Word: vaginas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mood for experiments and furiously charges the young vet: "I met him with a backhanded slash. The elastic came off and the water fountained in the bull's eyes ... I have often wondered since that day if I am the only veterinary surgeon to have used an artificial vagina as a defensive weapon...
Like the diaphragm, the cap works by preventing sperm from migrating from the vagina to the uterus and then to the fallopian tubes, where conception occurs. The diaphragm is a thin rubber shield held in place against the vaginal wall by the tension of its springy rim. The cap is a thicker, thimble-shaped rubber or plastic cup that fits snugly around the neck of the uterus, the cervix, and is kept in place by suction. Both devices are used with spermicidal cream or jelly...
Chicago announced the reason for this in her autobiography, Through the Flower, published in 1975, the year after she began The Dinner Party. "To be a woman is to be an object of contempt, and the vagina, stamp of femaleness, is despised," she wrote. "The woman artist, seeing herself as loathed, takes the very mark of her otherness and by asserting it as the hallmark of her iconography, establishes a vehicle by which to state the beauty and truth of her identity." The aim of this jargon-sodden Femspeak is to set up a myth of women artists...
...made by women that draws some of its poetic content from the image of the vagina. What makes Chicago's work unusual in this context is not the quality of her vision but the simplicity of her fixation. Perhaps one should imagine the case with the sexes reversed: a male artist decides to do a homage to macho history, from God the Father to Mahatma Gandhi and Frank Sinatra-all represented by china penises, propped up by quantities of Laurentian burblings about roots, darkness and the archetypal perceptions of the blood. Who, today, would take such an effusion seriously...
...least a reasonably interesting story line. But Jong doesn't seem to have time for these details. The message, the message. The book's jacket characterizes the insides as "highly entertaining" and "wildly funny"; could that refer to the page-and-a-half roster of eighteenth-century synonyms for "vagina"? Or maybe you consider reading about 12 men who gang-rape an innocent victim wildly funny...