Mama's Got a Squeezebox
Why aren't rock hoohaws given the same reverence as dongs?
“You’re comparing an innie to an outie,” Lita Ford tells me. “It would be a little difficult to take a plaster cast of that. You know what I mean?”
I laugh nervously, because that’s the only reasonable thing to do when you’ve just asked the former lead guitarist for the seminal girl-rock band the Runaways, the woman responsible for the scrotum-rattling riff in “Cherry Bomb,” whether she would ever immortalize her vagina in plaster.
“It’d be like taking a plaster cast of the inside of your mouth as opposed to your finger,” Ford says. And then, after a pause, “I don’t know how to answer that, I honestly don’t.”
It’s probably the best I could’ve hoped for. What was I expecting her to say? “Yes, my vagina is spectacular and belongs in a museum.” But why not? Jimi Hendrix’s penis—or at least a plaster cast of it—has been displayed at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Reykjavik, among other places. Why shouldn’t Lita Ford’s vagina get the same reverence? Is her vagina any less worthy of veneration than Hendrix’s schlong?
I probably wouldn’t be asking Ford awkward vagina questions if I hadn’t stumbled upon the website Groupie Dirt. (It’s a long story. I’m writing a novel about an aging rock star, and some salacious research is required.) It’s like the Yelp of rock penises, and the details are staggeringly specific. Did I need to know that Glenn Danzig has five inches of manhood? No, I did not. No more than I needed to know that Eminem’s slim-shady has “plenty of girth,” or that Lars Ulrich is uncircumcised, or that Trent Reznor has exactly 4.5 more inches of penile length than Billie Joe Armstrong, who is described unceremoniously as “little willy.”
The penis details aren't what shocked me. What shocked me was the lack of vagina details.
Courtney Love is the sole woman represented in Groupie Dirt, and the most we learn about her is that she’s “an unfaithful slut.” How do we live in a world where it’s public knowledge that Simon Le Bon has a curved penis and Courtney Love’s vagina remains a mystery? It’s certainly not because she’s bashful. “My genealogist and my gynocplogist (sic) know i do my Kegals like a snatch the cig off the table thai sex worker,” she tweeted in 2010. So why is nobody else talking about her vagina? Besides the Nirvana song “Heart-Shaped Box,” but Kurt’s intentions are still debatable.
Is her vagina that unmemorable? Or are we just more comfortable gossiping about (and fetishizing) rock cocks than rock vaginas?
You don’t have to look far to see penises being exalted in music. Male junk is everywhere, from songs like KISS’s “Love Gun” and Peter Gabriel's “Sledgehammer” (to name just two of literally hundreds) to the Stones’ Sticky Fingers album cover to the Tommy Lee Jones sex tape. I don’t even like the Doors, but I could tell you about the time Jim Morrison took out his ding-a-ling during a Miami concert.
In the late ‘90s, I almost got the chance to interview Jesus Lizard’s David Yow, and I was told by several people (mostly women) to ask about his penis puppetry, for which Yow is apparently legendary. “If he likes you, he’ll take out his prick and do a puppet show with it,” one female friend told me, as if this was a performance I should be delighted to witness.
Not to sound like a guy who went to a liberal arts college (which I did, full disclosure), but what are the vagina equivalents of all this cock worship? There’s, well … that rumor about Marianne Faithful shoving a Mars candy bar up her lady business (but that might’ve been Mick Jagger's idea, or it might’ve never happened at all.) Yoko Ono showed off her not-so-secret garden on the cover of Two Virgins (although John Lennon’s boiled shrimp of a penis got all the attention.)
I can think of only two examples of rock vaginas given the glory their deserve (and please correct me if I'm forgetting something.) One was L7 and their enormous camel toes in the 1994 John Water film Serial Mom, but that was meant as a joke.
And the other is Christina Aguilera’s glowing heart crotch at the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, which was awesome just by lack of competition.
Once you start thinking about vaginas and rock music, it can easily evolve into an obsession. I made a list of every song about vaginas I could think of— “Cherry Pie”, "Squeezebox,” “Winona’s Big Brown Beaver,” “Brown Sugar,” “Little Red Corvette”—and every one of them was written and performed by men. Even “Sugar Walls," Sheena Easton’s classic vagina anthem, was written by Prince.
If you dig deep, you can find a few vagina sing-a-longs by women. PJ Harvey’s “Sheela-Na-Gig.” And Aguilera’s “Woohoo.” And, uh ... wow, I don’t know. I’m sure there’s something I’m not thinking of. Liz Phair probably did a vagina song at some point, but all I can remember are the ones about blowjobs and male viscous fluid.
“No one talks about flaccid penises,” Jamie McCartney tells me. “Everyone’s interested in erections. [Infamous groupie plaster queen] Cynthia Plaster Caster was not casting floppy little willies. And of course that denotes arousal. But when you’re casting vaginas, arousal isn't part of the equation. And yet people are still horrified by them. They’re still perceived as threatening.”
McCartney speaks from experience. He’s a British artist who created the Great Wall of Vulva, which is literally a wall of plaster-cast vaginas, of women ranging in age from 18 to 76. The Great Wall was unveiled in 2011 at an arts festival in Brighton and is currently on exhibit in Miami. McCartney has made vagina casts of at least 400 women (and counting), and he hopes to inspire a movement of vagina replication.
“We sell a DIY vagina casting kit on our website,” he says. “It’s for all the people who want to show the world that vaginas are just as valuable and worthy of being preserved in plaster as Jimi Hendrix’s erection.”
I ask McCartney if he’s cast any musician vaginas yet, and he admits that he has, though nobody you’ve heard of. “Perhaps we should send a kit to every female rock star and see if they’ll do it,” he says.
When I call Ruyter Suys, the lead guitarist for Nashville Pussy, it isn’t initially to talk about vaginal plaster casts. It’s because her band has “pussy” in its name, and thus she seems like a good person to ask whether vaginas are given as much respect in rock music as penises.
“When you talk about pussy, it has to be shrouded,” she tells me. “It has to be disguised in some palatable manner. It’s like taking medicine with a spoonful of honey. With Nashville Pussy, they don’t like saying that word because the context is confusing. But you can say Pussycat Dolls and that’s fine. It becomes more acceptable if you find ways to Disney-fy the pussy. And that’s when it becomes more sexist.”
“Would you make a plaster cast of your vulva?”
I ask like it’s an obvious segue, like it’s exactly where the conversation was headed anyway. She’s hesitant, as any intelligent person would be when asked to share the most intimate part of their body. I give her the details of McCartney’s Great Wall of Vagina and subsequent plaster cast projects.
“There might’ve been a time when I would,” she says. “I was raised a hippie chick. I used to pose nude for art classes. But at this point in my life, I don’t want to share with anybody. It’s just mine. Also, Playboy made the mistake of approaching us years ago about doing nude photos and didn’t offer enough money. Once I realized there was a price tag on my pussy, things got covered up.”
But, she adds, “I did plaster casts of body parts when I was younger. I got my degree in fine arts, and I did that stuff all the time. I mostly did men. Actually, I only did men. Penises are just more... you know…”
She doesn’t finish her sentence, but I think I know what she means. We both laugh, enjoying the irony that the guitarist for a band called Nashville Pussy has a closet full of plaster penises.