.jpg)
Illustration to La Fontaine's Nouveaux Contes (1764)
Once upon a time, when a woman lifted up her skirt and displayed her cunt, it invoked profound horror in male onlookers. Even gods, demons and insects were disconcerted by this apotropaic act of magical indecency and her anatomy was not merely her destiny, but also the source of her terrifying power over life and death.
Sadly, however, within our epilated culture of digital pornography and labiaplasty, the cunt has lost much of its monstrous beauty and effective capacity. Women have been fatally exposed in the name of emancipation and equality and close-up images of their exposure are today endlessly circulated via the media; an act of violent and systematic exorcism.
For their feminine power is rendered null and void when their sex is put on permanent display and everything is made visible and accessible. No longer the site of secrets, the cunt has become a disenchanted and sanitized hole that waits to fulfill a function by being filled; just another empty sign in a hypersexual and hyperreal universe.
Having said that, some women are at least trying to reclaim their own genitals. The Labia Pride movement, for example, seeks to combat the growing trend for designer vaginas and raise awareness of the fact that the cunt comes in many shapes, sizes, and colours and should not be expected to conform to a hairless and odourless ideal determined by pornographers and cosmetic surgeons.
And whilst some of the statements I have read by vulva activists strike me as philosophically naive, I'm more than happy to support the goal of genital diversity and to resist trends which seek to further shame and humiliate women via the creation of misogynistic cultural norms and new insecurities.
Sadly, however, within our epilated culture of digital pornography and labiaplasty, the cunt has lost much of its monstrous beauty and effective capacity. Women have been fatally exposed in the name of emancipation and equality and close-up images of their exposure are today endlessly circulated via the media; an act of violent and systematic exorcism.
For their feminine power is rendered null and void when their sex is put on permanent display and everything is made visible and accessible. No longer the site of secrets, the cunt has become a disenchanted and sanitized hole that waits to fulfill a function by being filled; just another empty sign in a hypersexual and hyperreal universe.
Having said that, some women are at least trying to reclaim their own genitals. The Labia Pride movement, for example, seeks to combat the growing trend for designer vaginas and raise awareness of the fact that the cunt comes in many shapes, sizes, and colours and should not be expected to conform to a hairless and odourless ideal determined by pornographers and cosmetic surgeons.
And whilst some of the statements I have read by vulva activists strike me as philosophically naive, I'm more than happy to support the goal of genital diversity and to resist trends which seek to further shame and humiliate women via the creation of misogynistic cultural norms and new insecurities.
