Eurotophobia and the Case of Yulia Tsvetkova

Yulia Tsvetkova: 'Living Women Have Body Hair - And It's Normal!' 

Drawing from the series A Woman is Not a Doll (2018) 

 

I. 

 

I closed a recent post discussing the case of Caterina Sforza and her provocative act of vulvic defiance in the face of her male enemies by suggesting that the latter is not something that would work today in a porno-epilated culture; i.e., a culture in which the cunt has been rendered null and void, having lost its monstrous beauty and magical power.  

 

For whilst today, there may still be some men with an aversion to or dislike of female genitalia - perhaps on aesthetic grounds, for example - there is no real horror or fear of the cunt in the old sense. Even Freudians have largely abandoned their anxieties around castration and the old folk idea of vagina dentata has become laughable; the contemporary cunt, alas, has lost its teeth as well as hair.    

Having said this ... It seems that I was being somewhat Eurocentric and had failed to consider what the case of Yulia Tsvetkova tells us about eurotophobia in Vladimir Putin's Russia ...

II.

 

Yulia Tsvetkova is a 27-year-old artist and LGBTQ+ activist, currently under house arrest and facing criminal prosecution for creating and circulating homosexual propaganda and pornography; the latter consisting of no more than simple drawings of the female body posted on a feminist website in order to counter unrealistic and stereotypical images of women (an example of which can be seen above).

 

Well, that's not quite true; even the Russian authorities have conceded that these drawings do not in fact constitute pornography. Thus the charges against Tsvetkova relate, rather, to her role as the administrator of an online community who upload explicit (if often abstract) depictions of female genitalia to a page named after Eve Ensler's 1996 play, The Vagina Monologues. 

 

This, it seems, is too much: images of vaginas worked in elaborate embroidery or painted in delicate watercolour, trigger an ancient disturbance in the Russian male psyche; a primitive fear and hatred not so much for the cunt-as-organ, but for the cunt-as-symbol - one which obliges them to consider that most dreadful of suppositions: Supposing truth to be a woman ... [1]

 

It's a supposition that subverts the entire phallocratic order and its values; one that invites us to reconsider the world from a gynocentric perspective in which truth is not something that can be clearly identified and fixed, but something hidden, ever-changing, and prone to leakage. 

 

Ultimately, in thinking truth as woman - and in terms of the cunt - is to think truth not as presence, but, rather, as absence. Thus male anxiety before the gaping vagina is essentially a terror of staring into the void; a site of sheer loss in which everything becomes zero and Man struggles to maintain his hard-on. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] It was Nietzsche, of course, who first raised this supposition concerning the nature of truth; see his Preface to Beyond Good and Evil. See also chapter 3, Vol. 1, of The Treadwell's Papers, by Stephen Alexander, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 55-80, wherein I discuss this remark at length, developing a sexual politics of what D. H. Lawrence terms cunt-awareness. 

 

For more information on the case of Yulia Tsvetkova, visit freetsvet.net. 

 

Or to send an email to the Russian authorities demanding that charges against Tsvetkova are dropped, visit her Amnesty International page by clicking here. 

  

A Vagina Monologue

Poster for the film Chatterbox starring Candice Rialson 

(dir. Tom DeSimone, 1977)

I.

Many people are familiar with Eve Ensler's critically acclaimed but philosophically problematic play, The Vagina Monologues (1996). But not everyone knows of the artistic tradition to which it belongs and which can be traced back to an ancient folkloric - and phonocentric - origin.      

The vagina loquens is a particularly popular motif in France. When not working on his Encyclopédie, for example, the philosopher Diderot was also writing a novel entitled Les bijoux indiscrets (published anonymously in 1748), whose story concerns an African sultan who possesses a magical ring - given to him by a genie - that when rubbed and pointed in the right direction grants female genitalia the autonomous power of speech.   

This is often awkward for the women concerned, as what shameless cunts most like to speak of when given the opportunity is past amorous experience, including acts of infidelity that their owners might prefer to keep secret and remain silent about.

Now, whilst I quite like this idea of an independently-minded, free-speaking vagina, nobody likes a rat and nobody wants a snatch that snitches. Also, I have problems with the idea of locating a moral-confessional notion of truth in the vagina, thereby simply turning the cunt into another form of soul and reviving traditional ideas of sex and subjectivity.


II.

In effect, this brings us back to some of the philosophical criticisms made of Ensler's play. For example, some feminists, trans activists and genderqueer individuals are far from happy to see women being reduced once more to their biology and are dismissive of the claim that they can be politically empowered via a form of cunt-awareness. 

Critiquing The Vagina Monologues from a very different perspective - but with even more overt hostility - is Camille Paglia, who regards the play as a bourgeois perversion of feminism and a psychological poison that denigrates men and celebrates victimhood.

Whilst I don't quite share Paglia's almost obsessive insistence on discussing female sexuality in terms of elemental mysteries and bloody horror, I do agree with her that Ensler's sentimental and complacent humanism in which the vagina is turned into a user-friendly safe space and given a winning personality is deeply depressing.

Ultimately, of course, it's not for me to suggest what a speaking vagina might have to tell us. But one would hope it might amuse and challenge, rather than bore to tears by merely repeating what it's already heard the mouth blabber on numerous occasions.

Either that, or, preferably, just stay mute with a noiseless soft power of its own that lies beyond all truth (unless it be the truth of zero), all identity, and all metaphysics of presence. In fact, that's precisely what I want the cunt to be; a kind of ontological black hole or site of sheer loss, as silent and as inviting as a freshly dug grave.