Vagina: A New Biography

Vagina: A New Biography, by Naomi Wolf, is a history of attitudes towards the vagina in ancient and modern culture. It follows Catherine Blackledge's The Story Of V and Jelto Drenth's The Origin Of The World, and was published shortly before Emma Rees's The Vagina: A Literary & Cultural History.

While Blackledge and Drenth were more scientific in their analysis, and Rees takes a more cultural approach, Wolf's book is broadly spiritual. Of the book's four main sections, two are echoes of 1970s consciousness-raising ("Does the Vagina Have a Consciousness?" and "The Goddess Array"). These chapters are largely anecdotal and feel pseudo-scientific.

At times, Wolf sometimes seems almost self-parodic. She attends a dinner party at which the host serves vagina-shaped pasta nicknamed "cuntini", and this minor incident has dire consequences: "after the "cuntini" party, I could not type a word of the book - not even research notes - for six months, and I had never before suffered from writer's block". If Wolf was so traumatised by cunt-shaped pasta, perhaps she's not the ideal author of a book called Vagina?