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 (thirteen-year-old Y.T. uses a rape defense "vagina dentata" which, unless disabled, injects a rapid-acting sedative on penetration, allowing someone to get away)

Vagina dentata imagery and analysis

• "Alien" and H.R. Giger's imagery generally:

The alien's mouths have long been the quintessential vagina dentata -- complete with a bonus phallus dentata that shoots out at will -- so Jeunet ups the ante by having Ripley tear the penile tongue out of a dead monster and offer it to Ryder as "a nice souvenir."

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

Independence Day reinforces the notion that femininity is a threat to American society in its depiction of the actual alien invasion. When the alien spaceships go into attack mode, they present the viewer with the image of a vagina dentata, an age-old cultural icon which locates destruction (teeth) within the site of heterosexual masculine pleasure (the vagina). This is the sort of image Barbara Creed talks about in her book The Monstrous-Feminine, which analyzes threats to masculinity in the context of science-fiction and horror cinema. Independence Day's alien ships align themselves perfectly with her conceptualizations of the destructive feminine threat to male ideology. After parking itself conspicuously and directly over the point of the Capitol Building in Los Angeles, one of theseships opens at the underbelly to reveal, between its jagged metal teeth, a weapon extending down from it which releases its destructive rays, incinerating the skyscrapers on impact. According to Creed, the horror of science fiction's alien exterminators has, at its base, the idea that "phallocentric ideology" is "terrified at the thought that women might desire the phallus." The weapon on the alien ships is depicted as a feminine phallus. It is not Planet Earth that is under attack, but the male perogative. The aliens' attack is merely the culmination of a war that was underway long before their arrival, a war on the masculinity of the film's protagonists. President Whitmore's enervating reliance upon and care for women, Stevie Hiller's affiliation with degenerate female sexuality, Russell's emasculation at the hands of the castrating aliens/Vietnam War, and David's subjugation to the career and domestic demands of his powerful wife have all placed them, on July 2, at the feet of this awesome and unavoidable feminine power.

Bibliography

• 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

External Links

• Vagina Dentata at The Goddess Café, Yoni Temple
• Wikipedia entry about vagina dentata