Vagina Dentata: a seemingly immortal tale.
There was a Baiga girl who looked so fierce and angry, as if there was magic in her, that for all her beauty, no one dared to marry her. But she was full of passion and longed for men. She had many lovers, but – though she did not know it – she had three teeth in her vagina, and whenever she went to a man she cut his penis into three pieces. After a time she grew so beautiful that the landlord of the village determined to marry her on the condition that she allowed four of his servants to have intercourse with her first. To this she agreed, and the landlord first sent a Brahmin to her – and he lost his penis. Then he sent a Gond, but the Gond said, “I am only a poor man and I am too shy to do this while you are looking at me.” He covered the girl’s face with a cloth. The two other servants, a Baiga and an Agaria, crept quietly into the room. The Gond held the girl down, and the Baiga thrust his flint into her vagina and knocked out one of the teeth. The Agaria inserted his tongs and pulled out the other two. The girl wept with the pain, but she was consoled when the landlord came in and said he would now marry her immediately.
At the center of the Baiga Girl story, the main “monster” is a girl with a toothed vagina. What makes this tale particularly disturbing is that the vagina in this story is a landscape for pain and loss. Her vagina is not portrayed as what it is, a part of the body that can push forth new life, and it’s certainly not understood to be a landscape for pleasure. Instead, it is monstrous. It is the Vagina Dentata.
For this month’s video, I’m discuss how the centuries old “Vagina Dentata” folktale continues to exist in entertainment (specifically Science Fiction/horror) and how this trope has been weaponized against women and people with vaginas in the modern day. The Vagina Dentata exists in order to stoke fear mongering about sexuality when it is not phallocentric.
