Crotch Rot

Ken O’Brien

One no longer has to go to a strip club to have women’s private parts in your face. Today vaginas are a cultural meme. And pussy galore has become a bore.

The glorification of the magical nature of the vagina as a means to female empowerment has reached a stage that is beyond self-parody. 

This descent into literal and figurative hysteria began with the arrival of The Vagina Monologues in 1996. By 2012 we had a respectable author like Naomi Wolf publishing Vagina: A New Biography.  In its introduction she writes, “For personal as well as intellectual reasons, I began to realize that the real headline is one that is rarely talked about, outside of a small circle: that there is a profound brain-vagina connection that seemed to me to  contain more of the truth of the matter than anything else I was exploring.”

Really? After decades of jokes about men thinking with their genitals it is now somehow “empowering” for women to accept that they think with theirs? 

But, for me at least, the Rubicon dividing mere “new feminist” nonsense from scatological drivel was crossed by the headline article in Salon Magazine this weekend. I reproduce it below in its full narcissistic glory:

But the extension of this nonsense doesn’t stop there. No! In Slate we have Amanda Hess writing an article titled “Do We Really Have to Be Proud of Our Periods?”  This emergent discussion revolves around such gems as, “For some women, it’s not just talking about periods that makes them feel good—menstruation itself is empowering. ‘Do you feel embarrassed, slightly ashamed, slightly awkward? Or is it “I am woman, hear me roar?”‘ CNN’s Wallace asked one woman about her emotional relationship to her period. ‘It’s “I am woman,” ‘ she replied. Girls, mother and blogger Shannon Bradley-Colleary says, should be instructed to see their periods as ‘a source of pride and power.’ “

Last month we had an attempt at a global celebration of this absurdity:

It was a bust. I couldn’t turn up a single news article about this non-event.

I can only hope that this was an indication that this preoccupation with the female genitals as a source of empowerment is coming to an end.

Now you’ll have to excuse me. I’m behind on getting the manuscript for my play to my literary agent. It’s titled The Penis Platitudes.