Yoni

Yoni image by Cassandra Pride

When my daughter was born I wondered what words we would use to teach her about her body and mine. With my son it was relatively simple since penis, testicles and scrotum come with little baggage and no embedded misandry. Naming genitals is a complex task in a world where roughly half the population’s genitals are no longer viewed with reverence or nonchalance but as money making opportunities, or even with hatred, fear and little knowledge about their function other than as a receptacle or canal. Women’s genitals are not named for us, for our use or for our ownership but as the playthings of men (since heternormativity is also part of our naming), thus vagina – sheath for a sword – or birth canal – the functions of sex and birth taking over the ownership of each woman over her body. Penises don’t change name depending on whether they deliver urine or spurt sperm and yet the yoni cannot be a firm, set icon which belongs to women and thus only changes name as that woman wishes it.

And there is the clue to which name we chose to teach our daughter – yoni. She also knows vagina, vulva and clitoris but I wanted her to have one word which summed up her genital package and wasn’t defined by the male gaze, and that is yoni.

Yoni was a term I heard homebirthers using once I joined that particular club although it had come to my attention many years previously in feminist circles. At first I found it mildly uncomfortable, even slightly ridiculous, that white women took this Sanskrit word and colonised it. What’s wrong with vagina and vulva (possibly the least used word in English), I thought, feeling vaguely embarrassed by this show of hippy terminology. What indeed, became my response over time and particularly after the birth of my daughter through my own yoni.

It was important in our family that our son also learnt words that do not denigrate or otherwise warp his view of women’s bodies nor build a megapenis of importance in his mind. Genitals are just functional bits of bodies no more special than elbows, despite the significance with which we choose to view them. I didn’t want him absorbing any more than we could manage of the hatred for women’s bodies taught to us as a society from before we’re born.

Sex as a marker of difference has ebbed and flowed over the centuries in western thought. In our world we need to know the sex of our children before they’re earthside. We have always had spells and charms which helped us ‘see’ into the womb but now we really do have the capacity to look into our bodies and glimpse those all important genitals prior to birth. We can then line up our consumerist ducks appropriately and not discomfit anyone by leaving gender fluid and uncertain, to be defined by the individual as they grow, rather than the group. In many places the ultrasound which reveals a yoni is the first step to terminating the pregnancy since no good can come of conceiving girls. What must it do to the psyche of women to be driven to abort the miniature of themselves and only keep the child whose penis marks them as fit for nurturance?

In birth the yoni is almost redundant. Babies are now said to be ‘born’ when removed surgically from the abdomens of deliberately paralysed women. Those who enter the world via a vagina are named as ‘delivered’ thus cementing the surgeon’s primacy even when the woman’s body has been audacious enough to birth a baby. ‘Natural birth’ is now posited as anything other than hysterotomy which is a large serving of cognitive dissonance given how little there is ‘natural’ about induction, episiotomy, vaginal exams or ventouse and forceps. Our society will go to some lengths to avoid saying vagina so perhaps there are many more layers behind this odd usage. The notion of the ‘birth canal’ neuters women’s bodies and removes the perception of sexualised language when careproviders are present. ‘A little snip’ as performed by scissors – episiotomy – which mutilates a woman’s yoni, leaving distress and extensive damage in its wake, has continued in our society even forty years after studies showing cutting a perineum does not ‘protect’ it from damage. Only in the cognitively dissonant western medical world would a deliberate slice into healthy tissue be considered saving from damage. Putting a bounty on episiotomy scissors and removing them one by one from hospitals would be a social service to women beyond compare.  How much hatred is embodied in the gesture of forcibly cutting women’s genitals whether in girlhood or birth?

The full moon is crowning to my left as I write this. She’s so beautiful tonight I gasped involuntarily when I glimpsed her, Grandmother Moon, as my children say. From my vantage point she reminds me of so much birth art I’ve seen, of glowing babies emerging from stretching yonis performing a function once held as divine. Can we ever reclaim this and reposition yoni as normal but sacred in our world? Can we ever see sheela-na-gig for the first time and feel recognition, love, tenderness or even worship like my ancestors did? Will our children be a yoni-positive force in the world and thus also by necessity woman-positive because you cannot genuinely love yoni without loving women and you cannot truly love women without yoni being again a normal and important part of humanities’ journey to Mother Earth. I hope this spring edition of Village Ink will inspire you in a little yoni reverence of your own!

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