Once, as a young undergraduate, I was given a lift by an older student who said he was doing a PhD on the female orgasm. The textbooks strewn across the back seat of his car seemed to support his statement. Apart from thinking it was an odd choice of subject for a bloke, it was a perfectly uneventful trip. I cannot remember where we were going, or why he was taking me there, and I never saw him again.
So why mention him now, fifty years later? Simply because I have just read about a new book, by Rachel E Gross, called Vagina Obscura, about that and other parts of the female body – all apparently named by men (because they, not women, were the doctors, scientists and – presumably – students of female sexuality). At least Gross would seem to know first-hand of what she writes.
The word vagina – the canal leading via the cervix to the uterus in human females, and most other female mammals – comes from the Latin for sheath. It puts one in mind of swords and sheaths, so one can perhaps see where see the link was in the male mind.
The uterus (in laywoman’s terms the womb) has an interesting etymology too. The word describes the hollow muscular organ that houses, and ultimately expels, the developing foetus. It comes from the Greek hustera – hysteria. Hysterics is a state associated (in the male thinking of the time, at least) with a woman’s more tenuous control over her emotions and, ergo, her emotions must originate in the womb/uterus.
The association between women/uteri/hysteria has been lengthy, and women have not been allowed to do a range of activities, like vote, have their own bank account, because they were seen by the men in charge as either too emotionally, or physically, frail – or both, until relatively recently. Indeed, concern was raised when travel by train first became feasible in the second half of the nineteenth century, that women would be unable to cope with the increased speed, as their wombs might fly out of their bodies.
A Facebook post to this effect is doing the rounds and causing much hilarity; after all, we don’t believe such things these days, do we? However, it was only in the 1950s that women’s football was recognised by the Football Association, and not until the 1970s that women were allowed into marathon races. More recently, women’s sport has been expected to welcome Trans identified males into ‘their’ competitions, despite the unfair disadvantage male puberty affords in many sports. Why? Perhaps because women’s sport is still not seen as ‘proper sport’ by the (predominately) men making the decisions. Not surprisingly, many women, not just female athletes, are quite cross – It is enough to make one’s uterus take flight.
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