MASARYKOVA UNIVERZITA PEDAGOGICKÁ FAKULTA Katedra Anglického Jazyka a Literatury

MASARYKOVA UNIVERZITA PEDAGOGICKÁ FAKULTA Katedra anglického jazyka a literatury

ZÁVĚREČNÁ PRÁCE

Brno 2019 Mgr. Adriana Bolhová

Masaryk University Faculty of Education

Department of English Language and Literature

The most controversial aspects of female body

Final Work

Mgr. Adriana Bolhová

Supervisor: Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D.

Brno 2019 Abstract

This final thesis focuses on the feminist and socio-cultural interpretation of three of the most controversial aspects of female body; menstruation, hairy female body, and vagina. Through poems in collection milk and honey written by the Indian-born Canadian author, Rupi Kaur and critical sources the thesis reflects past and recent discussions addressed to these topics.

Moreover, this thesis argues that Rupi Kaur addresses the castigated functions of female body showing openly how the modern world perceives contemporary women who struggle with self-acceptance. The theoretical part shortly introduces the author and her collection while the analytical part focuses on studies of perception of menstruation, female body hair, and female genitals in Rupi Kaur’s poems supported by the secondary readings. Finally, this thesis presents the importance of the role of female artists and their view of female genitals.

Keywords: Rupi Kaur, milk and honey, female body, menstruation, domination, the hairless female body, abuse, vagina

Anotácia

Táto záverečná práca sa zameriava na feministickú a sociálno kutlúrnu analýzu troch najviac kontroverzných aspektov ženského tela; menštruácii, ochlpenia ženského tela a vagíny.

Prostredníctvom basní v zbierke mlieko a med, od rodenej Indky a Kanadskej autorky, Rupi

Kaur a kritických zdrojov táto práca zachytáva minulé a súčasné názory adresované týmto témam. Okrem toho táto práca argumentuje, že Rupi Kaur poukazuje na kritizované funkcie

ženského tela kde otvorene ukazuje ako moderný svet vníma súčasné ženy, ktoré zápasia so sebaakceptovaním. Teoretická časť nám stručne predstavuje autorku a jej zbierku, zatiaľ čo praktická časť sa zameriava na analýzu pohľadu na menštruáciu, ženského ochlpenia a žen- ských pohlavných orgánov v básniach od Rupi Kaur sprevádzaných sekundárnou literatúrou.

Následne táto práca uvádza dôležitosť úlohy umelkýň a ich vnímania ženských pohlavných orgánov.

Kľúčové slová: Rupi Kaur, mlieko a med, ženské telo, menštruácia, domination, ženské telo bez chlpov, zneužitie, vagína

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D., for her kind help,

valuable advice and positive encouragement.

Contents

Introduction ...... 7

1. Rupi Kaur ...... 9

1.1 Rupi Kaur: Instapoet ...... 9

1.2 milk and honey ...... 11

2. Domination and the female body ...... 13

2.1 Menstruating body ...... 16

2.2 Menstrual Taboos, Pollution ...... 18

3. Female body hair ...... 25

3.1 Disgust on female body hair ...... 27

4. Female genitals ...... 34

4.1 Negative aspect of vagina ...... 34

4.2 Positive aspects of vagina ...... 41

Conclusion ...... 43

Works Cited ...... 46

Appendix ...... 50

Introduction

The history of women’s bodies has been depicted in various areas of social life and the female body has been the subject of numerous empirical studies in a wide variety of specific contexts (Davis 5). This thesis mostly focuses on socio-cultural interpretation of the most controversial aspects of female body; women’s embodied experiences of menstruation, symbolic and cultural representations of vagina where different attitudes towards female genitals can affect women’s willingness not to talk about their vagina as something private and shameful.

Feminist work has done much to present positive alternative representations of menstruation and the vagina and attention has been placed on how institutions and cultural discourses shape women’s embodied experiences (Davis 5).

This final thesis is to analyse hidden and questionable aspects of female body through different critical sources and poems of young Indian – born Canadian poet, Rupi Kaur. The interpretations imply how female body was and is still perceived in the twenty-first century and that “learning to be a woman in any patriarchal culture has many painful aspects” (Laws

208). In the centre of Kaur’s poems is a woman with whom contemporary women can easily identify, a woman who deals with taboo of menstruation, a woman who tries to accept her female body as it was created in spite of the pressure of the world which still attempts to persuade her of hairless, smooth image of the feminine body. There is an evidence how rape and abuse which still go on in this world, can affect women’s health and self-perception

(Wolf 138) and how menstruation, which is such natural biological process, is still looked at with secrecy and shame.

Rupi Kaur in milk and honey determines the direction of the poems where she explores themes of sexual abuse, survival, loss, trauma, healing, femininity and what it means to be a woman in this day and age and she is not afraid to speak openly about the most controversial

7 subjects of female body; menstruation, oppression, abuse, vagina. Besides, she tries to refine her definition of what it means to be a woman in this society, “we are all born / so beautiful

/ the greatest tragedy is / being convinced we are not” (183). Furthermore, Kaur draws par- allels between the beauty of nature and the biology of the female body. In modern society female genitalia is over sexualized or labelled “distasteful” whenever it is not being used for pleasure. The biology of a woman's body is heard when used such pleasure otherwise it should be left mentioned. No matter the look, shape, size, colour of body parts; it is natural, human and undoubtedly beautiful. The pure realness is what makes it so alluring, not what society has done to pluck (“Anatomy”).

Kaur also argues that women are under the pressure of social norms which intent to form unacceptably restrictive construction of the feminine woman; “my issue with what they consider beauty / is their concept of beauty / centers around excluding people” (170). Besides, these norms “powerfully endorse the assumption that a woman's body is unacceptable if unaltered” (Toerien and Wilkinson 333). Yet, Rupi Kaur declares that being a woman makes her feel complete in her feminine skin. She accepts her stretch marks as natural part of her human being. They look human and normal. She celebrates the natural beauty of being a woman and disagrees with any societal constructs about how women ought to behave, dress and groom themselves: “i find hair beautiful / when a woman wears it / like a garden on her skin/ that is a definition of beauty…” (170). Furthermore, Sophie Laws also claims that women develop their own attitudes towards their body within a culture, within families, with certain pressures upon them (Laws 1) and that notions of what is 'natural' are very variable, and attitudes to bodies generally change enormously across different cultures (20).

However, the primary focus in this thesis is to explore mostly negative socio-cultural perception of the most controversial taboos of female body; menstruation, vagina and hairless female body. Rupi Kaur as a modern literary representative of feminism helps women

8 to understand how beautiful their body is no matter what the world is trying to tell them.

1. Rupi Kaur

1.1 Rupi Kaur: Instapoet

Rupi Kaur is a # 1 New York times bestselling author and illustrator of two collections of poetry (“About”).

She started drawing when she was five when her mother handed her a paintbrush and said to draw her heart out. Rupi Kaur views her life as an exploration of that artistic journey.

Through her poetry and illustration she engages with love, loss, trauma, healing, and femininity. For Kaur writing has always been a collective experience, a form of release that quickly began resonating with those around her. Kaur pursued her love for language by stud- ying rhetoric at the university of Waterloo. Her labour of love milk and honey quickly became a New York times best seller. She has since brought her performative poetry to stages across the world. Kaur’s passion is expression and that expression is taking many forms. Her photography and art direction are warmly embraced and her poetry and prose are breaking international boundaries (Kaur 207).

Rupi Kaur was only 25-year-old when she became one of the bestselling Instapoet

(Samantha Edwards). Yet, it is not only the straightforward nature of Instapoetry, but also the therapeutic and emotional influence of Kaur's poetry on readers what makes her so popular. Ian Williams explains that for a long time, poems have been so difficult and rare- fied, and along has come Rupi Kaur, who is the age of her audience and seems to be flout- ing convention. Her readers can understand what she’s talking about. They don’t feel in- sulted or stupid, and they don’t feel like they need to dissect [the writing] like in English class. And that mixture of social media celebrity and simple beauty reaches an audience that literary poetry can’t―or won’t. It breeds devotion (Samantha Edwards).

But, Rupi Kaur has often been the subject of frequent parody online while some critics have questioned its literary merits. But mostly, all these critics have looked only on the structure of her poetry. Kaur's poetry is simple and easy to grasp. She has admiration for minimalism and wants her poems to be uncomplicated, to be reachable for each of her readers also for those who particularly might not like poetry. She also claims that she will never stop writing, because it became like a limb, an extension of her body; for her, poetry is like holding up a mirror and seeing herself and gives words to these very complete emotions and these feelings that she had as a child, and not being able to put words to them

(Rupi Kaur, “How Poet Rupi Kaur Became a Hero to Millions of Young Women”). In her milk and honey she writes: “my heart quickens at / the thought of birthing poem / which is why i will never stop / opening myself to conceive them” (Kaur 200).

Some of the lovers of poetry would not be happy about coupling poetry and social media together, but Rupi Kaur argues that in her mind it seem so very natural that these two things would come together, because of technology and social media, so many things are changing, and social media has become a platform for so many different industries (Rupi

Kaur, “How Poet Rupi Kaur Became a Hero to Millions of Young Women”). Furthermore, through her poetry, Rupi Kaur has become a voice of this post – postmodern time when women can easily identify themselves in Kaur's six - line poems. She has made them feel powerful, strong, healed, independent and free from oppression of this world when she has written that “the greatest lesson a woman should learn is that since day one / she's already had everything / she needs within herself / it's the world / that convinced her she did not”

(The Sun and Her flowers 233).

Rupi Kaur in her first collection of poems milk and honey encourages women to be bold, not to be afraid to be themselves and speak up about their opinions. After reading

Kaur's poems women experience some hope and self-empowerment. Her words are simple but transformative.

1. 2 milk and honey

Milk and honey is Rupi Kaur’s first collection. It is transparent in its subject, minimal in its structure, stylistic in its position, and elevates itself even higher with impactful drawings (Hacco). The collection opens with a poem:

my heart woke me crying last night

how can i help i begged

my heart said

write the book (6)

Rupi Kaur refrains from using capital letters and punctuation, so the whole book even the names of chapters are never written in capitals. Some of her poems contain stanzas written in italics. All of her poetry has a white background with occasional line-sketches done by Kaur herself. The poems maintain their form and small letters are not an error.

Rupi Kaur also talks about the birth of her collection when she unconsciously began writing poetry to cope with the assault she experienced, to reclaim the body that she had felt her attacker stolen from her. These sentiments and her experiences are strongly apparent in her work when she writes (Sydney Hubbel):

My thoughts of ending my life were constant, and I could not stand myself. I

could not look at my body while I was having a bath. I could not enjoy it. Then

it has happened. Writing a book was a guttural response to my trauma. I was

18, 19 and 20 when I was writing my first book. The book is not a hundred per-

cent like an autobiography. There are the emotions of it, yes, perhaps but

they're also stories my sisters or my cousins or my mum or my aunt experience

every day.

I have had the ability, and the privilege to go and write poems about their expe-

riences. (Rupi Kaur, “How Poet Rupi Kaur Became a Hero to Millions of Young

Women”)

Poems in Rupi Kaur's first book milk and honey are not easy to swallow. They hurt, they are terrifying, harsh, raw, chaotic but writing them is healing. Some poems are without titles or structure, but rather as fluctuating streams of consciousness. For Kaur herself creating this collection was cathartic (“The recipe”).

The first chapter of the collection the hurting opens with a poem:

how it is so easy for you

to be kind to people he asked

milk and honey drip

from my lips as i answered

cause people have not

been kind to me (Kaur 11)

Milk and honey draws its title from Exodus 33:3, in which God promises to bring the

Israelites to ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’. This land of milk and honey is a place of an abundance, a metaphor for the Promised Land. Rupi Kaur associates this milk and honey with tenderness. "How is it so easy for you / to be kind to people" applies a man in the first poem in the collection. The poet's response, "cause people have not / been kind to me" (“Milk and Honey Summary”).

The poems are written in an intelligible, plain language, are short and personal. They eschew difficult metaphors and verses are way too simplistic.

Rupi Kaur through a short poem reveals what the collection is dealing with:

this is the journey of

surviving through poetry

this is the blood sweat tears

of twenty-one years

this is my heart

in your hands

this is

the hurting

the loving

the breaking

the healing

- rupi kaur (210)

Kaur was only twenty-one years old when she wrote milk and honey. She divided it into four "chapters"—the hurting, the loving, the breaking, and the healing. These chapters roughly correspond to the narrator's journey of surviving and rebirth as she goes from being an abused child to a loving girlfriend to a heartbroken yet empowered woman.

2. Domination and the female body

Feminist scholarship focused mainly on how women’s bodies have been regulated, mutilated, colonized and violated. Women were viewed as the victims of oppression and all women were oppressed in and through their bodies. The female body in all its materiality was regarded as the primary object through which masculinist power operated (Davis 10).

Rupi Kaur in her collection milk and honey also concentrates on a woman, women of this age. She writes from the point of a straight woman who had to endure many things in

13 her life, who has been taught to believe in the gender differences and in a traditional gender role. She has come to understand that men in general like to subjugate women, to think of them as sexual objects and use them as entertainment (“Milk and Honey Themes”). She talks about her experience: “you / have been / taught your legs / are a pit for men…” (Kaur 13).

The poems, which depict her opinions, are replete with dislike for men and men relatives who exploited her and handled her like a commodity. According to her experience, women aren't safe, their bodies are still under sexual oppression of men, under the pressure of “the new beauty ideal which requires techniques of control, manipulation and self-improvement”

(Smelik 233). Moreover, Dorothy Smith also highlights that “the world as experienced eve- ryday by woman is rooted in patriarchal knowledge discourses and these dominate woman's consciousness” (qtd. in Sayers and Jones 106). Jane Caputi argues that the pornographic representations of the feminine in Western culture are also part of systems of domination which only support the abuse of women. Thinking of sex as an it and women as sex objects is one of the grooves most deeply carved in the Western mind (180). One of the Rupi Kaur’s poems presents the violence committed against the female body:

the therapist places

the doll in front of you

it is the size of girls

your uncles like touching

point to where his hands were

you point to the spot

between its legs the one

he fingered out of you

a confession… (15)

Patricia Williams understands pornography as “a habit of thinking that is a relation of dominance and submission. Women are defined as the sum of their body parts, bared, open, and eternally available for use and abuse” (qtd. in Caputi 181-182).

Angela Carter in her short story the Company of Wolves also explores theme of

manipulative power of the objectification of women, where the heroine becomes the

object of the man’s – wolf’s powerful manipulation when “the heroine started her

woman’s bleeding” (143) and “she took off her scarlet shawl, the color of poppies, the

color of sacrifices, the color of menses“ (148) which is as a symbol of subjugation of

the man. As believed by Sophie Laws menstruation is used in our culture as the basis,

the excuse, for a flexible and changing set of ideas and practices which reinforce men’s

power over women (108).

Since centuries the female body stood for all that “required to be tamed and controlled by the (dis)embodied objective, male scientist” (Keller qtd. in Davis 5). Furthermore, Susan

Bordo declares that “female body is always the ‘other’: mysterious, unruly, threatening to erupt and challenge the patriarchal order through distraction from knowledge, seduction away from God, capitulation to sexual desire, violence or aggression, failure of will, even death” (qtd. in Davis 5). Besides, radical feminists reflect that men benefit from women's oppression, and that individual men often play an active part in creating that oppression”

(Laws 7).

As Sophie Laws indicates women are often required to hide any evidence of menstruation, and the difficulties which this creates (Laws 32), for instance today's young women are “ashamed of their bodies, of their own genitals” (Mullinax et al. 425). Additionally, Rupi

Kaur points out how apparently private struggles of the female body (menstruation, body hair, a vagina ...) can become a public issue. She wants women to alter the way the world pushes them to perceive their bodies: “accept yourself / as you were designed” (Kaur 172).

2.1 Menstruating body

Everything started on March 25th, 2015 when Rupi Kaur posted a photograph she took as part of ‘period’, a project for her visual rhetoric course at the University of Waterloo, on

Instagram:

I bleed each month to help make humankind a possibility. My womb is home to the

divine, a source of life for our species whether I choose to create or not. But very

few times it is seen that way. In older civilizations this blood was considered holy,

in some it still is. But a majority of people, societies and communities shun this

natural process, some are more comfortable with the pornification of women, the

sexualization of women, the violence, and degradation of women than this. They

cannot be bothered to express their disgust about all that but will be angered and

bothered by this. We menstruate, and they see it as dirty, attention seeking, sick, a

burden as if this process is less natural than breathing as if it is not a bridge between

this universe, and the last, as if this process is not love, labour, life, selfless and

strikingly beautiful. (“Period”)

The reaction of Instagram was shocking. The photograph was removed twice from her

Instagram account. The photo shows Kaur curled up in bed, dressed in a t-shirt and sweat- pants. She also is menstruating, and a bit o blood has visibly leaked through her pants on the bed (Gray “It's 2015 And We Are Still Terrified Of Women's Periods”). The poet felt totally offended by the reaction of Instagram when she reacted back:

I wondered why I scurry to hide my tampons and pads from the world and why I’m

too ashamed to tell people. I’m in pain because of my period, at times I may not be

able to do certain things like come in to work. Why do I lie about it? As if it’s a bad

thing to have. This was just a small part of it. The issue is so much deeper. Some

women can’t visit their places of worship, or leave their homes or cook for their

families while menstruating because they’re considered dirty. We’re laughed at in

public if we have leaks. It goes on and on really. (Gray “It's 2015 And We Are Still

Terrified Of Women's Periods”)

Lots of women grew up understanding that they must take care to avoid public embarrassment in relation to menstruation. They must hide their tampons on the way to the bath- room, lest they expose any physical evidence of their period (Laws 54). Sophia Laws in her book Issues of Blood says that such secrecy is not a thing of the past, and many girls nowadays are told that men must not know they are bleeding (ibid.).

Menstruation has become restrained to organizational settings; the only place women can be freely bleeding is on the toilet, the place where man defecate and urinate (Sayers 14).

But, Rupi Kaur is trying to demystify the period and make something that is innate ‘normal’:

“apparently it is ungraceful of me / to mention my period in public / cause the actual biology of my body is too real…” (177). According to Grosz like “vaginal childbirth so menstruation is available only to the body that is female” (qtd. in Brook 53). Menstrual blood, birth, offers an area of the body in a sense out of control: and the language and imagery of the ‘sanitary product’ industry is one organized around that idea of containing danger and embarrassment

(Brook 51).

When a girl has her ﬁrst period, according to historian Joan Brumberg there is rarely an invitation to welcome her new womanly status (“Time for a party!”), but more commonly a knowing smile, and a scramble for menstrual products (“Time to go to the drugstore!”).

This may be one of the ﬁrst lessons a woman learns about her body and about its place in the social order, she will become a consumer (Bobel 27).

As claimed by Adrienne Rich “it is women’s fault when women participate in the silences around menstruation, and allow others to speak for them (qtd. in Bobel 27). Ann Short and Helynna Brooke assert that womanhood needs to be deﬁned by women as for too long

17 it has been defined by men, the media and advertisements. If women do not help girls define womanhood, they will be defined. Older women who matter to the girls should be a part of teaching the skills to survive successfully and conscientiously in our culture as women (qtd. in Bobel 91).

As believed by Rupi Kaur, even though menstruation is something so natural to female body, it is still perceived like something ugly: “…the recreational use of / this body is seen as / beautiful while / its nature is / seen as ugly…” (177) and therefore, according to Kami

McBride “when women disregard their bodies, they disregard themselves and their power”

(qtd. in Bobel 83).

For centuries, the woman’s menstrual cycle has been viewed with something ap- proaching revulsion and contempt; it was seen as dirty, a sign of sin and its existence rein- forced women’s inferior position in male dominated society. Menstruation is still viewed today as a biological disadvantage to women, making them emotional, unreasoning and un- reliable workers (Bobel 86).

2.2 Menstrual Taboos, Pollution

Menstrual ‘taboos’ are presented as coming from the past, from age - old social attitudes and gullible beliefs. Society supports these ideas and no-one in particular is responsible for this or mileages from it. It is sometimes a little mysterious that modern society still sus- tains such old-fashioned beliefs (Laws 6).

Judy Lever, in her book on premenstrual tension, evidences a classic example of this kind of thinking:

Society, since way back when, has generally treated menstruation as something to

be ashamed of and hidden away, in contrast to pregnancy (the other side of men-

struation) which is a proud event to be revealed and welcomed. In many early prim-

itive societies, women were, and in some tribes, still are, excluded from the main

house and made to stay in a private hut during menstruation. They are forbidden to

bathe, eat or touch their bodies, and have to remain in a bowed position the whole

time. Most of all, no men can come near them during this time, for fear of their

lives. (qtd. in Laws 6)

Moreover, menstrual taboos, which still exist in many cultures of the world, “help to emphasize the low status of women, to confirm female inferiority and to protect male ritual status” (Harper qtd. in Ullrich 19). Nevertheless, Ullrich observed that many menstrual practices that used to reflect beliefs in ritual pollution and purity were, for example among

Havik Brahmins’ women in South India since 1987 replaced with hygiene (21). Increase- ment of education, professional opportunities and increased marriage age of women let to the less significance of male dominance. When we go back to year 1964 when every Havik

Brahmin was demonstrating a belief in menstrual pollution (39). The word for menstruation was ‘touch’ (Ullrich 30). During the period a woman was not allowed to touch their husbands as it would shorten their lives. She had to avoid touching anything metal or wood, as her pollution was then transmitted to others who happened to be touching the same piece of wood or metal. She ate in the back of the house once everybody finished eating. These moral values and social rules, defined by the danger of contagion limited a ‘contaminated’ woman in performing of her normal functions as she could endanger others (Douglas 3).

Nowadays many Havik Brahmans’ women do not believe in menstrual taboos, ritual pollution has decreased its area and the belief and practice of menstrual taboos have deteri- orated, and the position of women has enhanced (Ullrich 37).

Yet, Rupi Kaur in one of her short poems evidences that modern women are still pursued by social conviction, being used for the purpose of recreation, whereas her inner self is seen as ugly as her natural beauty:

apparently it is ungraceful of me

to mention my period in public

cause the actual biology

of my body is too real

it is ok to sell what’s

between a woman’s legs

more than it is okay to

mention its inner workings

the recreational use of

this body is seen as

beautiful while

its nature is

seen as ugly (177)

According to Sophie Laws comments on menstruation are most often implicit, unspo- ken and women may be openly told not to mention it (Laws 160). Besides, menstruation may not be important in itself, but it is a great symbol of femaleness, and the way in which the human race deals with it shows how women are pictured (Laws 207). According to Laws the rule behind all the others seems to be that women may not draw men’s attention to menstruation in any way (43).

Moreover, menstruation was used make women a special target in Nazi concentration camps where many women ceased to menstruate not only due to malnutrition, but if blood was spotted, the woman would be killed. There were, of course, no sanitary napkins, or even

20 newspaper, and the women used large leaves if they could find them to protect themselves.

Any blood showing on a dress was displeasing and meant death (Laws 65). In wartime, women’s bodies have often been exposed to processes of abuse, subservience, exclusion, limitation, and savagery (Davis 10).

The silences and confidentiality in some ways are also required from women in modern age. However, advertising for sanitary wear allows public acknowledgement of the existence of menstruation (Laws 46) when some men admitted that “in later years it was for them a real shock to walk into toilets and see packets of tampax (tampons) and sanitary things which were not hidden” (Laws 44).

One cannot isolate meaning of menstruation in modern culture apart from the idea that it is something which must be hidden. The meaning of menstruation for many people in many circumstances relates only very vaguely to biology, and draws far more strongly from the complex social rules that people in society attach to it (Laws 43).

There are levels of male culture; in pornography where menstruation is not even referred to when menstruation is understood as something totally unerotic and repulsive, for men (Laws 77). Andrea Dworkin considers the origin of the word pornography:

The word pornography, derived from the ancient Greek porne and graphos, means

“writing about whores”, the graphic depiction of the lowest whores. Whores exist

to serve men sexually. Whores exist only within a framework of male sexual dom-

ination. Indeed, outside that framework the notion of whores would be absurd and

the usage of women as whores would be impossible. Men have created the group,

the type, the concept, the epithet, the insult, the industry, the trade, the commodity,

the reality of woman as whore. Woman as whore exists within the objective and

real system of male sexual domination. (199-200)

As Sophie Laws explains, it seems as if menstruation has no place in the pure male- centred world of pornographic ‘sex’ and women’s bodies as they actually are might violate the men’s fantasy world” (Laws 86).

Furthermore, the male culture depicts men as completely in control of sex with women.

Yet, when it deals with menstruation, which has nothing basically to do with men or sex, it sees this inner female phenomenon as somehow menacing to male power. Besides, sanitary towels seem to materialize everything that men find unpleasant about menstruation (Laws

87). As stated by Davis “the female body in all its materiality was regarded as the primary object through which masculinist power operated” (10).

According to Rupi Kaur the woman’s body is a place where many natural processes which are innate to her body occur, and menstruation is one of the natural disaster:

your body

is a museum

of natural disasters

can you grasp how

stunning that is (173)

Kaur wishes that every woman and society perceived menstruation as something so natural that belongs to the woman.

In 1971 feminist art pioneer Judy Chicago dramatically articulated resistance to menstrual shame and secrecy in the shocking photolithograph Red Flag, a close-up shot of Chi- cago removing a bloody tampon from her vagina. The artist later remarked that many people, in a stunning display of menstrual denial, did not know what the red object was; some thought it was a bloody penis (Bobel 46-47). Bernadette Vallely declared: “Women menstruate and it isn’t evil—and this is one of the most powerful times of her month—for magic,

22 for darkness and depth, for contemplation, for earthy reality, for honouring bodily ﬂuids”

(qtd. in Bobel 68).

For feminist-spiritualists, menstruation is neither a curse nor a meaningless hassle rather, because it is a process unique to biological women, it connects them to each other and to the essential feminine within (Bobel 68).

Gloria Stein’s classic If Men Could Menstruate is an excellent example of menstruation-related humour:

So what would happen if suddenly, magically, men could

menstruate and women could not?

Clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, boast-worthy,

masculine event:

Men would brag about how long and how much…Street guys

would invent slang (he’s a three-pad man’) and ‘give fives’ o

the corner with some exchange like, ‘Man, you looking’ good!’

‘Yeah, man, I’m on the rag!’...Men would convince women

That sex was more pleasurable at ‘that time of the month. (qtd. in Brook 54)

Yet, women could easily do the same but they can’t. They are not even able to talk openly and ‘celebrate’ their menstruation even though it is so natural to them. Through the lens of feminist-spiritualism, the means to reframe menstruation and empower women to embrace rather than reject this embodied process is left to the individualized practices of women with privilege. Besides, monthly bleeding is a vital woman’s experience, a general- izing sign of fertility, sexuality, and identity (Bobel 87).

Lara Owen, in Her Blood Is Gold, reiterates this view:

My period is a monthly occurrence in my life that I have in common with

all women who have ever lived. Women living in caves twenty thousand

years ago, priestesses in palaces in ancient Egypt, seers in temples in Su-

mer all bled with the moon. (qtd. in Bobel 70)

But, according to Sophia Laws attitudes to menstruation might still be determined by various social factors: pollution beliefs, religious beliefs, beliefs about sexuality. Women are rejected by any behaviour which attracts attention to menstruation while men may freely refer to it if they choose to (210).

However, learning to be a woman in any patriarchal culture is not easy. Women have to be prepared to behave as women are expected to, to be able to manage menstruation within the culture’s rules as a symbol of adult womanhood (Laws 208).

Feminist have tried to work hard in many areas of life to state women as women, their basic, natural right to exist, the naturalness of their femaleness. But, establishing a positive view about menstruation has been till now somewhat debatable (Laws 208) and women still have not more eagerly made public their feeling and attitudes on menstruation, and even though it may be true that menstruation is talked about more openly today, research reveals that the influence of menstruation—in both Western and non-Western societies—remains largely negative (Bobel 31). In a view of Sophia Laws in Issues of Blood the answer lies in

“half-heard threatening talk from men which enforces the rule of silence which is the essence of the etiquette of menstruation for women” (208). Besides, these days advertising for sanitary wear presents a specific problem, for to allow public acknowledgement of the existence of menstruation (46). However, “many of the advertisements refer to ideas of control, man- agement and hygiene while highlighting the supposed ability of their products to erase any of the social and physical inconveniences of menstruation” (Brook 56).

3. Female body hair

The history of woman’s bodies has been depicted in different areas of social life (Davis

5). The body has become the vehicle for the modern individual to gain an attractive life-style.

Bodies are “the means for self-expression, for becoming who we would like to be. The body is just one feature in a person’s ‘identity project’” (Giddens qtd. in Davis 2).

Especially women are willing to go to great lengths to obtain a body which looks young, thin, sexy and prosperous, while ageing, unhealthy, or disabled bodies are hidden from sight (Shilling qtd. in Davis 2). The denial of mortality is exacerbated by recent devel- opments in technology and bodies have become the ultimate cultural metaphor for controlling what is within grasp (Crawford and Bordo qtd. in Davis 2).

In fact, the body has become ‘a project’, as Chris Schillinger claims: “In the affluent

West, there is a tendency for the body to be seen as an entity which is in the process of becoming; a project which should be worked at and accomplished as part of an individual’s self-identity” (qtd. in Smelik 235). Moreover, according to Joanne Entwistle when “the body has become part of a project to be improved, fashion is a significant way of altering the human body. Fashion usually come and go, but removal of body hair looks like a trend that is here to stay” (qtd. in Smelik 235).

Furthermore, a highly technological society tries to support the frontier between humans and furry animals and all kind of ‘technologies of the self’, as Foucault names them, help this project along. They contain fitness, health care, dieting and beauty care. Technolo- gies help humans in altering, controlling and improving their body. These practices show how a society pushes the human body away from nature in the direction of culture (Smelik

240). Controlling and disciplining hairiness results in turning humans “away from nature with a touch of disgust: they do not want to be a ‘naked ape’ but a hairless human" (Morris qtd. in Smelik 240).

But the voice of Rupi Kaur screams:

hair

if it was not supposed to be there

would not be growing

on our bodies in the first place

-we are at war with what comes most naturally to us (193)

In fact, women deny their biological reality and the twenty-first century pushes women not only to make an effort to be hairless but the hairlessness should appear ‘natural’ as it was illustrated, for example, by a magazine advertisement for the Philips ‘Ladyshave and Care’, where was a close picture of a woman’s shaved legs with one of a flower, the advertisement reads: ‘Nature has many surfaces that are smooth and soft. Just like a woman’

(Claire qtd. in Toerien and Wilkinson 339). The aim of the advertisement is to promote the tools, for achieving feminine hairlessness, which are mostly hidden from the sights of men

(Chapkins qtd. Toerien and Wilkinson 339).

Besides, women’s perceiving of their bodies is highly constructed within and effected by the broader socio-cultural context. Women in Western cultures are likely to be viewed as sexual objects, and their bodies are seen as a collection of parts to be judged by other (Fudge and Byers 352). It is interesting how women are expected not to talk about removing their body hair, but are expected to be naturally hairless. Rita Freedman argues that having un- wanted hair is shameful and removing it is equally shameful and such secrecy prevents both women and men from recognizing the full burden of feminine beauty (qtd. in Toerien and

Wilkinson 339).

According to Naomi Wolf “women are now kept in the self-hating, ever-failing, hungry, and sexually insecure state of aspiring beauties so that they will buy more things for the body”

(qtd in Toerien and Wilkinson 339). They are “kept in the myth that women are hairless and clever marketing move maintain women as consumers” (ibid.).

In spite of this hairless norms, on April 2014 a photographer Ben Hopper proclaimed his photo series Natural Beauty in which he presented young women with hairy armpits, arguing against the societal ‘brainwashing’ done by beauty industry (qtd. in Smelik 234).

Rupi Kaur in her collection milk and honey also emphasizes the natural beauty of women: “accept yourself / as you were designed” (172).

3.1 Disgust on female body hair

Women’s body hair removal has become strongly normative within contemporary

Western culture (Toerien and Wilkinson 333). Marika Tiggemann and Sarah J. Kenyon claim that “statistically, hair removal is one of the most frequent ways women alter their bodies to achieve ideal of youth and good looks” (874).

According to Rupi Kaur a woman is not to be ashamed of her body, of her naturally growing hair: …

i find hair beautiful

when a woman wears it

like a garden on her skin

that is the definition of beauty… (170)

Living in the 21th century means that “the hairlessness norm powerfully endorses the assumption that a woman’s body is unacceptable if unaltered” (Toerien and Wilkinson 333) and “feminine hairlessness comes to seem natural” (343). Many women are being influenced by this hair-free trend of today’s beauty ideals that only affirms that “the twenty-first century body is a work in progress” (Smelik 234).

Rupi Kaur tries to highlight that hair is not what determines women’s quality as a human being and women ought to be aware of the full burden of feminine beauty in order “to maintain the illusion of a ‘naturally’ hairless feminine body” (Torien and Wilkinson 333):

removing all the hair

off your body is okay

if that’s what you want to do

just as keeping all the hair

on your body is okay

if that’s what you want to do

-you belong only to yourself (Kaur 176)

According to Mona Chalabi, the removal of facial hair is just as paradoxical – the pressure to do it is recognized by many women as a stupid social norm and yet they strictly follow it. Because these little whiskers represent the most basic rules of the patriarchy – to ignore them is to jeopardize women’s reputation, even their dignity (Chalabi).

As claimed by Freedman if women spoke out, they could transform their apparently private struggles into a public issue; things could be altered by women’s assertion of the way they perceive the world (qtd. in Toerien and Wilkinson 340).

Yet, there has always been a difference between hair on the head and body hair; “where head hair is a sign of power, youth, health, energy and beauty while body hair is traditionally marked as dirty, ugly, unneeded, sexual and animalistic” (Leach qtd. in Smelik 234). Ac- cording to Herzig “the demand for a hairless body is hardly a century old” (qtd. in Smelik

234) and “moves the body wilfully away from nature in the direction of culture and of the artificial, that is, of more control, perfection and manipulation” (Smelik 246).

It seems as if women have been for centuries incessantly responding to cultural norms, pressures, and expectations of society. Their body must have felt totally alienated to them.

At first it was menstruation taboo and now it is the taboo on female body hair.

As Lesnik-Oberstein stated: “Body hair for women is now such a strong transgression of the norm, as to have become a taboo” (qtd. in Smelik 238). Especially in contemporary

Western culture, only women’s body hair is considered as a reason for disgust, much like other body issues (such as menstrual blood, faeces, swear or odours) that are understood to be dirty (Hope 97).

An association of eternal youthfulness and ideal femininity is represented “though the present dominant mass media that advertise image of the feminine body: slim, depilated, smooth and unwrinkled skin” (Tiggeman and Kenyon 873). There is an example of the re- newed actress, Julia Roberts, who appeared in 1999 at a film premiere with unshaved underarms. Her unshaved armpits became the focus of media attention (Toerien and Wilkinson

334). One of her many critics was Tom Loxley who said totally outraged: “What is Julia thinking? The only place men want to see hair is on a woman’s head. Under the arms is unacceptable. From hairy armpits it is only a small step to The Planet Of The Apes” (Toerien and Wilkinson 334).

The hairlessness norm “strongly endorses the underlying assumption of any of the body-altering behaviours, namely that a woman’s body is not acceptable the way it is”

(Tiggeman and Kenyon 874). This norm may, therefore, be understood as a form of social control (Greer qtd. in Toerien and Wilkinson 341). The practices of removing of women’s hair are highly normative, most pervasive and socially enforced (343).

Rupi Kaur in her milk and honey appeals to women for not accepting social construc- tions which have mostly negative affect on women’s lives.

According to Kaur, a woman, with respect to her body should decide if she wants to follow a voice of this society (men):

the next time he

points out the

hair on your legs is

growing back remind

that boy your body

is not his home… (165)

Hairlessness is the taken-for-granted requirement for a woman’s body in present (Toe- rien and Wilkinson 342). Of importance, women are more likely to remove their hair if their partner indicates a preference for removal (Grossman and Annunziato 269).

Hair has been for centuries a symbol of masculine strength only, since to be strong is to be masculine, and to be masculine is to be hairy. Hair visible on a woman’s body have been a threat to the gender order and to be a hairy woman has meant to a certain extent to cross the boundary between feminine and masculine and constructed as masculine, hair has no right place on the female body (Ferrante qtd. in Toerien and Wilkinson 341).

Going back in history, the 16th century physiognomist Giovanni Battista della Porta, thought that “the thicker the hair the more wanton the women” (Cooper qtd. in Toerien and

Wilkinson 337). Besides, female body hair has also been associated with madness, as well as with witchcraft (Ferrante qtd. in Toerien and Wilkinson 337).

During the witch -hunts in France it was usual when suspects had to be shaved before they were tortured. Hairiness was highly connected with associating with the devil. Not only shaving helped interrogators to look for signs of Satan, but it is been believed that by losing her hair the woman would miss her strength and protection (Ferrante qtd. in Toerien and

Wilkinson, 337). Male hairiness has been equated traditionally with virility (Cooper qtd. in

Toerien and Wilkinson 336).

According to Christine Hope women in the West historically started removing their hair from legs and underarms around World War 1 (93).

The custom of the removal of female body hair was actively publicized between 1915 and 1945 in America with an aim to produce a certain kind of femininity for white women.

Its cause was showing more skin due to changes in fashion (Hope 94). Summer Dress and

Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair (95) and as the skirts and dresses became shorter and bathing suits revealed more skin, armpit and leg were looked upon as ugly, dirty, unnecessary and uneasy (Hope qtd. in Smelik 236).

Christine Hope argues that in this cultural system the smooth female body doesn’t really mean womanly, feminine it means childlike, whereas masculinity is associated with adulthood (Hope 99). Moreover, Smelik also declares that children are naturally hairless while body hair is secondary sexual characteristic for mature humans and removing body hair especially pubic hair makes the adult body look younger and more infantile (240). Ac- cording to Christine Hope, who typically lack pubic and underarm hair, as well as increase in hair on other parts of body, are children (qtd. in Torrien and Wilkinson 338).

Louise Tondeur specifies that the history of pubic hair is closely associated with a history of clothes and fashion (qtd. in Smelik 241). The practice started in the late 1990 when fashion revealed an increasingly greater area of naked flesh with the high-leg cut of swim gear, bikinis and underwear (Tricklebank and Clarke qtd. in Smelik 241).

In the past decades, media and women’s magazine have made a great influence on genital depilation which became a new norm of beauty care (Ramsey qtd. in Smelik 241).

However, a few studies show that visual pornography has been and still is a major influence on body hair depilation. Until the 1990s pornography was identified and even defined by the

31 presence of pubic hair (Ramsey qtd. in Smelik 242). The contemporary hairless vulva is nowadays referred as “clean, sexy and attractive, and the hairy vulva as dirty and disgusting”

(Smelik 243). In addition, Freud in his short article Medusa’s Head depicts “an appearance of the female genitals as scary and disgusting. They are scary because, in Freud’s view, there is nothing to be seen” (Freud qtd. in Smelik 244).

The world was in a shock when they saw Gustave Courbet’s controversial painting

The Origin of the World (1866). It was the first painting which portrayed the female sex with a dark bunch of pubic hair as with the visible labia. The leaning female body is visible only from the legs up to the breasts with full revelation of the hairy vulva. The Origin of the World was in fact considered so shocking and scandalous that is never was displayed and remained in private property (Smelik 243).

However, it was noted that “till 1990s pornography was characterized and even defined by the presence of pubic hair and until then pubic hair remain and are unaltered” (Ramsey qtd. in Smelik 242).

Till that time pornographic art expressed the female body with downy hair as a sign of wanton sexuality. At the end of the nineteenth century also drawings by Thomas Eakins fea- turing pubic hair were made only for private patrons (Smelik 242). In the early twentieth century, modernist art for example Schiele’s nudes, mainly depict pubic hair, but was considered pornographic and thus constrained by censorship (Baert qtd. in Smelik 243).

In 1894 one report, which was based on a sample of 2200 Danish prostitutes, asserted that many of them had an unusually large amount of pubic hair (Toerien and Wilkinson 337).

Something similar was also reported in Italy by Giovanni Moraglia and Cesar Lombroso, who stated that “prostitutes in comparison with other women, had very thick hair and more than usual amounts of hair on the face” (Ferrante qtd. in Toerien and Wilkinson 337).

The point is that the image of hairless and visible vagina as it has been witnessed in pornography in the last few decades is quite a new phenomenon (Smelik 243).

Yet, according to Linda Williams especially in present days pornography is obsessed with ‘maximum visibility’ where hairlessness allows the highest visibility of the female sex organ. A clitoris, hidden labia can be now seen. The vulva is entirely revealed and simulta- neously vulnerable and perceptible (qtd. in Smelik 245). As Tiggeman and Kenyon declare physical appearance tends to be for women more important than for man, and statistically, hair removal is one of the most frequent ways women alter their bodies to achieve ideal of youthfulness and attractiveness (874). But lots of women find “grooming pubic hair annoy- ing, they feel ashamed of their own genitals if they do not shave or wax. They do not like their vagina with hairs” (Mullinax et al. 425). It seems that an understanding of attitudes towards women’s vagina is really important. The 21th century and women’s visual culture, numerous video clips, fashion photos and advertisement influence women’s body and genitals perception. As Rupi Kaur writes, “accept yourself / as you were designed” (172) as “you belong to yourself” (176). Women are advised to love themselves without altering their body according to the visual field and contemporary culture. They are to respect their body hair and do not become “insidiously prevalent, socially enforced, and (arguably) unacceptably restrictive construction of the feminine woman” (Toerien and Wilkinson 343). Anneke Sme- lik asserts that in less than two decades the female body has become a sanitized, hairless commodity and on one side it may be picture-perfect but on the other side its smooth con- tours may well deny the carnality of live as it is lived (247).

4. Female genitals

4.1 Negative aspect of vagina

Vagina is an inseparable part of the female body and “women’s genital self-perceptions encompass their thoughts and feelings about their own genitals” (Fudge and Byers 351).

For lots of women their own genitals are still the taboo. Women are in a situation where they are often ignorant about their genitals and about their function. According to Blum many women imagine that urinate through their vagina and they lack the ability to draw their own organs (qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson 20).

Besides, Barker described vagina as “the most secret and under-research part of any woman’s anatomy” (qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson 20). Going back in history women’s genitals, from the ancient Greeks to the present century, have always been considered to be inferior’s to men’s (Galen qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson 18), and one Greek physician saw a woman “to be less perfect than the man in respect to the generative parts” (ibid.). Moreover, the classical Greeks believed that the vagina was inside - out penis. In Renaissance Europe, they still believed the same (Mills qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson 18). Only 17th century moved to a ‘two sex’ model, where there was a difference between female and male sexual mor- phology (Laqueur qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson 19). However, Lawrence and Bendixen state that women’s genitals remained inferior, and there is still even in the 21th century a tendency to compare the female body to the male-body -as- norm (qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson 19).

The vagina has been and is often represented as part of the female body that is shameful, unclean, disgusting. Women often feel that their genitals are ugly, funny looking, disgusting, smelly, and not at all desirable – certainly not a beautiful part of their bodies (Dodson qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson 21-22).

Yet, if women’s understandings of the vagina are developed in relation to their socio- cultural representations and practices, it is not surprising that women perceive their genitals

34 in a negative view as they are brought up in a society which tells them that their bodies smell

(Braun and Wilkinson 18). Moreover, the feminine hygiene products with fresh scent do their work brilliantly promoting beliefs that women’s genitals are smelly and need something that will do away natural feminine odour. There are also genital slangs which often invoke smell and to be called a ‘smelly cunt’ is a horrible insult” (Smith qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson

22). As a consequence of this manner “many women hate their discharges, and find them smelly and unpleasant” (Laws qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson 22), even though it is something biologically natural for their vagina. Large number of women pointed out that “their con- cerns about their genital appearance and smell had caused them to limit or avoid (both in the past and present) certain sexual behaviour” (Fudge and Byers 357). Furthermore, these attitudes come from the culture’s making out that women’s bodies are dirty, mysterious, oozing strange fluids – different from men’s therefore wrong (Laws qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson

22).

In the 16th and 17th century France women’s genitals were related to as pieces of shame which were meant to be hidden (Mills qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson 22). Social stereotypes even in 21th century define women’s genitals as unpleasant, smelly and unattractive if not altered according to ‘beauty’ norms. According to cosmetic surgeons, women bring porn pictures to their consultations as the genital model they wish to imitate in order to create a

‘designer vagina’” (Braun qtd. in Smelik 245). However, it is ironic because the female sex in erotic magazines is often digitally changed and prettified to create, for example a childlike vulva. The aim of such digital use and cosmetic interventions is to create a new ideal vulva image, which reproduces a youthful, almost pre-pubescent aesthetic (Braun qtd. in Smelik

245). Braumwell also uncovered that in fashion shoots and pictures where tight – fitting clothes in women’s glossy magazines is on display the external outline of the genitalia of the models are either obscured or digitalized into a smooth curve (qtd. in Smelik 245).

All in all, it is tragic how modern society try to influence and “convince” women’s brain that what is natural is not beautiful if it does not fit to the cultural beauty ideal.

Rupi Kaur writes:

You

have been

taught your legs

are a pit stop for men

that need a place to rest

a vacant body empty enough

for guests but no one

ever comes and is

willing to

stay (13)

She tries to demonstrate how women are taught to perceive their genitals. They might feel like women living in Elizabeth England when a culture portrayed the vagina as a hole.

A woman in that culture but also in today’s culture might feel that “she is centred around emptiness or worthlessness” (Wolf 272). Besides, “the vagina is not only represented as a case for the penis, for male desire” (Braun and Wilkinson 20), but women also learn that

“the purpose of the vagina is to receive the penis” (Brody et al. qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson

20).

Moreover, if a woman hears calling her vagina a ‘gash’ or a ‘slit’ all her life, then that perception of her vagina will become neutrally encoded in her brain (Wolf 272). Furthermore, when the vagina is represented as ‘a pit hole’ to be used any time by men, so a woman will perceive her vagina as something shameful, and she can’t create positive feelings about her genitals (ibid.).

As Prager underlines the vagina has been represented as the place where a woman is known to be vulnerable and a sense of vaginal vulnerability may result from, or may be experienced in, a range of ‘abuse’ involving the vagina (qtd. inBraun and Wilkinson 23).

In milk and honey Rupi Kaur also refers to an experience of rape and abuse of a woman:

you plough into me with two fingers and i am mostly

shocked. it feels like rubber against an open wound.

i do not like it. you begin pushing faster and faster, but i

feel nothing. you search my face for a reaction so i begin

acting like the naked women in the videos you watch when

you think no one’s looking. i imitate their moans. hollow

and hungry. you ask if it feels good and i say yes

so quickly it sounds rehearsed. but acting

you do not notice (38)

Kaur shows how pornography can have a negative effect on female self-perception, how from a happy woman with the ‘happy’ vagina can become a sexually traumatized woman with the traumatized, and the abused vagina. As Naomi Wolf declares: “rape stays in the vagina”, in other word, “rape and sex abuse trauma can actually damage the vagina’s functionality” (Wolf 138). If a woman was raped or suffered child abuse as Kaur writes: “the rape will / tear you / in half” (26) and causes injury to the brain and body (Wolf 121). Ac- cording to playwriter Eve Ensler, the author of a play The Vagina Monologues:

The vagina brain’ a separate brain, she said, whose understanding of the

world comes through the body. The reason we’re in so much trouble on

earth is that the vagina intelligence has been damaged by rape, battery,

sexual abuse and terror. (Boxer qtd. in Caputi 191)

Radical feminist view rape “mostly as power, not sex” (Wolf 120). But, as stated by

Kaur: “…yet the other is having sex / with their body its’ not love / it is rape” (22). According to Doyal rape can function as “means of a deliberate, if not actually legally encoded, policy and practice by governments, armies, etc. to coerce, humiliate, punish and intimidate women”

(qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson 23). In Tibet, for example reports of women being raped with cattle prods are numerous (Braun and Wilkinson 23). Neither Bosnian women, who were refugees in Croatia and Pakistan, in Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues talk about vagina- loving as they do not know any longer what is between their legs (Cooper746):

“I do not touch,” she says; “Not since the soldiers put a long thick riﬂe

inside me. . .. Not since I heard the skin tear . . ., not since a piece of my

vagina came off in my hand” (Ensler qtd. Cooper 746).

If you want to rape a woman you have to abuse her via her vagina (Braun and Wil- kinson 23). According to Wolf trauma to the vagina imprints deeply on the female brain, conditioning and influencing the rest of her body and mind (121). Playwriter Eve Ensler in her Introduction to the play, The Vagina Monologues writes:

I say ‘vagina’ because when I started saying it I discovered how fragmented

I was, how disconnected my body was from my mind. My vagina

was something over there, away in the distance. I rarely lived inside it,

even visited. I was working, writing; being a mother, a friend. I did

not to see my vagina as my primary resource, a place of sustenance, humor,

and creativity. It was fraught there, full of fear. I’d been raped as a little

girl, and although I’d grown up, and done all the adult things one does

with one’s vagina, I had never really reentered the part of my body after

I’d been violated. I had essentially lived most of my life without my motor,

my center, my second heart. (qtd. in Caputi 12)

In order to reclaim her integrity, and as part of a process of stopping the shame and the violation, Ensler found herself “saying vagina, over and over, no matter how ‘dirty’ it sounded” (Caputi 191).

Naomi Wolf explains that “rape is a strategy of actual physical and psychological control of woman and traumatizing via the vagina is a way to imprint the consequences of trauma on the female brain” (Wolf 121). To break a woman mostly psychologically, it is efficient to do violence to her vagina. She will break faster and more thoroughly than if simply beaten.

Even though healing is possible, one never fully gets over rape; one is never the same after as before (ibid.).

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ‘witch craze’ overwhelmed Europe.

Women’s vaginas became a target in looking for the witches or devil’s mark and torture focused on women’s genitals. Inquisitors used the ‘Pear of Anguish’, a torture device’ in a shape of pear made of iron that got bigger once inside of vagina as the torturer twisted screws

(Wolf 178). At the end of 19th century cliterodectomy reached its peak. It was introduced to

England in 1858 by doctor Isaak Bake Brown and it had to treat feminine masturbation by excising their clitoris. It was one of the ways, in the Victorian culture, how to have women’s sexuality under the control (Wolf 195). It was known that “masturbation led girls on the downward path to other, even the worst forms of ‘viciousness’ and moral laxity (ibid.).

However, another form of genital abuse is genital mutilation which practices today

(Wright qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson 23). Female genital mutilation / cutting is a form of violence against women and girls. It includes all procedures that involve the partial or total removal of external genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons” (Williams - Breault).

Furthermore, language and imagery can also symbolically abuse the vagina. Female genital slang is frequently derogatory, often making reference to violence (Braun and Kitz- inger qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson 24). Pornography devalues and abuses not only the vagina but also a woman (Dworkin 202). As “just holes asking to be humiliated and abused, women in pornography are frequently subjected to violence” (Carter qtd. in Braun and Wilkinson

24).

Words women hear about the vagina can create environment that directly influence women’s body (Wolf 248). When a woman hears calling her vagina ‘a pit stop’ (Kaur 13) or

‘cunt’ (Caputi185), she might feel “perpetually vulnerable and available and thus strips her physically and metaphysically, ritually divesting her of full humanity” (ibid.). But, the ancient word cunt, though now obscene, and probably “the most offensive and censored swear- word in English language” (Wajnyr qtd. in Wolf 260), was not always so mortified. Until the fourteenth century, “cunt was Standard English for the vulva and only became obscene in the seventeenth century due to its power sexuality” (Partridge qtd. in Caputi 185).

Naomi Wolf lists other slang terms for vagina in 21th century: “‘gash’, ‘meat curtain’,

‘fanny’, ‘pussy’, ‘flange’, ‘doner kebab’, ‘V-hole’, ‘sausage wallet’, ‘pink taco’, ‘ass mate’,

‘badly packed kebab’“ (278-279). She also thinks that women could range these terms for vagina from kind of offensive to really disgusting (280). Besides, she claims that Western

Young men today do not identify vaginas with dark magic, but most of the words connote low-grade, mass-produced junk food and don’t carry much of an emotional wallop (ibid.).

Yet, some women in 21th century are trying to talk back to these negative slang terms, for example a girl – power website, Tressugarcom lists women-friendly words for the vagina:

“’yam yam’, ‘honey pot’, ‘kitty’, ‘goodies’” (Wolf 181). As Naomi Wolf declares “vagina is no longer the abyss, or the gateway to hell, neither it is any longer the mark of divinity, let alone the centre of the universe” (282).

4.2 Positive aspects of vagina

As it was noted, vagina has been represented as smelly, dirty, shameful, vulnerable and abused and all these representations “could be seen as encapsulating (Western) society’s attitudes towards, and responses to the vagina” (Braun and Wilkinson 25).

However, the vagina began as sacred. There are many vagina symbols sculpted into cave walls in the earliest historic settlements. The earliest artefacts of human prehistory fea- tured noticeable vaginas (Wolf 166).

Sumerian hymns, for example worshipped Inna’s vulva, “Inanna was the ancient Su- merian goddess of love, sensuality, beauty, and war” (Beusman), as a sacred site (Wolf 167):

My vulva, the horn,

The Boat of Heaven

Is full of eagerness like the young moon.

My untilled land lies fallow (Beusman)

As Inanna’s vagina was “magical, a locus of pure holiness” (Wolf 168), so is the vagina of Rupi Kaur: “the goddess between your legs / makes mouth water” (188). Kaur praises the power of female vagina and calls her vagina “the soft spot between my legs” (77).

The genitals, in truth, are the mark of divinity on the body, manifesting forces of desire, ecstasy, exuberance, cyclic movement, creativity. Both the penis and the vulva – which are not opposites but correspondents – are manifestation of the primal source of being, something in which both men and women participate and what has been understood in many parts of the world as the feminine principle (Shiva qtd. in Caputi 195).

In the 1920s and 1930s came African American jazz and blues that introduced African

American slang for vagina. The blues vagina has practically never been presented as a ‘gash’

41 or ‘nothing’, rather blues vagina metaphors described something that was delicious, appeal- ing, or just amusing, for example: jelly, jellyrolls, sugar and candy. Besides, sexuality of woman in blues lyrics was emphasized as belonging to the women themselves (Wolf 224).

Not only African American jazz and blues have tried to present vagina positively, but also feminists (and other) writings and art have sought to represent vagina in a positive aspect.

They have tried to picture vagina as remarkable organ that ‘cleans itself’, a symbol of womanhood and power – a part of female body / identity that empowers women, of which women are proud of (Braun and Wilkinson 25).

Then came second wave feminism (1960s-1970s) which helped women to know more about their bodies, appreciate their bodies and understand their reproductive health (“The

Body in Revolt: The Impact and Legacy of Second Wave Corporeal Embodiment” 392).

Betty Dodson, as she called herself the ‘guru of female sexual liberation’, felt that “understanding genital diversity would lead to more potential sexual pleasure, orgasm, and enjoy- able experience with masturbation” (qtd. “The Body in Revolt: The Impact and Legacy of

Second Wave Corporeal Embodiment” 390). She wanted women not only to know their own bodies and to imagine their potential for sexual pleasure (ibid.), but also to confront and challenge the commonly-heard patriarchal claim that women’s genitals were dirty, ugly, or shameful (Lane and Rubinstein qtd. in “The Body in Revolt: The Impact and Legacy of

Second Wave Corporeal Embodiment” 390).

According to Braun and Wilkinson vaginal or genital imagery has fascinated a range of women artist in the past three decades (25). Georgia O’Keeffe, Judy Chicago and Eve

Ensler were painting or writing or dancing to express truths about female desire (Wolf 239).

Judy Chicago presented The Dinner Party in museums around the country in 1974 (Wolf

227). She portrayed thirty- nine mythic and real women from throughout history depicting different vaginas painted on dinner plates and placing them on a triangular table – the triangle

42 being an archetypal feminine or vulvas shape (Wolf 237). A similar agenda of the “anatom- ical images of the vagina” (Braun and Wilkinson 25) are seen in Tee Corinne’s Cunt coloring book 1973 (Wolf 243). Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, originally played by Eva

Ensler, made a great impact: “Ensler used real women’s monologues about their vaginas to call attention to still – taboo issues of female sexuality and rape” (Wolf 243).). Rupi Kaur in her milk and honey shows a woman of twenty-first century who struggles to fit in this society and to fight against still existing patriarchy.

These genital images presented by feminist writers and artists (are) ”designed to arose women, but not sexually. In this sense, the vaginal image is a social and political symbol that challenges male supremacy; it is ‘propaganda for sexual equality’” (Rose qtd. in Braun and

Wilkinson 26).

Conclusion

In the past several years, nothing has made as much of an impact onto the poetry world as Rupi Kaur’s milk and honey. Having sold over one million copies, her collection of poems is actively being discussed, quoted, and plastered all over social media (Hacco Shelly). Milk and honey ows its success not only due to its simplistic, minimalist, and easily-accessible form of craftsmanship but mostly to its feminist subject matter (ibid.).

Rupi Kaur is not afraid to speak and write openly about the stigmatized taboos. Her message to all women is clear: “accept yourself / as you were designed (172) no matter what!

Rupi Kaur is trying to demystify the period and make something that is innate and normal, something that has nothing to do with age-old negative social attitudes and credulous beliefs, which treated menstruation as something to be ashamed of and hidden away. Ac- cording to Sophia Laws “menstruation may not be important in itself but it is highly symbolic of femaleness” (207), and “it is available only to female body” (Grosz qtd. in Brook 53), and

“the ways people deal with it shows a lot about how women are viewed” (Laws 207). Closer analysis has demonstrated that men still act in oppressive ways and women have been turning their head aside pretending not to see (Laws 207). Even though menstruation is talked about more openly today (Bobel 31), it is still viewed as a biological disadvantage to women, making them emotional and unstable workers (86).

This thesis implies that female body has become ‘a project’, something that is not ac- cepted in its natural way, but as something that needs to be altered and tamed according to the requirements of the world.

According to Smelik a society pushes the female body away from nature in the direction of culture (240). Rupi Kaur argues that “hair / if it was not supposed to be there / would not be growing / on our bodies in the first place and that we are at war with what comes most naturally to us” (193).

The analysis of the final work has also proved that women’s perceiving of their bodies is highly constructed within and affected by the broader socio-cultural context (Fudge and

Byers 352). Furthermore, women are not only advised not to talk about removing their body hair, but also are expected to be naturally hairless.

Moreover, it has been noted that today’s world of media, advertisement, and pornography have become a great tool of promoting the male supremacy. How women feel about their vaginas, and the vividness of patriarchy reveals much about the struggle women face to make peace with their bodies when they refuse to look at their vaginas comparing them to the porn star vaginas, or they practice constant washing and rewashing of the ‘always dirty’ site of the vagina (“Genital Panics: Constructing the Vagina in Women’s Qualitative Narra- tives about Pubic Hair, Menstrual Sex, and Vaginal Self-Image” 216).

Closer analysis of the thesis has also shown that women have been for centuries oppressed by men, society and persuaded that there has been something shameful about having

44 menstruation that “hairy women are witches, insane, dirty” (Torien and Wilkinson 341) and nearly everything connected to female body was understood as taboo which has not to be talked about. Hence, constructing a positive attitude to menstruation, vagina, female aspects have been somewhat problematic. Especially in contemporary Western culture, only women’s body hair is considered as a reason for disgust, much like other body issues (such as menstrual blood, faeces, swear or odours) that are understood to be dirty (Hope 97).

Furthermore, the tenacity of negative representations of vagina, menstruation and body hair in women suggest that it is necessary to think about, and challenge, the way all these aspects of female body are represented in popular media, in schools and in conversations between parents and daughters. Breaking the taboo of secrecy and shame that often sur- rounds the vagina and menstruation by talking (seriously) about it, and by thinking critically about, and challenging, negative representations of the vagina and menstruation, is crucial to developing better and adequate perception of these aspects of female body (Braun and

Wilkinson 17).

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Appendix

I. A photo of Rupi Kaur on her period (2015)

II. Rupi Kaur, milk and honey, p. 13

III. Judy Chicado, Red Flag (1971)

IV. Gustave Courbet, The Origin of the World (1866)

V. Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party (1974-1979)

VI. Tee Corinne, a drawing from the Cunt Coloring Book (1975)

VII. Egon Shiele, Woman in black stockings