JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews
“3. Designer Vagina” from Thirteen Designer Vaginas by Juliet Cook
(Hyacinth Girl Press, Pittsburgh, 2011)
Designer Vagina
A bonbon and a boner walk into a bar.
A bourbon ball was trapped inside the body
of a middle aged lady. A pink chiffon swirl
challenges a burlap potato sack to a duel.
The winner gets to be wrapping paper.
The loser gets scalpeled into scalloped potatoes.
In between a masochistic pair of doll legs.
a designer vagina might be just another punch line poem.
Some of us suffer from information overload.
Some of us can’t resist too much information mode.
Some of us get sucked into the porn-o;
some of us get sucked into the surgical photos
in which some vaginas are docudramas,
some are soap operas, some are black holes
sculpted into softcore attention whores.
*
At the end of the Thirteen Designer Vaginas, the chapbook in which this poem appears, there’s a note, for which I was grateful: “The Thirteen Designer Vaginas were partially inspired by looking up Vaginal Rejuvenation Surgery online.” I am grateful because it helps give me entrée (sorry!), or at least a way of beginning to read these poems.
Vaginal rejuvenation is another way of saying vaginal tightening. Vaginal tightening? Huh? Found via Google: “A woman describes her ‘teenage vagina,’ which she got through vaginal rejuvenation surgery.” On the one hand it’s not as bad as it sounds; she had some kind of botched forceps delivery and needed repair. But a “teenage vagina” rather than simply a repaired vagina? Yes, that is as bad as it sounds. We don’t want to be who we are, do we? Or we think others don’t. Or they don’t.
I have no idea why Cook looked up Vaginal Rejuvenation Surgery. But what she found did seem to tick her off more than a little. I chose this poem because it’s a little longer than most and – sick bastard that I am, I can’t resist – gives me more to chew on.
OK. “A bonbon and a boner walk into a bar.” We begin with the beginning of a joke. I suppose the bonbon is a woman, since the boner would pretty much have to be a man. Or two women, one taking on a masculine role. It doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that Neither are described in particularly human terms, to put it mildly. There is some wild and ugly objectifying going on. I think we can guess that this is going to be a somewhat angry joke.
“A bourbon ball was trapped inside the body / of a middle aged lady.” So that’s why she’s a bonbon. I suppose her middle age is to make her slightly less immediately purely sexual, and the bourbon ball is to make her nevertheless slightly intoxicating. Trapped is an unpleasant word here. Does it indicate that she is forced into her sex role? I am assuming that the bourbon ball is her vagina.
“A pink chiffon swirl / challenges a burlap potato sack to a duel.” This appears to be a continuation of the setup of the joke, though now we’ve moved on to a new set of metaphors. Is the pink chiffon swirl her clothes? Her labia? Is the burlap potato sack his clothes? Hiss ball sac? I honestly don’t know. But if this is a continuation of the preceding lines, then it is the female who makes the challenge.
I’m not on firm ground here, as far as narrative goes. I don’t know what the stakes of the duel are, at least not exactly:
The winner gets to be wrapping paper.
The loser gets scalpeled into scalloped potatoes.
In between a masochistic pair of doll legs.
I guess the stakes are, no matter what, she gets to lose. I believe she loses in her own mind, even before any sex takes place (“I’m middle aged, therefore my vagina is too saggy-baggy to please, as it would were I still a teenager …).
I think this first part of the poem describes a woman who believes the surgery to be a necessity. Therefore I was right; it is not a funny joke. It’s a description of a woman who for one reason or another cannot be who she is. She thinks she must be other in order to be ok. The second stanza is one line only: “a designer vagina might be just another punch line poem.” In Cook’s hands it is. What? A poem, not a joke.
This prepares us to move into somewhat new territory in stanza 3:
Some of us suffer from information overload.
Some of us can’t resist too much information mode.
Some of us get sucked into the porn-o;
some of us get sucked into the surgical photos
in which some vaginas are docudramas,
some are soap operas, some are black holes
sculpted into softcore attention whores.
Now we are in less objective territory. We are contemplating the effect of learning about this surgery. This stanza is very end-rhymey, which lends it a sense of inevitability that is different that the inevitability in stanza one. The effect seems to be one that could be described by either of two semi-misogynistic proverbials: Pandora’s box, or “it’s too late to close the barn door once the cow gets out” (which can refer to many things, but is also something my grandmother told me when I was a young teenager, indicating that women who were sexually active dimmed their marriage prospects …).
Cook is ambivalent about how one might relate to the information re: this surgery: one might find it pornographic, one might find it scientific. But she isn’t ambivalent about the ultimate effect, though she does seem to transfer her own obsession onto the vaginas themselves; she calls them attention whores, rather than herself an addict.
I find this interesting. I wonder if there are other ways to read this that don’t “blame the victim.” One occurs to me, and that’s that the vagina can never be a neutral object. Or do I mean subject, in that in photos of objects, the objects are the subjects of the photos. In any case, perhaps the best way for me to understand this poem is to go back to the joke, and to realize that if the middle aged woman assumes that her vagina needs tightening, as the woman in stanza one appears to do, then she is doing some identifying with the vaginas she is studying, and is finding herself to be a softcore attention whore.
As one can tell, it is difficult for me to read this poem and be sure how a woman might read (or write it). Nevertheless, it is strong in its affect, and forces me to consider how hard it is for a woman to grow older in this culture.
*****
[Editor’s Note: This is one of 50 reviews written, mas o menos, in 50 days. While each engagement can be read on a stand-alone basis, there’s a layer of watching the critic’s subjectivity arise in a fulsome manner if the reviews are read one after another. So if you have insomnia and/or are curious about this layer, I suggest you read the 50 reviews right after each other and, to facilitate this type of reading, I will put at the bottom of each review a “NEXT” button that will take you to the next review. To wit: NEXT. And an Afterword on John's reading process is also available HERE!]
John Bloomberg-Rissman is somewhere towards middle of In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam (picture Hannah Hoch painting over the Sistine Chapel) The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making, and Flux, Clot & Froth. In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg. He is also deep into two important collaborations, one with Richard Lopez, one with Anne Gorrick. By important he means "important to him". Anyone else want to collaborate? He blogs at Zeitgeist Spam.
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