It’s Vulva, not Vagina

In the annals of Things that Annoy me as a Woman, Feminist, Pagan, and just plain Human-

Odd example, but bear with me:

In an episode of a TV show I watch, that takes place at a fictional law firm, there was a public sculpture, after being unveiled, the city who commissioned the sculpture refused to pay the artist, saying it “violated community standards”. Throughout the episode the characters made arguments about whether the sculpture did or didn’t “look like a vagina”. Problem: most people, apart from gynecologists- don’t really know what vaginas look like. It’s an internal organ. It’s a vulva, people! Labia majora, labia minora, and clitoris. Not vagina- that’s the “slot” below the vulva. But that’s slot that the penis goes into, so it’s the important part! Yay heteronormativity. So we refer to the whole of female anatomy as “the vagina”. This spreads misinformation, and is insulting to women. Seriously? It doesn’t help how shoddy sexual education is in our public schools. But most of the time, there are sexually experienced adults talking about the Great Mysterious Female Anatomy. Stop talking about it that way. It shouldn’t be any more mysterious than male anatomy, which apparently is more OK to talk about? Is it more obscene to say vulva than vagina? Is this an American problem rather than a European or Canadian one? I don’t know- feel free to tell me if other countries are less insistent on oversimplifying lady parts.

But yeah- this whole thing reminds me of the straight guys who can’t fathom what women do together in the bedroom. All I can say is fellas, if you can’t figure that out, your girlfriends and wives must be pretty unhappy.

Here’s some visuals to help you out. (Not porn- sex ed material!)

This post has been brought to you by: Sheela Na Gig

“Sheela Na Gigs are quasi-erotic stone carvings of a female figure usually found on Norman or to be more precise Romanesque churches. They consist of an old woman squatting and pulling apart her vulva, a fairly strange thing to find on a church. The carvings are old and often do not seem to be part of the church but have been taken from a previous older, usually romanesque, building.” Well, isn’t that special?

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Favorite “D” PBP Posts

Dagaz- Huginn & Muginn’s musings

To Dare- Super-Duper Space Witch on activism

Dán– Seeking Imbas

Deity/ies/Divine

Druid Bird– My Relationship with Deities

Seeker Sight– Divinity: a guide for seekers to concepts of the divine

Scathcraft- Divinities (in French, Google translate link on site)

Mistress of the Hearth– Devi, the Great Goddess

Deity Communication- Witch of Valenwood   “I am not a Pagan because I have chosen a priestly path to non-Abrahamic deities, and I don’t believe that communication with deities is integral to a Pagan identity. Your pagan beliefs may allow for such communication to occur, and the praxis of your pagan beliefs include such a thing as a goal, but it is not obligatory.   I believe in the gods, I love a few of them, and I believe that occasionally I can feel their presences. But my praxis is to live in a way I believe will please them and make offerings in their names. Whether I pray to them or not, they exist, and I am wary about meddling in the affairs of gods, for they are subtle and quick to anger. My love and respect for them is too sincere.” -That’s piety, my friends.

Specific Deities: Miach Rhys writes about Dian Cecht, an Irish God of Healing

Seeking Imbas- The Dagda and his epithets (actually the name Dagda itself is an epithet meaning Good God)

Dependency– Leithin Cluan

Devotion/Devoted/Devotional– Strip Me Back to the Bone:  “Devotion is, I believe, ultimately a private affair that can not reliably be measured empirically by outsiders — and in this case, outsiders means anyone other than you personally”

Spirit Stitch– A Place Where All Forces Come Together

Isleen – Daily Devotion to the Divine

Echtrai “In addition, it has been the experience of many polytheists that you do not choose a god. If they desire a devotional relationship from you, they’ll come knocking. Imagine if someone walked up to you on the street and said “I’m going to marry you.” Wouldn’t that be weird?

Abgeneth– Unlikely Devotionals: Everyday Things in My Life I Find Brought Me Closer to the Gods

Delight in Doing the Work- Grave Moss & Stars “Doing the Work is a common phrase used to indicate doing the hands-on, occasionally tedious work that is related to or directly causes a sense of personal and/or spiritual fulfillment.”
Delightism– Donald Engstrom

Discernment- Red Menace “Discernment, I find, is a topic that is strangely absent from a lot of pagan books I’ve read. I’ve seen books go on at length about the clair abilities, the various methods of divination, but there never seems to be a discussion on training yourself to understand when the divination is coming from an external force, and when it’s you seeing only the patterns you want to see. ”

Disillusionment- from Thorn the Witch

Disney & Callanish Stones– Knot Magick on the standing stones depicted in Disney’s “Brave” and information about them in the real world. I hadn’t heard of these stones before reading this post, so thanks to the writer and Disney from bringing them to the fore (even if Disney just happened to find them convenient Scottish scenery)

Disting– and other Heathen Holidays in February Pagan Grove

Division– Conor hopes for an amicable division between pagans and polytheists

Domovoi– Witch’s Journey– domestic spirit in Slavic folklore

Domatites (Poseidon) Strip Me Back to the Bone “The biggest reason early on that I decided I was not and could not be a Hellenic pagan was because Hestia would not be my hearth; Poseidon was. Poseidon would remain so. Fast forward years later. Just last April I was reading through Pausanias’s Guides To Greece, as one does, and I stumbled upon a reference to Poseidon Domatites – Poseidon of the house, or, more specifically, of the rooms.” I vote that she can jolly well call herself a Hellenic pagan or polytheist if she wants. You don’t need to strictly follow “Old Stones, New Temples” to be one.

Doubt– Baring the Aegis

Draugadrottin– Wytch of the North (she is doing a series on Odin’s epithets/titles) This one basically means “King of the Zombies”

Drawing Down/Drawing In– In general I wasn’t interested in posts on Drawing Down the Moon, but Raven Scribe has her own meditation loosely based on it, to help her deal with seasonal depression- asking help from Brighid (so of course I couldn’t resist)

Druids/Druidism– Philosophical Pagan– Allec, on why she doesn’t call herself a Druid

Ci Cyfarth untangles a mess of historical Druid definitions

Duir, the Mighty Oak at Raven & Oak

When the Gods Become Real

One thing that became apparent from the Pop culture Paganism discussion last year was a lot of assumptions people were making about how historic myths are, and where the distinctions lie.  The problem is if these assumptions are false then their whole religion falls apart. Hence part of my reasoning in the Authenticity post.

• Mythological heroes (Heracles, Perseus, Odysseus) were historic and therefore worthy of cultus
• Superheroes were never real people there therefore can’t be “real” gods
• Certain characters in medieval Irish and Welsh literature, written by Christian monks were all historically worshiped as gods.
• A counter-point by others: mythology and folklore was the pop culture of its day

Does this imply that the “high gods” of Olympus and Asgard (etc) were originally human, and that makes them more real? The funny thing is good ol’ Euhumerus made that argument a long time ago, that the gods were all deified humans, but he used that as a rationalist explanation of religion, and his ideas were later used by Christians to discredit polytheism. Which is rather ironic given their spiritual focus on a historic deified human.

While there are some who literally worship Superman, Sunweaver was originally just talking about using characters like him as a metaphor, but even that people freaked out about.  Saigh also writes about using a modern warrior woman character as an icon at her shrine, to serve as inspiration but clarifying that she is not worshiping her as a being. Gefnsdottir shares an intriguing anecdote: “A woman who posts on one of the fora where I lurk had been trying to get pregnant for a year without success. At the end of the year, she remembered a particular ritual from the Kushiel’s Legacy series, wherein D’Angeline women (who can’t get pregnant otherwise) light candles and pray to the goddess Eisheth to “open the gates of their womb”. She decided to perform the ritual, and the following cycle, she became pregnant, and has had no problems since.”

The evidence of worship of many supposed Irish divinities is sketchy and even more questioned is the divine status of characters in the Mabinogi tales such as Manawyddan and Arianrhod.  Some of their names are cognate with the Irish (Manawyddan=Mannanan, Llew=Lugh) memories of gods that have been “demoted” to powerful humans in the stories.  Other characters can be seen as heroes or demi-gods worthy of honor as well. The lines between God, Sidhe, Human Dead and Hero are very blurry in Celtic and Germanic traditions, and they often aren’t as clear in Greek & Roman traditions as people think they are. (Saigh addresses this historical iffy-ness in her above post)

Nowadays, instead of Euhemerus, we have scholars like Ronald Hutton that tell us, sorry to burst your romanticized bubble but that holiday custom was invented by a Scottish nationalist, and that god you’re worshiping was invented by a poet.  Nothing against Hutton, he has been a needed correction to Robert Graves and Margaret Murray, but what he says is historical should not determine our religious practices. If you want your practice to be all historically attested, fine but you’ll constantly have to re-invent the wheel whenever the new scholarly journal comes out.

This is why I’m becoming more comfortable with the idea of honoring folkloric and older literary figures as deities.  I prefer older characters (19th century or earlier) not due to the “older is more authentic” mentality necessarily but because they have had time to show their cultural staying power and relevance.  Also, by then the copyrights have often expired and the commercialism has faded.  A lot of characters come and go in waves of popularity, others stick around for decades or centuries.  At some point, new gods and spirits appear to us. Maybe they are old gods in new guises, trying to be noticed. Maybe they are totally new. Maybe old gods do disappear and reappear in other forms? But we can’t really tell for sure what’s new and what’s old we just have to follow our instincts. I think it’s the spiritual equivalent of evolution and biodiversity. Spirits and their cults and religions have their own eco-spiritual niches, they evolve with the times- or at times they die and come back in a different form if their “niche” no longer fits them.  Some spirits also broaden or narrow their cultural or geographic territory. Gaia, for example from what we know historically wasn’t worshiped very much as a goddess in ancient Greece, she was more of a distant, cosmic principle. But now she is widely worshiped among Neo-Pagans and even Hellenic recons due to modern ecological consciousness.

This is a rather rambling post- I am sorting out a lot of tangled threads, I’m sure I’ll find some of them are strong material, while other strands are thin, weak and don’t lead me anywhere.  Eventually I will start some more weaving!

More bloggy links-

Stone of Destiny: No Capes “Because fandom is not worship. Worship involves pouring energy outward to achieve a result.Fandom, on the other hand, is about the self. It’s about satisfying a need that we feel, filling a hole that our modern society has forgotten how to satisfy.”

Snow Queen, Snow Maiden

For recent glimpse of the Snow Maiden- check out the new Disney film, Frozen. It’s about a pair of royal sisters, Anna and Elsa. The elder sister Elsa is born with the magical ability to freeze things, and after almost killing her sister with frostbite, she is isolated in a tower. But after her parents are killed, she must be released to become queen, and she loses control over her powers and puts the kingdom into an endless winter.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to see it til it’s out of the theaters, otherwise I would review it right here. It looks like a beautifully animated film, with a great feminist message. See, Disney? You can do it! It’s not that hard!

I have to disagree that Frozen is a retelling of the Snow Queen– I’d say that it is loosely inspired by it however. C.S. Lewis draws much more explicitly on the Snow Queen with the White Witch character. She rules a realm of eternal winter (with no Christmas!) and tempts Edmund to hop in her sleigh of warm furs and tasty Turkish delight. That’s what happens in the original the little boy is lured off by the Snow Queen, and his sister goes on a journey to rescue him. And that’s Edmund’s siblings (Lucy, Peter & Susan) have to do.

For the longest time after reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I wondered what the heck Turkish delight was. Well, I did get to try some a while back and I can see why it was so tempting! It is basically gelatin with dried fruit and nuts- rather like gooey fruitcake.  Wouldn’t making some of it be a great way to celebrate winter?