Vagina. Saying it out loud is somewhat cathartic in a way. Go on, try it. Vagina. It’s connotations are slightly different from saying “penis”, which is like shouting out “power” in a raw way (which can be a good experience, so I’m not taking sides here). Vagina is like saying “shame” while lifting one’s eyes and facing the world. It’s defiance in its pronunciation. It’s what would happen if Susanna, in Allori’s Susanna and the Elders were to look away from the mirror, right into the elders’ eyes and stand up to full height in her nakedness. Yes, the elders are the voyeurs and rightfully it’s they who should be feeling shame. Saying “vagina” feels like that act of putting the shame in its rightful place.
And so begins my affinity for the Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler. Talking about vaginas is not sexy – not in the least bit. I’m not saying it couldn’t be made sexy, but we choose to keep that out and instead simply talk about them – making ourselves vulnerable, being honest, for once emerging from the forts we’ve constructed for ourselves. That fort is sexy – it doesn’t care about anything but its own defence, plays power games and cannot, will not love – loving you see, is vulnerability. That’s how it differs from admiration – to admire and to be admired involves no risk. But, to paraphrase Rilke, we have not really lived until we test the limits of risk. To me, it’s this sincerity that the Vagina Monologues represent – reaching into that intimate part that is not fortified, that is proud even in its vulnerability – projecting that vulnerability as its strength. I’m not ashamed, it seems to say. I’m shameless and proud of it. Like carrying a sanitary pad through a crowded room. Yes, the pad out in the open – no bag, no hiding.
Saying “vagina” is such a shock to our hetero-normative selves also because, as Virginia Woolf rightly points out, women are taught not to love other women, and by extension, themselves. We make of ourselves what is perceived of us – John Berger writes of this as he describes the gaze – the woman gazes in the mirror (Susanna assesses herself) and the man gazes at the woman. She tries to achieve in the mirror what he wants her to be. Saying vagina, much less going through the acts of looking at, feeling and experiencing the presence of the vagina, is an act of self-acceptance – of acknowledging pleasure, the ability to love and to feel love, to feel and reject pain. At the end, we can, as Woolf says, tell ourselves that it is possible after all for Chloe to like Olivia. I quote from her: “Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”
The moment of articulating this realization of sexuality is like that moment in Maurice when Durham first gives Maurice a copy of The Symposium. “He hadn’t known it could be mentioned” Forster writes, “and when Durham did so in the middle of a sunlit court, a breath of liberty touched him.”

It is, the furthest praxis of Germaine Greer’s warning against women turning themselves into sexless “female eunuchs” in their attempts to fit into a male-defined hetero-norm. Saying “vagina” out loud and talking about this vital part, is in a second, the creation of the desiring subject – the woman who wants for herself: the woman unafraid to love another women and strip off her armour of vulnerability before this friend, as she might before a man, a woman unwilling to allow this vulnerability to be ravaged by man or woman.
The monologues speak of the vagina in architectural terms – as a flooded cellar for instance. It is the inner space – if it were not kept separate and unspoken about, bedchamber and cellar would lose their boundaries – for they are one in the imagination, both being spaces of heightened intimacy. This is the architecture of intimate spaces – the vagina is not the fortress or even the walls of the home. It is the “inside” spaces of comfort and intimacy – the couch, the bed, the basement – spaces of secret discomforts, deep truths and true pleasure.
Possibly the most euphemised word of all time, the vagina is also mythologized and part of most imaginations – labyrinths, flowers, immensity emerging from smallness, are all pictures of the vagina. To say it with pride, and love, however, is a little foreign to our ideas. I believe that, like carrying a sanitary pad in the open, saying vagina rather than “down there” or “flower” or any of the million “other” words used to describe it, is important to making women visible as women and putting shame where it belongs – in the perpetrator of sexual violence, not in the woman, because yes, we have vaginas. Yes, we love it. No we’re not ashamed of it. No, we’re not building a fort around it. That doesn’t mean anyone can force himself or herself in. And yes, that also means we choose to love who we love, and do so proudly. Cast off the shame.

The Author
 Sneha Krishnan is an economics-obsessed, pasta-loving history student bound for Oxford this fall. She is usually found curled up in sofas with her ever-present macbook perched on some surface in the vicinity. Sneha first started thinking about doing Sa when she and Shweta realized that they were ranting about the day's news/ happenings practically everyday and everything they said had something to do with their feminist convictions. So they wondered how it would be to write about these things and more... and KaBoom... seven months and laborious code-learning (trial and error, the only method for us) sessions later, Sa came to be. Sneha’s favourite pastimes, besides feminism and Sa, are reading the New York Times, playing Scrabble and watching every movie that looks remotely interesting.

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