Vaginal Politics – Dizzy with Discovery

By Sue O’Sullivan

I was born in 1941 in the USA.

I bled at age nine and my mom that morning, lying in bed beside my dad, said when I announced this, ‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry. You’re so young.’

I stuffed toilet paper in my pants and told no one for more than a year after that.

Later I demanded that my periods be kept a secret from my dad.

We did not talk about sexual pleasure, except my mother told me that it was best and beautiful to give your virginity to your husband.

I found my clit around age ten. Something made me want to touch it. Some young girls spontaneously find their way to wanking.  But not all of us do.  I tried stimulating it, was frustrated, gave up, and forgot about it till some years later.

I had intense longings, but what were they about – except romance?  I longed to swoon, to be swept away.  But what by?

Somebody was supposed to take me to where I wanted to be.

My cunt ached with it all.  I wasn’t ignorant, my liberal parents taught me the ‘facts’. But how did it all fit together? My vagina led where?  Some place inside of me.

I remained a virgin until I was 18.

Some boys, some men, tried to take me where I wanted to go but either I wasn’t swept away by them or fears of unwanted pregnancy filled my head.  Where was my agency in all this?

Someone much older, a writer, sophisticated New Yorker, relieved me (with my full and genuine consent) of my unwanted virginity but an orgasm eluded me.  He told me I could play with his penis – it was mine.  But I didn’t want to play with it.  His toy? No thank you. I still wanted to be swept, swooning into orgasmic pleasure – whatever that might be.

I bled every month. I had cramps every month for a day or two. Dull aching lower belly swelling. I hated it.

I met a boy my age while living in London for a year in 1961.  He wasn’t experienced. I had an orgasm and fell in love with him.

I didn’t know how to live honourably as a person in love. This was all new to me.  Back in the US, still deeply in love, I casually and without desire slept with a boy I’d known from age six.  No birth control.  Fucking someone was so much easier than saying no.

Over in one thrash, one New Year’s Eve fuck and I was pregnant.

I couldn’t tell anyone except my college girlfriends. My love in London didn’t know.

Four of us drove for hours in W’s old VW beetle through miserable cold weather to find an abortionist someone knew about.

Abortion was illegal.

At the address, by myself, I entered an ordinary wooden house in a small town.

A man I assumed was the abortionist said he had to examine me. Flat on my back on the examining table he began to insert his fingers.  And I suddenly knew this was all a masquerade.

It turned out, he was an assistant of sorts with no ability to provide an abortion. The abortionist was in prison.

With borrowed money from a girl friend’s mother, I went to Puerto Rico with the address of an abortion clinic provided by a man who wanted to fuck me.  I had no intention of letting him.

Guess what?  I let him fuck me the night before I flew to PR.  The night before Valentine’s Day, 1963.  I owed him.

I got married later that year and moved to London for good.  I was happy.  I imagined a long life with my husband.  No glimmers of lesbianism danced in my head.

Four years later I got pregnant on purpose.  Before that I used the coil and the pill.  We both wanted children.

I had a long and nightmare labour with my first child. I felt swept up – but in an out of control nightmare of pain, vomiting.

And then, right around the corner, baby now in tow, I encountered the WLM – over 50 years ago and I never looked back.

Not many years later I tumbled into the Women’s Liberation Health Movement.  Vaginas, vulvas and reproductive health were high on our agendas. We were learning about self-examination. We bought cheap plastic speculums (so much nicer than the cold metal ones) and took turns to climb onto tables and insert these into our vaginas. Then with torches and mirrors we looked at ourselves and invited our sisters to look as well. The aim was to demystify and educate ourselves. Our bodies ourselves. Indeed.  Our explorations opened up as many connections between women as differences between them.

Talking about all this ended up almost naturally leading into questions of women’s oppression – and women’s liberation – whether that was in feminist groups, in Holloway Prison, with nursing students, community groups. What were the forces in our different societies which fuelled such negative attitudes and actions about women’s reproductive and sexual bodies?  Vaginal Politics.

In small groups of women and various campaigns I was dizzy with discovery and revolutionary excitement.  The personal (periods, my lost and found again clitoris, longings, abortion, pregnancy, nightmare childbirth, conflicted feelings about motherhood, tears and horror at injustice in the world) was ALL deeply political.  Wetness, dryness, orgasms, men, women, wanking – all political – not parliamentary political, grass roots political.

For me, the arrival of HIV/AIDS in the early 80s gave talk about sexual practice, desire and sexuality a new urgency.  Now it was imperative to talk together and with as many different women as possible about sex and sexuality, sexual practice and identity.  No time to be shy. Through my involvement in women’s health issues on Spare Rib magazine and Sheba Feminist Press, I and others began to write about it all.

I then worked for the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS (ICW). At an international AIDS conference in the late 90s, we were told we should not discuss anal sex in groups of HIV+ and negative women from around the world.  We demurred and found that many women were being pressured into having unprotected anal sex with men – the riskiest form of penetrative sex you could have in relation to HIV transmission.  We also discovered that the supposedly shyest groupings of women, once given permission, were keen to talk about their sexual practices and feelings and from there to learn about and develop the strategies needed to demand what they wanted – or did not want – as sexual beings. What they needed in terms of protection – and wanted in terms of pleasure. We all learned from these discussions together in collective group settings.

In the decade or more before the arrival of HIV/AIDS in the early 80s, there was a growing acceptance, even celebration, of female bodily fluids, of vaginal juices and lubricating slickness. ‘We’re hot, we’re wet, and we love it.’  For me personally, becoming a lesbian and revelling in the desire for other women’s cunts whether in imagination or reality, AND wanting women to make love to me – all this was transformative.

But I also believed that women, whether lesbians, heterosexual, bisexual, whatever, could find and experience possibilities of pleasure – I never wanted to deny other women’s ways to acceptance and delight.

HIV/AIDS threw a spanner in the works.  The irony of having been part of a feminist movement/time in which women were reclaiming their bodies and particularly their vaginas – and then being lectured about the dangers of fluids – was hard.  AIDS righteously fuelled fear and loathing of secretions. Demands for the use of dental dams, condoms or abstinence abounded.

Contradictions appear all around us, always did, still do.

I’m old now and I want to be called old. Forget ‘older’!  If I can’t call myself old now, what if I pop my clogs tomorrow and miss out on that experience?

Paradoxically, even when women are relatively young, they are seen as in the process of decay.  Think of the dreaded atrophying vagina which we’re told begins at menopause or even before.  Along with geriatric pregnancies which take place when women are in their 30s – what do these terms reveal about the cultures and economies we live in?

When I was through with the menopause, I expected thinning vaginal walls, pain on penetration (whether with a lover’s fingers or hands or with a dildo) and loss of my own lubrication. Yes, some women have a horrible time, but others experience changes but little difficulty. Mine wasn’t bad. I didn’t get as wet as before. I embraced lubes – especially for using with sex toys.  But with my last lover in my late 60s, I was taken aback when after having announced to her that lubes were an absolute necessity, I found I was almost always wet enough to enjoy anything we got up to.  Amazing how the body can sometimes surprise you.

Today we seem to live simultaneously in two, three or more weird and overlapping universes. In one, the world feels so much better for women. But in others, woman-hatred is as great or greater now than 40 years ago. We need to bring these worlds into focus – celebrate and hold on to what’s great for women, and at the same time mount new creative ways of combatting the reactionary forces busily at work today.

In writing this, I’ve used the notes I had saved from a panel discussion I took part in at the Vagina Museum when it was in Camden Town, London. When? I think sometime before covid lockdown but I’m not sure. Whenever, it was great fun.

Vagina Museum: https://www.vaginamuseum.co.uk/