13 Days of Sheela Na Gig: Pussy Power

In Tales and Novels in Verse (1664), Jean de la Fontaine shares a poem called “The Devil of Pope-Fig Island.” In this story, a farmer successfully hoodwinks a demon—and instantly regrets it, as the demon is not at all happy about this turn of events. Luckily, the farmer’s wife, Perretta, can keep cool in a crisis. While the farmer hides in a vat of holy water, Perretta warns her adversary that he should flee before her husband, a cruel and violent man, abuses the demon as he has abused his wife. Then she lifts her skirts. Fontaine puts it this way:

For God’s sake try, my lord, to get away:
Just now I heard the savage fellow say,
He’d with his claws your lordship tear and slash:
See, only see, my lord, he made this gash;
On which she showed:—what you will guess, no doubt,
And put the demon presently to rout…

I stumbled upon this tale as I was researching Sheela Na Gig. What links Perretta and our Sheela is the idea that the very sight of a vulva is enough to scare away the devil.

The idea that female genitalia is a wound or gross imperfection has a long history in the West. At least as early as Aristotle, the perfect human form was male, and women were sort of undercooked men. Women, the thinking went, are more fluid than men and more permeable. Women, the thinking went, are leaky and changeable. Every month, they lose the life-sustaining essence of blood and, when a man plants his seed in them, they become a vessel for the child he engenders. In this context, of course the vulva is a site of horror, and we get anasyrma, the Greek word for lifting a skirt to expose one’s genitals or buttocks in protest.

In the latest issue of Croning, I cite scholars who suggest that Sheela Na Gig was supposed to have apotropaic power—that she’s been carved on churches and castles and bridges and elsewhere to ward off evil. A splayed vulva is, perhaps, the one characteristic that defines a Sheela Na Gig. Fontaine presents the vulva as supernaturally horrifying, but what if the vulva has apotropaic power because the vulva is the threshold between not being and being? What if the vulva provokes awe and terror because only those who possess vulva have the power to bring new life into the world? Maybe the vulva is only horrifying to those who would prefer to not think about the singular power the vulva represents? In her essay for the Spring issue of Croning, midwife Mel Bailey points out that reproductive freedom includes the power to end life, which we know is terrifying to the people who would take reproductive freedom away. The vulva made shockingly visible is, paradoxically, a sign of the inner workings of a pregnant person’s body—processes over which patriarchy can only ever have limited control.