Writing about women or America, if one is not a woman or a resident of America, is impossible, at least if one wants to get at the truth. If one is a man or a European (or an Asian, African or South American), one can only judge women or America by their respective appearances or by what women or Americans say about themselves. As a result, one can’t help but be wrong: appearances are deceiving and no one – not even someone who knows herself well – can speak for or be taken as truly representative of all the others of her kind.

Of course, this is not to say that men or people who don’t live in America cannot say interesting, important or truthful things about women or America. After all, both men and women are people, as are all the human inhabitants of the world’s many countries. By seizing hold of the truth about themselves as people, they can certainly grasp the truth about the humanity of women and non-Americans. But when it comes to what makes the others different, uniquely different, they will always be wrong.

This is the fundamental problem with Gianfranco Sanguinetti’s La Chatte, Hier et Aujourd’hui (“The Pussy, Yesterday and Today”), which was published in a bilingual edition (French and English) by Silverbridge in 2004, as part of 1724 Birth of the Cunt, an art installation and book created by Jason Rhoades. “The Pussy” attempts to do two things simultaneously: celebrate vaginas and they way they have inspired poets (“1724” refers to the number of synonyms for vagina in the English language, which was chosen among other languages because Jason Rhoades was an American); and denounce the suppression of these words in the name of “political correctness,” especially in America. But since Sanguinetti is neither a woman nor an American (he is an Italian man), he meets with mixed results. To be specific, he spends too little time on the first of his two projects, at which he is mostly successful; and too little time on his second one, at which he mostly fails.

“The Pussy” begins with a discussion of “the very origins of modern poetry,” which Sanguinetti locates in Roman de la Rose (“The Saga of the Rose”), begun in 1225 by Guillaume de Lorris and completed by Jean de Meun in 1265. “The rose is the vulva,” Sanguinetti writes, and “the text uses a multitude of different synonyms to describe it.” After showing the influence that the Roman had upon Dante’s poem Il Fiore (“The Flower”), he notes that the central metonym of the Roman (rose = vagina)

was contemporary, in poetry, to the Sicilian School of which Cielo d’Alcamo was a member (1250 – cf. the sonnet entitled ‘Rosa fresca e aulentissima. . .’ and has endured through poets such as Ronsard (‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose. . .’), Pietro Aretino at the end of the Renaissance, Giorgio Baffo from Venice – considered to be ‘the greatest libertine poet of all time’ by Apollinaire who particularly appreciated his ‘sublime obscenity’ – and even Marcel Duchamp who signed his works Rrose Sélavy (= Eros c’est la vie).

Here Sanguinetti isn’t simply claiming that the image of the rose, and the way it has been used to symbolize the vagina, has persisted in modern poetry for seven hundred years. I believe that he is claiming that all modern poetry is about the vagina or, rather, a celebration of it, which, in his words, is “the synonym of happiness and metaphor for life itself.” This sweeping claim is certainly suggested by the very beginning of his text.

In the beginning was the Word. Then men found synonyms. A total of seven hundred and twenty-four are listed here.

In other words, the very first Word wasn’t “God”: it was “Vagina,” and all the other words in every language are either substitutions for or derivations from it.

But before this provocative thesis can be developed, Sanguinetti drops it and moves on to his second project. “We should carefully measure, and appreciate the merit of, the distance that separates Dante and Jean de Meun from contemporary hypocrisy,” he writes (emphasis added), but he doesn’t do this, no doubt because contemporary hypocrisy – especially of the American kind – is so deserving of denunciation. But it is also an easy target; perhaps too easy.

“And the cunt?” Sanguinetti asks. “It simply cannot be named, even though it is on everyone’s mind, because we have to be politically correct (…) The word that has by far the most synonyms in all languages is also the most taboo and noticeably absent from all of the dictionaries.” Though “all” dictionaries are guilty of this “linguistic infibulation,” it is the Americans and English – because of “their puritanical attitude” – that get the most criticism. “For a long time,” Sanguinetti notes, “they censored and banned some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century – James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller – precisely because of the mental cobwebs that poison and imprison the poor sexuality of those who rule over them (…) Wilhelm Reich, the famous author of The Sexual Revolution and The Function of the Orgasm, had fled to the United States to escape the Nazis and in 1957 was left to die by the Americans in Lewisburg prison simply because of his ideas.”

There is no denying these facts, but there is also no denying the fact that America has changed – at least where its attitudes towards “the cunt” are concerned – since the 1960s. Among many possible proofs of this, I need only cite one: the existence and tremendous popularity of Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues, which appeared long enough ago (1996) for Sanguinetti (who wrote “The Pussy” in 2004) to have found out about it. Not only does this play reclaim “the vagina” from its confinement in Puritanism’s prison, but also its synonyms, even the word “cunt.”

Of course, the “victory” of The Vagina Monologues has been partial. America is a very big, very diverse country, in which many different forces are fighting for attention, respect and power. Only this past year, Representative Lisa Brown (D-West Bloomfield) was barred from speaking in the Michigan House because she offended hypocritical, religious Republican men by using the word “vagina” during a debate about abortion. But when this happened, not only did Eve Ensler join Rep. Brown (and 8 other female members of the Michigan House of Representatives) to stage a performance of The Vagina Monologues on the steps of the Michigan Statehouse, but public opinion strongly condemned the misogynist men who had barred her.

To Sanguinetti, America is a place dominated by “gyms, body-building, sport” and so on. Though this may have been true in the 1970s and 1980s, it is no longer true today, at a time when the numbers of obese people are growing at an alarming rate. According to current estimates, between twenty and thirty percent of all Americans (especially poor and working-class Americans) are dangerously overweight. Such people certainly do not go to the gym, build their bodies or engage in sport.

Sanguinetti is certainly right to condemn Americans for their “sexual undernourishment,” which leads them “to nourish themselves with whatever they can get their hands on, no matter how poor, criminal, altered, disgusting or indigestible it may be”; for their “ridiculous” oversensitivity to “sexual harassment” and their zeal in pursuing “zero tolerance” for it; for their “frigidity,” which “creates cruelty and a society that is as anaesthetized to the joy of orgasm as it is to pain”; and for their “insurmountable mistrust of the other and an unbelievable lack of curiosity, sustained by inexhaustible passivity and active cowardice.”

But none of these things truly derive from the sources that Sanguinetti cites. “Contempt, fear and simple lack of pussy are what cause the majority of their crimes and psychopathic deviances,” he writes. In capitalist society, “the repression of sexuality” – which creates an artificial scarcity or “lack of pussy” – “is therefore necessary, because it produces dissatisfaction, to which the market responds by offering cheap commercial images with considerable profit margins (…) The degradation of eroticism is absolutely essential to the promotion of an industrially producible and economically attractive substitute.”

In point of fact, what makes America the monster that it is – what distinguishes it from all the other countries in which “the repression of sexuality and the resulting dissatisfaction are extraordinarily powerful engines of consumption and production” – is the prevalence of the sexual abuse of children.

Though they are exceptions, the majority of the abusers are adult men, and the majority of the victims are girls. These men do not abuse children because they are deprived of pussy, though that is precisely how many abusers justify their crimes (“If only my wife would have sex with me, I wouldn’t need to have sex with her daughter”). These men perpetrate this abuse because, back when they themselves were children, they weren’t allowed to attain accurate knowledge about either their own bodies or the bodies of girls, nor were they allowed to experience healthy sexual relations with their female counterparts. Like Guillaume de Lorris and Dante, these boys were raised to believe that – to quote Sanguinetti – “the cunt is (…) covered by a ‘curtain’ (the pubic hair) that hides” it; that it is “covered by a cloth” in such a way that “the sanctuary appeared not.” But of course these boys were deceived by their teachers (here “Puritanism” certainly plays a role, but so do all of the world’s patriarchal religions, which think it natural that God hid what they posit to be evil): even when a woman’s pubic hair has been shaved off, her vagina cannot be seen. It is in fact an internal organ, the orifice of which can only be seen when the woman spreads her legs. And when these misinformed boys grow up to be men, and then experience sexual repression, they – some of them – try to undo the damage done to them by having sex with a little girl, all the while pretending that they are still little boys, which of course they are not. Inevitably, they project or unleash their frustration, confusion and sense of betrayal onto those little girls, who are of course innocent and completely undeserving of such punishment.

And what about the victims of such crimes? No one of good faith can blame them if they grow up to be “feminist” women, frigid, suspicious, hostile, terrified of (further) harassment and even “guilty” of what Sanguinetti has denounced elsewhere as the “most common, the most broadly imposed and also (…) the least talked about (…) form of sexual abuse”: “being deprived of sex,” that is to say, adult women depriving adult men of sex.

And so Sanguinetti is certainly right to say the following.

Since the eruption of the free market economy in ex-Communist countries, one of the first changes to occur was that girls who previously only attached a use-value to their pussy [sic] quickly understood that they could also have an exchange-value. The principal consequence of this was the inevitable death of fantasy, spontaneity, illusion and even poetry that comes with the creation of exchange-value. Previously the gateway to infinite opportunity, the pussy tendentiously becomes no more than one raw material among many others, entering the flow of goods like a kidney for transplant, wheat, oil, an eye or a heart.

But he has missed the greater horror, which is that, in these same countries, parents – that is to say, the fathers – have flooded or perhaps even re-created the global market in child pornography with pictures of their daughters’ vaginas. This is most definitely not something that these girls decided to do: they were forced into becoming “child models.” Nor can this horror be fully or simply explained by the “eruption of the free market economy.” If such an explanation were sufficient, these men – these new pornographers – would have been satisfied with or limited themselves to photographing the cunts of their wives and girlfriends. No: they chose to pursue a form of pornography that is just as likely to earn them lengthy prison sentences and universal hatred as large profits and universal prestige. So we must search for an explanation elsewhere: in the religious fear and hatred of the body, which of course precedes the advent of capitalism and cannot be eradicated by a revolution that is simply anti-capitalist.