Hi Readers! First of all, I’m sending my love to friends and family in California as they’re dealing with these terrible fires. I’m currently on the frigid East Coast, where I spent a relaxing holiday with family.
I truly took the holidays off, so I never got around to sending a “Best of 2024” post. That will be coming your way in a few weeks, when I’ll have to step away from the newsletter for a bit to work on a film. But I’m in the “office” today (my living room), so a brand new topic is coming your way. Today’s newsletter is about the myth of the vagina dentata.
Thank you so, so much for reading the ADULT SEX ED newsletter! If you’re enjoying it, please share with friends, so they can be hilariously informed.
Adult Sex Ed comedically challenges why we think what we think about sex. In case you’re new, I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a comedy writer, film producer, and performer. In 2018, I started a comedy show called Adult Sex Ed and launched this newsletter last year. Each week, I take a fun deep dive into a topic that I’ve been researching. Want to know more? Read the whole description on substack here.
Ready to plug the holes in your education? Okay, let’s go!
One of my favorite things to do during the holiday season is catch up on theatre in NY, especially the shows that tourists won’t go in droves to see. My friends clearly had the same idea and I saw a litany of photos from the audience, specifically the splash zone, of Teeth the Musical. Based on the 2007 cult horror movie, Teeth is about a conservative Christian teenager who becomes an accidental vigilante after discovering that her vagina has teeth. When men violate her, her body literally bites back. The musical version, which just closed in NY, is like Little Shop of Horrors with a carnivorous c*nt (that was for you, Mom). But the myth of the vagina dentata isn’t new.
Psychoanalyst and noted misogynist Sigmund Freud may have coined the term vagina dentata (Latin for toothed vagina) in the year 1900, and his analysis was that the vision related to “devouring or being devoured.” In the years that followed, some freudian followers built on the idea, and related the image of a generalized fear of women or “castration anxiety.” The image of the vagina dentata and what it represents has been the root of wars against women around the world. However, different takes on the myth appeared in several cultures throughout history, represented in folktales and art. Naturally, I did a holiday season deep dive into this biting myth (sorry).
Many of the vagina dentata myths warn of the necessity of removing the teeth from women’s vaginas, in order to transform her into a nonthreatening sexual partner. You know, marriage material. It’s the core belief that women need to be tamed. There are countless vagina dentata stories that originate in India. In one popular tale, a man suspects that his love possesses a toothed vagina. He instructs four men of a lower caste to rape her in order to remove the teeth. Once they’re finished, he’s willing to marry her. That tale originated in Madhya Pradesh, an Indian state that was the site of a rape epidemic a decade ago that led to this Washington Post piece, which invoked the vagina dentata myth.
The concept of the toothed vagina appears in the creation myths and folklore of various cultures, including those of Native America, Russia, Japan (among the Ainu), India, Samoa, and New Zealand. Among the Ponca and the Otoe tribes that historically lived in the Great Plains region of North America (present-day Nebraska), there was a story in which Coyote outwits a wicked old woman who placed teeth in her daughter’s vagina to seduce, kill, and rob young men. The old woman also took another female prisoner, who also received the implanted teeth against her will. Coyote kills the woman and her daughter but marries the other young woman, after knocking out the teeth in her vagina “except for one blunt tooth that was very thrilling when making love.” Here’s hoping this Coyote who receives pleasure from a tooth is a coyote-like man and not an actual dog.
In a Māori legend, the trickster demi-god Māui (yes, the same dude from Moana, played by The Rock) decides he’s going to make humans immortal. In order to do that, he needs to kill Hine-nui-te-pō, the goddess of death and gatekeeper of the underworld, who happens to possess a vagina dentata. His plan is to travel into her vagina and out of her mouth while she is sleeping, representing the inverse of the life-giving powers of a woman. A flock of birds blow his cover when they awaken her and he is crushed in her crotch, making humans mortal forever. Seriously, where was this is Moana? I’d love some rapid-fire Lin-Manuel Miranda lyrics about the dentata (it’s such a great staccato word).
Some historical vagina dentata myths have a happy ending. In a Russian/Finnish folklore, a beautiful young woman was married off to a gross man against her will. She puts a fish head with sharp teeth inside her, which severely pricks the man whenever he tries to enter. She then makes fun of him for not knowing that young girls still have teeth. He tells the account to his mother, who decides to prove to him that women don’t have teeth by showing him her own vagina. Her peep show doesn’t work as the obviously stupid man believes hers have just fallen out due to old age. The young woman gets away with not having sex with her slovenly husband.
The vagina dentata myth is represented in art, from paintings to movies. In the novel Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson, the vagina of a female character is equipped with a dentata, a device that injects a drug into whatever penetrates it. The imagery of a wearable dentata is reflected in spiked chastity belts, past and present (whether they were actually worn for real in the past is up for debate).
When men fear women, they reduce them. Luckily, this myth doesn’t have too much of a presence in modern times in a literal sense—few people believe we get pap smears at the orthodontist. But dating all the way back to Ancient Greece, men have believed that women’s bodies hold an array of secrets. It would be a lot easier to try to understand each other, no? Don’t try to tame us, we’ve all got some metaphorical teeth inside.
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"It would be a lot easier to try to understand each other, no?" Well, no, it would not.
Most males of the species seem to be inherently violent, so the easiest thing for them to do is be violent. After-the-fact, they do their best to devise an excuse-er, I mean, reason for it. Claiming her hoo-ha bit your wee-wee, so you HAD to beat her just makes (male) sense.
The wandering womb would make another good story.