You broke my vagina

THE VAGINA: AN ONTOLOGY

“You, however, BROKE MY VAGINA. Not only did it hurt, but it isn’t even pretty.” Bald and Bloody

: “vagin’a, n, sexual passage in female from uterus to external orifice”.

: “ontol’ogy, n, department of metaphysics concerned with the essence of things or being in the abstract.”

(The Concise Oxford Dictionary)

Clearly, Bald and Bloody in in a state of distress. In addition to having undergone pain her vagina isn’t even pretty anymore. But why would she speak of her vagina as being “pretty”? Is being pretty – the diminutive form of being beautiful – an attribute that can coherently be ascribed to her vagina? If it can be attributed, just how can it be coherently done? Questions like these open up speculation as to just of what, ultimately, the vagina might consist. What is its essence? Can it be said to have being in the abstract? Clearly, what is required here is a consideration of the ontology of the vagina.

Linguistically, of course, the term “vagina” has its origins in Latin for sheath or a scabbard for one’s sword – did the Roman legionnaires speak of putting their swords back into their vaginas? – but the lexicographical derivation doesn’t take us very far. Nor does the next step up the ontological scale, the vagina seen merely as an object of perception where it takes the shape of a simple tube. Similarly, the functionalist or biological understanding of the vagina, the depository of semen preparatory to its voyage up and into the uterus, still attributes an unsatisfying reductionist quality to the essence of the vagina. (Is it true, as some maintain, that a deposit of semen in the vagina calms the natural female tendency to hysteria?) No, to speak of the essence of the vagina is to speak of its being in the abstract. It is to speak not of its physical denotation however conceived but rather it is to speak of its symbolic connotation. But what is that symbolic connotation?

The symbolic connotation of the vagina is its iconic and even mythic role as the font of life, a conception perhaps best conceptualized in terms of Plato’s Theory of Forms. For Plato the ontological problem was to ground the multiplicity of particulars – of vaginas in the present context – on that by virtue of which they were identified as vaginas, with their ontological resemblance to each other. But what was this ground of vaginal resemblance, this essence of their being? For Plato, it was the Form Of Vagina (yes, always capital letters for Plato’s Forms). All particular instances of individual vaginas, in other words, were more or less excellent – “prettier” in Bald and Bloody’s terminology – to the degree to which they embodied the Form of the Vagina. Plato would have rather used the term “good” – his highest Form was the Form of the Good which, of course, Christianity which borrowed Plato’s Forms calls “God”.

So there we are. Plato’s Form of the Vagina which finds its ontological home in the Form of the Good is the essence of Bald and Bloody’s particular vagina embodying as it does its being in the abstract. That is why she was in a state of distress when she discovered that it wasn’t “pretty” anymore.

A pleasure as always.

Cheerio!