The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer Read Free Book Online

smelly, and obligingly obliterates all signs of her menstruation in the cause of public decency. Women were not always so reticent: in ballad literature we can find lovely ex- amples of women vaunting their genitals, like the lusty wench who admonished a timid tailor in round terms because he did not dare measure her fringed purse with his yard:
    You’l find the Purse so deep,
    You’l hardly come to the treasure. 2
    Another praised her shameful part in these terms:
    I have a gallant Pin-box, The like you ne’er did see,
    It is where never was the Pox Something above my knee…
    O ’tis a gallant Pin-box You never saw the peer;
    Then Ile not leave my Pin-box For fifty pound a year. 3
    Early gynaecology was entirely in the hands of men, some of whom, like Samuel Collins, described the vagina so lovingly that any woman who read his words would have been greatly cheered. Of course such books were not meant to be seen by women at all. He speaks of the vagina as the Temple of Venus and the mons veneris as Venus’s cushion, but he abandons euphemism to describe the wonders of the female erection:
    …the Nymphs…being extended do compress the Penis and speak a delight in the act of Coition…The use of the blood-vessels is to impart Vital Liquor into the substance of the Clitoris, and of the Nerves to impregnate it with a choyce Juyce inspired with animal Spirits (full of Elastick Particles making it Vigorous and Tense)…The Glands of the Vagina…being heated in Coition, do throw off the rarified fermented serous Liquor, through many Meatus into the Cavity

    of the Vagina, and thereby rendereth its passage very moist and slippery, which is pleasant in Coition…The Hypogastrick Arteries do sport themselves in numerous Ramulets about the sides and other parts of the Vagina, which are so many inlets of blood to make
    it warm and turgid in the Act of Coition. 4
    Collins’s description is an active one: the vagina speaks, throws , is tense and vigorous . He and his contemporaries assumed that young women were even more eager for intercourse than young men. Some of the terms they used to describe the tissues of the female genitalia in action are very informative and exact, although unscientific. The vagina is said to be lined ‘with tunicles like the petals of a full-blown rose’, with ‘Wrinckle on wrinckle’ which ‘do give delight in Copula- tions’. The vagina was classified as ‘sensitive enough’ which is an exact description. They were aware of the special role of the clitoris, in causing the ‘sweetness of love’ and the ‘fury of venery’.

    The Vagina is made so artificial (affabre is his word) that it can accommodate itself to any penis, so that it will give way to a long one, meet a short one, widen to a thick one, constringe to a small one: so that every man might well enough lie with any Woman and every Woman with
    any Man.
    ‘The Anatomy of Human Bodies epitomized’, 1682, p. 156

    The notion that healthy and well-adjusted women would have orgasms originating in the vagina was a metaphysical interpolation in the empirical observations of these pioneers. Collins took the clitoris for granted, as a dear part of a beloved organ; he did not under-emphasize the role of the vagina in creating pleasure, as we have seen. Unhappily we have accepted, along with the reinstatement of the clitoris after its proscription by the Freudians, a notion of the utter passivity and even irrelevance of the vagina. Lovemaking has become

    another male skill, of which women are the judges. The skills that the Wife of Bath used to make her husbands swink, the athletic sphincters of the Tahitian girls who can keep their men inside them all night, are alike unknown to us. All the vulgar linguistic emphasis is placed upon the poking element; fucking, screwing, rooting, shagging are all acts performed upon the passive female: the names for the penis are all tool names. The only genuine intersexual words we have for sex are the