Familiar or not, stories of the mythical vagina dentata (Latin for “toothed vagina”) exist in virtually every culture. Peruvian, Indian, Japanese, Maori, Chilean, Russian, Native American, and Omani folklore each has its version. Throughout history feminine sexuality has been worshipped and feared, with the oldest known cave art dating back some 37,000 years is the etching of a vulva. A bit of prehistoric porn, maybe. Always, the feminine has seduced and horrified by way of sex and supernatural status: prostitutes or virgins; damned whores and god’s police. For the Greeks, although Medusa the gorgon is not actually a toothed vagina, she possesses a hugely fanged mouth, serpentine hair and a gaze that turns man to stone. Impotent. Described by Barbara Creed in The Monstrous Feminine, (1993) this, “… terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Because it’s not just that (female) sex organs are scary. Women in general are terrifying.”
Vagina dentata is symptomatic of the innate fear of castration and inherent cross-cultural belief of the sexual entitlement of men and its impunities, issues very much in the forefront today. Sigmund Freud’s secular psychoanalytical concept of castration anxiety has a male child’s fear of loss or damage to his genital organs as the anticipated punishment for incestuous thoughts towards his mother, and murderous imaginings against an antagonist father.
Aristotle, for example, believed, “… a boy actually resembles a woman anatomically speaking, and a woman is, so to speak, an infertile male. She is female because of a kind of inadequacy being unable to concoct semen from nourishment … owing to the coldness of her nature.”
The idea of a woman as an imperfect man was popular in western thought for more than a thousand years because most of the writers were men. The most plausible theory we have is fear of the female sex. If there was ever a male paranoid fantasy, a vagina with teeth is it.
Freud regarded the female genitalia as an essentially “mutilated organ” being the remnant of the lacking penis. According to him, upon recognition of genital differences, the female child believes she has been castrated; the male child that he could be castrated. It is a spectre that has haunted men for centuries: that manhood will become, has become or is becoming, obsolete. It is an angry history, long and loud, with its first literary description some four thousand years ago in a Mesopotamian curse as the culmination of this myth.
Castration has been deeply entangled in the patriarchy of Christianity for at least two millennia, centrally because to understand the relationship between God and man, there must be an agreed assumption or construction of what suitably defines a man. While many of these tales are ostensibly cautionary for men to beware lest they lose their member, far more disturbing is the involvement of completely non-consensual removal of said teeth. Freud’s belief was, as the result of the vagina being a dismembered and disfigured organ, it arouses a “..feeling of disgust.. or horror instead of pleasure.”
Horror itself is the provocation of concrete events, perfectly normal in appearance and nonetheless suspicious. Ironically a sentiment wholly relative to the layman perspective of psychosexual development according to Freud. However his theories may be explanations of behaviour, they are not predictive – which is the ultimate outcome of science. Ergo, that which is unempirical can neither be proven nor refuted.
Freud’s classical psychogenic admonition of penis envy and castration anxiety can certainly be opined as his personal fantasies enmeshed within the dentinal box of folklore. Presumably, this type of orchiectomy is both an act of female revenge and the culmination of castration anxiety in men. This then supposes that all vaginas are nothing but vengeful, and testes filled with nothing but fear. Viewed from the completely rational perspective that this premise is little more than the ramblings of an abandoning neuroanatomist routinely snorting industrial-sized cables of cocaine is a line worth following. Freud’s Freudian slip was that everthing he said he meant his mother.
In the Andes, Peruvian ceremonies involving the chewing of coca leaves had occurred for thousands of years but its particular botanical fragility meant it didn’t travel well. There are more than two hundred species of this tropical plant, many of which contain cocaine, but the native South American Ertyhroxylon coca is the favoured commercial source. Five years before his death in 1860, German chemist Friedrich Gaedcke first isolated its alkaloid and in deference to the genus of the flowering plant of the coca family, Erythrolxylum, named it ‘Erythroxyline’ which is possibly pronounceable only after a line or two. After fellow German chemist Albert Neimann refined the purification process and blessed it with a much more song-worthy name, cocaine was touted as a cure-all by the burgeoning pharmaceutical companies manufacturing it. Ol’ Siggy learned of the powder from the Therapeutic Gazette, published by the Pfizer subsidiary Parke-Davis, which then sponsored the 28-year-old Freud $24 to endorse this wundermerch – equivalent to about month’s wage today, but you could probably buy a house.
The effects of cocaine for Freud of course, were instantly attractive “… against depression and against indigestion, and with the most brilliant success.”
In Über Coca, a paper he published within that first endorsement year, Freud describes “a gorgeous excitement” upon first ingesting it, an “exhilaration and lasting euphoria,” as well as noting the suppression of fatigue and hunger.
A few years later, another pharmaceutical company, Merck & Co., also sent samples to the ambitious neuropathology research assistant. From Freud’s protracted dabbling and delving into the stuff emerged psychoanalysis, and his pioneering notion that nostrils and cocaine belong together.
UK military and security specialist Dominic Streatfeild, author of Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography, suggests that, “If there is one person who can be held responsible for the emergence of cocaine as a recreational pharmaceutical, it was Freud.”
Its value was cited by him as a cure for asthma, mental lethargy, eating disorders, sexual impotency, and even the complete answer to alcohol and morphine addictions. He gave samples to colleagues, most notably his brilliant physiologist and physician friend Ernest Fleischl von Marxow. The amputation of Ernest’s thumb due to an infected cut dissecting a cadaver had him suffering chronic pain, relieved only by his subsequent morphine and heroin addiction. In short order, the cocaine cowboy of conjecture Freud, had his unwitting friend blowing six thousand deutsche marks a month on blow, which snuffed him out seven years later at the age of 45.
Such is the digression, as one is prone to do with a toothy tale of treacherous twats; rather unpleasant imaginings even were someone to give you a smile created by the best cosmetic dentist in Sydney.
Around the same time Freud was formulating fallacies fuelled by foo-foo dust, German physician Wilhelm Fliess published a treatise called The Relations Between the Nose and the Female Sexual Organs from the Aspect of Biology. It expanded an idea he’d had about the “nasogenital reflex.” Fliess proved to be Freud’s closest friend, and quite intensely between 1896 and 1898. Undoubtably a complex man, Freud was constantly anxious about his sex life and money, suffered bouts of depression, was frequently resentful of the achievements of peers, and was unashamedly gullible when it came to outlandish medical theories.
So you can appreciate how these predilections had Fleiss become the person with whom Freud shared his most intimate thoughts and unfettered notions.
Fleiss was basically what would now be an ENT specialist, and argued that the nose was intimately connected to the genitals. Therefore, problems with one manifest as symptoms in the other. A bony projection on both sides of the nasal cavity called the nasal inferior turbinate was identified by him as being especially influential, deciding that headaches, discomfort, moodiness and difficult menstruation often began here. Despite his list of indications matching a normal 28-day female cycle, Fleiss insisted the connection with the outcome of possible complete neurosis.
One of Fleiss’ theories was that that their biorhythms were perfectly synchronised, leading Freud to refer to it as their “secret biological sympathies” in an 1896 letter to him, relaying that their separate minor surgeries had them both, “… feel the surgeon’s knife in our bodies at about the same time, and on precisely the same days moaned and groaned because of the pain. Since yesterday I am doing well, and have reason to assume the same kind of change has taken place in you as well.”
Fliess and Freud were coke buddies and despite Freud having already turned his brilliant physiologist friend Ernest Fleischl-Marxow into an addled, multidisciplinary addict, F1 and F2 concluded that not only could neuroses be treated huffing cocaine, but certainly cured by it.
The substitution of one addictive drug for another was certainly a treatment protocol of the late 19th century, and Freud had been studying the effects of cocaine since 1884 with his most reliable and favourite subject – himself.
According to him, it worked! His sexual problems and cybernetically-looped mental illnesses had not manifested, and this could only be due to inadvertent remedying, via his nose.
Voila! Fleiss’ treatise was thoroughly proven.
So Freud had his devil’s dandruff flake-mate Fliess operate on one of his patients: Miss Emma Eckstein. She was a 26-year-old Austrian author, suffering abnormally heavy menstruation which Freud confidently attributed to sexual yearning.
Most likely Miss Eckstein had a congenital bleeding disorder, and fibroids – for which she eventually had a hysterectomy. Not, however, before Wilhelm Fleiss took out one of her turbinate bones, and mislaid half a metre of infection-causing surgical gauze before leaving her and Vienna. In due course, Fleiss inadvertently provided the best 19th century documented case of medical malpractice, comprising idiosyncratic treatment, negligence, cover ups, and flagrant sexism.
Emma suffered horrific post-operative complications, requiring a senior local specialist, Rosanes, to insert an ineffective drain. Further examination revealed a tiny end thread, the pulling of which resulted in the shock removal of the gauze, and she almost bleed to death.
When the cavity was repacked with fresh iodoform, Rosanes later wrote to Fleiss that, “… the poor creature, by then whom we had lying flat, (was) unrecognisable. I felt sick. After she had been packed I fled to the next room, drank a bottle of water and felt miserable. (My wife) then brought me a small glass of cognac and I became myself again.”
Were it so easy for Emma Eckstein to ever become herself again.
A month later, there was further massive haemorrhaging. Fleiss continued to send advice from a distance that was prudently ignored and gradually, with the help of morphine and repeated repacking, Emma Eckstein recovered. Curiously, she later worked for several years as a psychoanalyst, her once beautiful face permanently disfigured by the chiselling of her nasal bone caving in one side of her face.
Were she able to invoke the myth of vagina dentata and enticed either or both Fleiss and Freud to her bed, it would be hard to hold that against her. As it was, she spent the last twenty years of her life on a couch, unable to walk, never leaving her room and dying of a stroke in 1924 at the age of 59.
One may idly muse this facial collapse as an eerie pre-echo of a deviated septum, with Freud getting off lightly with only the symptoms of a conspirational mind convinced that nothing at all was perilously unbalanced in his addict behaviour.
Freud likely attributed the Emma experiment as astoundingly progressive, in that at least she wasn’t dead, and he was likely devoid of castration anxiety, no matter how close his nuts were to Emma’s surgically splayed face and cocaine enthusiast Willy’s shakin’ scalpel.
Attempts to reclaim the symbolism of the vagina dentata as a feminist emblem of power subvert the story-arc, presenting it as a weapon against sexual predatory behavior in the genre of rape revenge.
2003’s movie Penetration Angst is a gory and tasteless re-imaging of Brian De Palma’s “Sisters” where Helen suffers a psychotic dread of penetrative sex. Directed by Wolfgang Büld, her lovers are nothing but a pile of their clothes when consumed by her genital monster. Recommended only for true diehards of Büld, indeed both of you.
Most certainly it’s not the only cinematic exploration of the subject; we had Fellini’s Casanova in 1976, Clerks II forty years later, and of course Teeth a year after that.
In the 2018 publication Vagina Dentata: An erotic romance, sort of, by Lauryn Pants, Kari doesn’t mean to eat men alive with her vagina, it’s just what happens sometimes when you have vaginal teeth. This twisted short read has monster vaginas rock when you’re not on the receiving end… oh wait.. actually, you have to be.
Put lyrics to the term and you get a Fat White Family track about demands, gritted teeth and bite-mark scars of relationships in 2019’s Serf’s Up!
Doing little but reinforcing the legitimacy of the vagina dentata model, prototypes of defensive rape prevention gadgets have been created, with none having made it to the retail market.
Thankfully, one would think.
@vaginadentazine is an Instagram account exploring the relationship between science fiction and fashion that has nothing to do with vagina dentata but is indeed an interesting distraction that appeared because in Google nobody hears you scream past ‘vagina dent’ …
Edgar Degas’ Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879) gives us luminous strokes to a dark-skinned woman suspended on a rope in mid air, secured only by her teeth. An erotic and exotic object for public consumption, it resembles a lynched figure, since the rope extends upward, and her head thrust backward, the assumed strength of Miss La La’s teeth also points to something else: the depicted threat she poses to the vulnerable entrapped by her formidable jaw.
If the popular assumption is true – that Degas was impotent and therefore celibate – then the power-mouth of Miss La La divulges Degas’ terror of female genitals and fear of castration.
While Vagina Dentata is the surreal interpretation of the sexually dangerous woman, after about 1840 advice manuals began to focus on the vagina, advising that women experiencing sexual pleasure are exposing themselves to unending harm. Nature holds the real-life demonstration via the female cabbage butterfly (Pieris rapae). Using her “vagina dentata” to rip through the hard encasing of a male’s ejaculated spermatophore once mated, and therein lies new perspective of the butterfly effect only the male Pieris rapae can appreciate.
Most interestingly, in 1989 the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology documented teeth growing in a benign embroid tumour on the wall of a woman’s vagina. Labelled “GYN. 143. 1” you can look it up if you like. Though perhaps not before breakfast.
No doubt had it been discovered between the 12th and 17th centuries it may very well have become very much a part of secular or religious architecture and a somewhat different iconography for genuflection.
The trope of demonic and eroticised women with this menacing power of castration has been kept alive in paintings, folklore, mythology, legends, movies and literature. Its stories have remained popular throughout human history in shaping collective ideas of women as patriarchal instruments for control and subjugation.
All in all, over the centuries women are mutilated males, genitals are connected to the nose, female orgasm is necessary for procreation, masturbation leads to insanity and menstrual blood is actually sperm gone bad.
At one time or another, medical science made all of these statements – often as an attempt to apply science to largely superstitious or religious strictures.
It is heart and imagination that runs naked and free during sex, whether physician, scientist, writer, artist, teacher or builder. Any idea we may have of sexual sophistication is indeed transient; progress dictates that medical and scientific doctrines are often later disproven. Society is now approaching gender-bending narratives that were not part of the zeitgeist even a decade ago.
Sex. Something to sink your teeth into.