Vagina dentata

Image taken from Goddess Cafe

Latin for "toothed vagina".

Often crops up as a sexist projection onto women's bodies of men's fear of women's sexuality. Devouring mothers and all that.

A common motif in certain cultural legends and myths. For instance, the Navajo's story of "Snapping Vagina" included a vagina dentata that produced lightning. Apache and Navajo stories featured women who killed men with their toothed vaginas; the heroes could destroy them by destroying their teeth.

Sometimes appears in fiction as an instance of fantastical biology, or a science-fictional body modification or device.

As a rape deterrent, it rather rests on the presumption that men will have access to women's bodies anyhow, and that they will go far enough for a device located in the vagina to make any difference, thereby circumscribing women's inevitable position as victims.

Sonette Ehlers with a screenshot and a prototype of the Rapex, a female condom. (Photo: Reuters, taken from Robyn Dixon, "Controversy in South Africa over device to snare rapists", Sept. 2, 2005.)

The development of a real-life version (the "Rapex", invented by Sonette Ehlers in 2005) inspired various criticisms:

1. that they would be useless against rape committed with the help of foreign objects;
2. the use might enrage rapists and incite further violence;
3. they offered revenge not deterrence;
4. they might expose victims to blood-borne contagions should their attackers' skin break.

Ehlers said she had been inspired to invent it after meeting a woman who had been raped who told her, "If only I had teeth down there."

Examples

Fantasy

• Tanith Lee's "Weasel Bride"

Science-Fiction

• Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Other

• Piero Schivazappa's "Femina Ridens" (transl. "Frightened Woman", 1969); misogynystic millionaire kidnaps and tortures a woman; he creates a vagina dentata doorway.

External Links

• Pat Carr, "The Vagina Dentata Motif in Nahuatl and Pueblo Mythic Narratives: A Comparative Study," New Scholar: An Americanist Review (1982), v. 8, nos. 1-2, pp. 85-101.
• Leonard Cassuto. "Repulsive Attractions: 'The Raft,' the Vagina Dentata, and the Slasher Formula." in Kathleen Margaret Lant & Theresa Thompson, eds., Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998), pp. 61-78.
• Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993.
• Grosz, Elizabeth. "Animal Sex: Libido as Desire and Death," Sexy bodies: the strange carnalities of feminism (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 278-299.
• Horney, Karen. "The Dread of Women," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 13 (1932), 348-60.
• Ruth Markus, "Surrealism's Praying Mantis and Castrating Woman," Woman's Art Journal, Spring-Summer 2000, v.21, n.1, pp. 33-39. (vagina dentata and related imagery in surrealist painting)
• Otero, Solimar. "'Fearing Our Mothers': An Overview of the Psychoanalytic Theories Concerning the Vagina Dentata Motif", American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Sept. 1996, v. 56 n. 3, pp. 269-288.
• Raitt, Jill. Article on "vagina dentata," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 48 (1980), 415-431.
• Barbara Walker. The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
• Vagina Dentata at The Goddess Café, Yoni Temple
• Wikipedia entry about vagina dentata