Something about Storm Large’s ‘Eight Miles Wide’ rubs me the wrong way. Now I may be missing the point and it’s actually a parody (but I’ve seen it performed super serious by a lovely woman wearing silver emergancy blankets) but is rams up against everything that annoys me about the whole feminine goddess business.
To spoil it for you, the ‘eight miles wide’ is refering to her vagina, which she implies people can fit into. There’s room for everyone to be female in the big metaphorical vagina. Now I’m in now way bashing the shelia na gigs of the world, but where she falls flat is when she refers to the universal vagina. What universal vagina? Mystical goddess core my foot! I’m not my vagina, and if you want to summerize my feminity with one part of my body, I’m going to edge away from you slowly while making polite small talk about the weather. Just like the people who try to talk to me about Jesus on the bus! So there!
Of course the vagina worship shtick is often claiming it’s focusing on the potential creative power of women. (Birthing new life and all that, assuming you’re not infertile.) With so much descrimination against my gender and stupid female modesty taboos, who could blame people for wanting to overeact and shout. ‘VAGINA IS OKAY!’ and dance around with one on their head? Still, there’s two problem with that method of coping, one of which being that it makes sex paramount to gender identity and the other is that a vagina is a pretty arbitray part of a woman’s unique reproductive system to focus on. In the latter case maybe the fact that I didn’t enter the world through a vagina, but via a c-section, as well as making me part of the club of people who can kill Macbeth, makes me under value that part of the body, but I feel suspiciously like the reason why vaginas were chose was because a good portion of the human race wants to stare at them.