female rats. You know? And again, there's space for many, many, many discourses in feminism."

Which brings us (sort of) to "cuntini". One of the interesting things Wolf looks into is the way in which sexualised language is used to demoralise women who achieve power in male-dominated worlds. Most women know this from experience; that sexual insult is the quickest and commonest way to undermine them and that men – online, on the street – use it all the time. I'm sure Wolf has come in for a tonne of it. But there is a scene in the book that suggests she has crossed into territory where it is difficult for the rest of us to follow. With her trademark tone of more in sorrow than in anger, Wolf tells the story of a party her friend Alan threw her, in celebration of Vagina finding a publisher. As a joke, Alan said he was going to make vagina-shaped pasta, which he did. When, in front of guests, he referred to it as "cuntini", Wolf was so horrified, so traumatised by his language, that, she writes, she suffered six months of writer's block.

One understands that "lighten up, love" is the stock misogynist response to women protesting male aggression. But this seems an extraordinary reaction to a …

"Party?" says Wolf.

Yeah.

"I mean. You know. I'm not sure what your question is?"

It's hard to understand how she can have had such a reaction to a bit of a shit joke, but not that bad a joke.

"Well, that's a good question." She looks very much as if she does not consider this a good question. "You know, one never understands everything about one's insufficiencies and incapacities, but I know that I was nervous [about the book]. I'm not now, because there are enough readers who've said, wow, this is really valuable to me. But at that time, I hadn't written the book yet and I was scared by the taboo around it. And scared that there would be a very public backlash; that I'd be punished."

She cites the contagious diseases acts of 19th-century Britain, which allowed the state to round up prostitutes and women judged to be promiscuous for mandatory VD testing and subsequent imprisonment. "Which, believe it or not, is I think actually a major trauma in western women's psyches – that oh my God, if I'm sexual or if I own my sexuality in some public way, a terrible thing will happen to me. For a while, thousands of women were rounded up because they were overtly sexual and incarcerated for up to nine months. And I do think there are such things as culturally traumatic moments that get passed down.

"So it was scary to think: I'm going to write this book and put my name on it and send it out there and something terrible will happen. So then when, in my circle, there was this publicly humiliating thing [cuntini], I don't know if there was a cause/effect and that's why I couldn't write, but I know I couldn't write for quite a while after that. Again, these are very intuitive connections, so I can't say this silenced me. But it reinforced the idea that something bad would happen."

It's not that this isn't credible so much that Wolf can't, apparently, hear how it plays; or how a wry acknowledgment of its absurdity might get her further. It's the same tonal deafness that characterises her description of a man from Chalk Farm, north London, in whom she puts a great deal of store, a "bodyworker" who attempts, through massage, to re-engage sexually traumatised women and who, Wolf relates in the book with a straight face, once saw an image of the Virgin Mary in a vagina.

Now that she is working on civil liberties, life has become slightly easier. She has a big following, with fewer crazies in the mix. After being arrested in New York last year during an Occupy protest, Wolf found herself in the public eye as a hero. (She was informing protesters of their legal rights to demonstrate peacefully, without being rounded up by police, who arrested her.) It was, she says, a frightening experience. "They took us from the precinct where our lawyers were waiting, to an undisclosed location across town where no one knew where we were. We were looking at 15 days in Rikers Island if we were found guilty, which is a very violent place. Where all bets are off. I think everyone in Britain and America should be very concerned about protecting due process."

She is hugely disappointed in Obama on this front. "Oh my God. He prosecutes whistleblowers, he keeps Guantánamo open, he allowed the department of homeland security to put military equipment in police stations across the country which they then used against protesters. He has been worse than Bush for civil liberties."

Can she still vote for him? "I try not to say who I'm voting for because I try not to endorse." But, she says, "people like Cameron and Obama and Romney to some extent are – minor differences."

She will continue campaigning, through her journalism, her advocacy and her "democracy-building" website. Meanwhile, Vagina will probably cause a fuss in the kind of places where everything causes a fuss; a few bookstores will refuse to put it in the window, and Wolf will be reassured, as she must, of the power of her taboo-breaking.