Indeed, its addictive effects, in terms of new neuroscientific discoveries, actually turns out to be a kind of drug or sedative. Porn 24-7 doesn’t threaten social control. What is shocking and obscene is when a serious person – a legislator – dares to take back ownership of her own self, with the scandalous words “my vagina.” The issue is not the vagina, but who gets to say what becomes of it and who owns it. Legislating the most intimate aspects of women’s reproductive lives, all the way to imposing transvaginal probes on them – as states are doing across the country – isn’t shocking or obscene, because it is about taking away sexual control from women of their own bodies. Staging a strip performance is not disruptive to social order in Moscow, but three punk poets using their sexuality to make a satirical comment about Russian leader Vladimir Putin is destabilizing and must be punished.
Rather, what is still scandalous to our culture is when women take ownership of their own bodies. Indeed, the female body has never been so commodified before, and female sexuality has never been so readily consumable in sanitized, corporatized formats such as pornography. In a hypersexualized culture, in which porn is available 24-7, it is not female nudity – or discussion about vaginas or breasts or “pussy riots” – that is scandalous.
Vagina enters stage left – or is it right? We are at an important crossroads in which it is becoming clearer to women around the world that, as one feminist artist put it, “your body is a battleground.” Young women in Tahrir Square protesting in the Arab Spring were punished by imprisonment – and vaginal exams by armed strangers for “virginity tests.” This is not so surprising when you understand the delicate brain-vagina connection that my new book documents – female sexuality around the world is targeted because through traumatizing the vagina, you can intimidate women on multiple other levels.
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