Vagina dentata

Vagina dentata is Latin for "toothed vagina ". The myth of the vagina dentata was mainly made known in the western world by Sigmund Freud . In his opinion, the myth went well with his theories of castration anxiety .

Origin of the Myth

Freud gave the phenomenon this name. He was inspired by numerous legends about women with toothed or otherwise armed vaginas, which allegedly enabled them to murder or castrate their sexual partners. This motif can be found in various Asian myths (especially in Southeast Asia), where different forms of penile fear (e.g. Koro ) are at home.

Barbara Walker assumes that this myth developed into the image of the gigantic mouth as the entrance to hell in medieval Europe . This warning legend was often told to warn of the dangers of sexual contact with strangers.

The cultural historian Camille Paglia attributes the myth to the North American natives. She sees it as a "horrific direct symbol of female power and male fear" of "physical and mental castration" during sexual intercourse, a process of "being eaten" in which the male comes with "less out of the vagina" than it does with Had entry.

The painter and sculptor Volker Bartsch , who portrayed the myth several times, names the Greek poet Hesiod as one of his sources , according to which the sharp metal sickle with which her son Kronos later emasculated his father Uranos was formed in the lap of the divine mother Gaia .

From a gynecological point of view, there is no scientific documentation of a vagina dentata . However, the formation of adjacent cysts in the vaginal area could be a source of this myth.

Vagina dentata in popular culture

In Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash , the character YT wears a dentata to protect against rape. In 2003 the myth was processed in the trash horror film Penetration Angst , which is about a woman whose vagina eats the men who have sex. In 2007 the myth was processed in the film Teeth - He who bites last, bites best , which won the Special Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival .

The German rapper Schwartz released the album Whore Son Holocaust Chronicles 2 in 2012 , in which the title Vagina Dentata deals with the myth.

The formation Grausame Töchter named their album, released in 2016, and a title included with Vagina dentata . Here the texts are mostly based on the BDSM area .

literature

Felix Morgan : Beyond 'Teeth': The Cultural History of Vagina Dentata. Tracing the ins and outs of one of humanity's earliest myths. Posted May 20, 2017, accessed June 25, 2020.
Stephen Ducat : The wimp factor . gender gaps, holy wars, and the politics of anxious masculinity. Beacon Press, Boston 2004, ISBN 0-8070-4344-3 , pp. 115-149 .
Sonja Ross: The vagina dentata in myth and narrative, transculturality, variety of meanings and contextual integration of a myth motif (= ethnological works . Volume 4 ). Holos, Bonn 1994, ISBN 3-86097-045-3 (dissertation University of Munich 1994).
Claude Lévi-Strauss : Mythologica (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft . Volume 167 ). 7th edition. tape 1 : The raw and the cooked . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 978-3-518-27767-6 (part 1 of four volumes, translated by Eva Moldenhauer).

Web links

HealthCentral.com: Vagina Dentata - In Fact And Folklore (English)

Individual evidence

↑ Camille Paglia: Sexuality and Violence or: Nature and Art. Taken from The Masks of Sexuality. DTV, Munich 1992, pp. 43-44.
↑ Volker Bartsch: Myth of the vagina dentata. volker-bartsch.de , accessed March 23, 2017.

[1] Camille Paglia: Sexuality and Violence or: Nature and Art. Taken from The Masks of Sexuality. DTV, Munich 1992, pp. 43-44.

[2] Volker Bartsch: Myth of the vagina dentata. volker-bartsch.de , accessed March 23, 2017.