A model from the Sex museum, Paris. ‘Vaginas seem dark and mysterious, and produce strange liquids. Its secretions form the basis of the belief that women are unclean, indeed ritually so.’ Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features (via A poisoned vagina? What an intriguing yet stupid murder weapon | Naomi McAuliffe | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk)
- Women using poison to murder their husbands is an old trope – one going back as far as Claudius’s poisoning, which implicated his wife Agrippina. “Arsenic Annie” Nannie Doss saw off four husbands, as well as most of her family, in the span of four decades (she confessed to the murders in 1954). And now a Brazilian woman may soon be added to this pantheon of gloom. Although this alleged attempted homicide was unsuccessful, the method will certainly go down in history: she allegedly put poison in her vagina, and invited her husband to perform oral sex on her. The man became suspicious while down south, surprised by an “unusual smell”. He took her to hospital, where the poison was found.
- Paranoid fantasies about ladies’ bits are nothing new. Vaginas seem dark and mysterious, and produce strange liquids. Its secretions form the basis of the belief that women are unclean, indeed ritually so. As the South Park character Mr Mackey said: “I just don’t trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn’t die.” And yet pleasure – and most importantly life – also emanate from it.
- This “dark power” inspired folklore. It was believed at various points in history that menstrual blood was semen “gone bad”, that women took men’s life-force through their vaginas, that the female orgasm should be prescribed for anxiety disorders, and that some vaginas came laced with teeth that could castrate a man. Indeed, the myth of the vagina dentata – meaning toothed vagina – can be found in many different cultures, from Greek mythology to the Chaco and Guiana tribes of South America. Its message can be subtly different, depending on where it originated from: it either says that penetrative sex is dangerous, that women are evil temptresses bent on male castration, or that men should not rape women, or suffer the consequences.
- This latter threat was actually realised with the invention of Rape-aXe, an anti-rape female condom invented by Sonnet Ehlers in South Africa in 2005. The Rape-aXe is a latex sheath embedded with sharp, inward-facing barbs that would dig into the attacker’s penis, causing excruciating pain.
The article also states that “women are also not more likely to be a poisoner than men: the overwhelming number of convicted poisoners are men” but this could be because society (and mostly chivalrous male judges) tend to be more lenient with female crime.
