Wolf claims that there is "an increasing body of scientific evidence that suggests that the vagina has a fundamental connection to female consciousness". This is an angry call to re-establish what women's libbers might once have called pussy power. Perhaps this history will do for 21st-century activism what The Beauty Myth did for 1990s feminists. At a time when Western women's bodies have never been more highly politicised, the one person who might be able to shine a ray of light into feminism's dark crevices has to be Wolf. As the Russian government found themselves trapped in an international PR disaster while they quashed their home-grown Pussy Riot, male politicians across the world were busy tying themselves up in knots over definitions of rape. Wolf's tome could not have been better timed. In response to the Lisa Brown incident, Wolf asked playfully, "Are we seeing the beginning of a vagina lobby?" It's high time, says the author of The Beauty Myth: "The culture is just not letting women have a positive relationship to their sexuality, to their vaginas." An epic UK tour is planned, including an audience in front of 400 fans at Intelligence Squared at the Royal Institution in London on Thursday. But Wolf's book – "which goes to the very core of what it means to be a woman" – is likely to be more controversial than entertaining.
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