A WOMAN OF PARTS: Florence King reviews Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography:
All this is not to say that Wolf’s book is entirely worthless. In fact, one section of it is priceless: the story of her experience with the Tantra man. Tantra is a system of vaginal healing wherein sympathetic male practitioners restore traumatized vaginas by gazing lovingly into them, murmuring to them, and gently massaging them. It sounds like the kind of service advertised in sleazy personals but it is not illegal and the practitioners are viewed as trained professionals, possibly because so many sex-research institutes have sprung up that activities like Tantra are assumed to qualify for government grants.
Wolf interviewed a London-based Tantra man for the Sunday Times. “He had worked intimately with the vaginas of hundreds of women,” she notes, so a year or so later she wanted to see him again to ask about some new findings. One visit led to another, and one thing led to another, until she was “in a state of — yes — oceanic bliss.” They didn’t have sex; he just gazed at her tasmap, or talked to it, or whatever (she doesn’t exactly say); but it worked. She left his studio on “a dopamine high.”
On her last visit, matters reached a point of no return. “I was in bed with an attractive stranger and there was no way to pretend that what he was proposing would not be a form of sex. The nice monogamous Jewish girl in me once again drew the line.”
Wouldn’t you know it? She’s a Tantra tease.
Read the whole thing.
