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In This Issue

• DeLovely? DeLorean.
• What Would Future You Do?
• What Are Your Plans For That Junk?
• Letters to the Editors
• The Adventures of Young Boy and Park Girl in 4-D
• Hipsters Remember Awkward Tweens at Brooklyn Bar
• You Can Call Me Ishmael Anytime
• Oh, Take Me Over Awkwardly
• People Know Me. Cool People.
• Not Even Time Thwarts Yo Mama
• I Plan To Own The Future
• How to Write Love Poems for Girls Who Can Read
• Lies My Robots Told Me
• My Ears Are Bleeding! Wait, That's Just My Vagina.
• Veritas Forum Takes Stand Against Death
• Too Jewish to Play Ska?
• Damned Interface Technology!
• The Church of Timeology
• THEY WATCH
• The Staff of 21.5

Jamie Peck

The dreaded "Death Oyster", ghost of V-Day.

Why is the Fed obsessed with vaginas? Why don't we have more meta-captions?

For the past four and a half years of my life, I have gone to all-girls schools. It has been drilled into my skull that I am a strong woman with a strong sense of self and an even stronger set of ovaries. This overexposure to feminazism has definitely shaped me. It has made me aware and appreciative of my particular set of gonads. It has made me a supporter of feminism. Hell, I even like dressing up and reveling in the fact that only my gender gets to look cute in a skirt. I will absolutely be the first to extol the value of the female species.

I also have a paralyzing fear of the vagina.

I cannot tell you how it started. Maybe my childhood fear of dark places played a role. Maybe it’s due to my unease at hearing the word “moist.” Maybe it’s some odd modification of Freud’s penis envy. Whatever it is, it has played an important role in my life. Yes, I am a woman who is afraid of the female genitalia.

Vagina. Even the word makes me cower in fear. It represents something dark and mysterious... like a cave full of man-eating bats. It is an area of the unknown… you can’t even truly see it for yourself. Even the derivation of the word is terrifying. Vagina comes from the latin word for a sheath used to hold a sword. Swords are sharp and are used to kill people. Sharp painful death = frightening. Therefore, vaginas are frightening. It’s simple math. The transitive property of vaginas.

The euphemisms that are supposed to take the edge off of the word are just as unsettling. “Pussy” is reminiscent of bad porn and everything smutty in the world. “Cunt” cannot be used in most circles, except those frequented by angry lesbians. The only word I have thus been able to embrace is “bajingo,” my baby cousin’s attempt at naming her vagina. Or maybe she was saying Bo Jangles. Either way, it seems innocuous enough to me. Unfortunately no one has any idea what I’m attempting to say when I use that word, except her. And honestly, I have very little to say about my vagina to my baby cousin.

I realize this fear of mine seems practically blasphemous, coming from a Barnard student. We are supposed to embrace all of ourselves, in the literal and figurative sense. My friends have taken to making fun of me, constantly saying “vagina” while I cower in fear. Some friends. Recently, however, I decided I needed to prove to them I could stand up to my fear and take control of my life. I needed to find a way to become comfortable with vaginas. But how?

Then I saw it: a glistening beacon in the middle of college walk. A poster. A poster for Vagina Monologues auditions. That’s crazy, you say. By immersing myself in vagina-talk, I would just be constantly uncomfortable. It would be like a child with a fear of goats deciding to live amongst them for six months. Except, you would probably use a far more normal analogy. And I would not blame you.

But I felt ready. And I prayed that whatever I had to read would not contain any word for vagina in it. I got lucky. I read the one monologue that never used any word for genitalia. I lied my way through the audition process, never once bringing up my unease. I even got a part that was vagina free. It was so simple to hide my terror. I took to calling the play things like “the monologues” or “my play” or “that thing I have to go to tonight.” No one suspected a thing. If anyone asked why I never used the whole name I would simply reply that it was bad luck to say the name of the play. I would never add that that rule was only for Macbeth and only for when the cast was in a theater, but no one seemed to notice. I was living a glorious lie.

Then one day it all changed. I was lying in bed with my roommate gone, and decided that in the name of the play, I would discover myself. I did, and it was amazing, and there were angels in the room and the earth shook and my life became instantly better. I realized there was nothing odd or disgusting about my vagina, it was part of me. I then sang kumbaya, rejoiced in my femininity and took to only listening to Ani Difranco.

Actually…I just lied again. None of that really occurred. The word still makes me feel uneasy sometimes, but I have grown accustomed to it not unlike army men become accustomed to witnessing people getting their heads blown off. I can now hear the word without cringing, and even say it on occasion, when the mood strikes. I am not a born-again militant feminist, nor am I completely vagina-phobic. I just wrote this article as the first step to getting over my problem. I hope that other cuntophobes (that is the scientific name, I looked it up) will read it and draw strength from my words. I don’t call myself a revolutionary, but if others decide to embrace their nether regions on account of this article, that is up to them.