The party became a topic of conversation among his friends, often with a ripple of amusement – with something oblique in it – as an undercurrent.Īlan told me that he was going to do a pasta party at which guests could make vagina-shaped pasta. At that point, a friend of a friend – an impresario whom I will call Alan, who has a complicated sense of humour and enjoys creating social spectacles that heighten tension – said he wanted to throw a party celebrating my book deal. This book had just been signed by a publisher, and I was euphoric, in creative terms, about the research and writing ahead.Īt the same time, I was anxious about grappling with such a strong social taboo. I experienced firsthand the powerful impact that the words used to communicate about the vagina can have on the female brain. With this dynamic in mind, the phrase "fuck her up" takes on new meaning. This in turn will inhibit the dopamine boost she might otherwise receive, which would in turn prevent the release of the chemicals in her brain that otherwise would make her confident, creative, hopeful, focused – and effective, especially relevant if she is competing academically or professionally with you. If you sexually stress a woman enough, over time, other parts of her life are likely to go awry she will have difficulty relaxing in bed, as well as in the classroom or in the office. Sexually threatening stress releases cortisol into the bloodstream, which has been connected to abdominal fat in women, with its attendant risks of diabetes and cardiac problems it also raises the likelihood of heart disease and stroke. On some level they are getting the message that they may be in the presence of would-be rapists, making it impossible to shrug off immature comments, as women are often asked to do. Almost all young women who face a group of their male peers chanting such slogans are likely to feel instinctively slightly panicked. Ethically, they are in the right, and neurobiologically, they are right as well. The young men chanted at the protesters: "No means yes and yes means anal." Some of the young women brought a lawsuit against the university, arguing that tolerating such behaviour created an unequal educational environment. In 2010, male Yale students gathered at a "Take Back the Night" event, where their female classmates were marching in a group, protesting against sexual assault. These acts are often impersonal and tactical – strategies for directing a kind of pressure at women that is not consciously understood, but may be widely intuited, and even survive in folk memory, as eliciting a wider neuropsychological "bad stress" response that actually debilitates women. But the role of manipulating female stress in targeting the vagina should not be ignored. Of course cultural and psychological motivations play a part in this form of harassment. When a woman faces a workplace in which her male peers want to show her she is unwelcome, similar words or images targeting or insulting the vagina will often surface: centrefolds with legs spread, for instance, and the face of the woman in question superimposed on the naked body, will appear in public. Women react strongly to male verbal abuse of their vaginas or to implied threats of rape, even when these are "just jokes", for these very reasons – though most of us are unaware of the science behind our gut reaction that this kind of abuse is bad for us.Ĭomedienne Roseanne Barr described male TV writers' behaviour when women made inroads into their profession: she noted that she hated going up to the writers' house because there would be a "stinky-pussy" joke within three minutes. This "bad stress" can also, as it supports or inhibits orgasm, either raise or lower the levels of women's confidence, creativity and hopefulness overall. One suggests that a stressful environment can negatively affect vaginal tissue itself. Studies have shown that verbal threats or verbal admiration or reassurances can directly affect the sexual functioning of the vagina. When a judge says "Guilty" to a defendant, or a groom says "I do", the words alter material reality. A "performative utterance" is a word or phrase that actually accomplishes something in the real world. Because of the subtlety of the mind-body connection, words about the vagina are also what philosopher John Austin, in his 1960 book How to Do Things with Words, calls "performative utterances", often used as a means of social control. W ords, when deployed in relation to the vagina, are always more than "just words".
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