CW: Sexual assault, violence, child abuse.
Western texts date the discovery of vagina dentata to 1800 BCE, to the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus, the oldest medical text in the world. Misalignment of the lower jaw is detailed, for which regular application of date oil is recommended.
• • • •
This is the part of Appalachia where the Deliverance jokes start, and the curves of every road are cut with the corpse of a dog. Those few buildings that jut out from the rolling waves of kudzu are Dollar Generals and strip malls full of Subway chains and broken windows, soaped over windows, and Methodist and Lutheran and Presbyterian churches where the marquees say “GO WAYLON AT STATE!” over “ROMANS 6:23 FOR THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.”
The women here are women. It’s strange to have to say, and yet sometimes on the other side of a screen, it’s easy to forget—they don’t make sense, and yet they make perfect sense, occupying the no-man’s-land between inheritance and choice, between generational poverty and their own romantic visions of themselves: they wear plastic flip-flops and free charity event T-shirts they picked up at Goodwill and raise chickens and don’t believe in doctors except by way of pain medications. They are all of them, on the side, selling weight loss wraps and nail polish stickers and beeswax candles infused with spiritual energy. Only sometimes do they attend those churches along the road between the stiff bodies of pit bulls and rottweilers—though they are deeply religious, Mackayla or Paeslyn or Kashleigh has dance practice some Sundays. They believe in God and the devil and, a little embarrassedly but nevertheless sincerely, in witchcraft.
Is this witchcraft?
This is a trailer linked to the road by a gravel drive that hasn’t been reseeded since a Bush was in office. The carpets are camel-colored, shag, just as old, and the walls are wood-paneled. There’s a hole in the roof somewhere; you can smell it. There is a little girl on a table, naked from the waist down, her legs splayed and held open—sometimes by hands, sometimes by rope. This time, by the tied-together arms of old hoodies, Go Bucks. Her family-women are around her: her too-young mother and too-young grandmother, their too-young sisters. A few women from the neighborhood, and a hierarchy is revealed by who has been invited and who has not, by who is hovering close to the walls and who is holding aloft the light—a flashlight, most times, but sometimes someone has brought a shop lamp or a work light from the shed.
There is never enough light.
I have married into this place and so I am stationed near the door, because though in this small and airless room there is an atmosphere of reverence, it is as delicate as a soap bubble, as if the wrong step would suddenly sink the scene into a poorly prepared stage play where no one is sure who has forgotten their line. I am no danger set so far aside. My only task is self-imposed, to ask myself that age-old anthropologist’s question: what distance nevertheless renders me complicit?
This girl here, now, is seven years old. She is dressed in a wash-worn Mickey Mouse T-shirt and mismatched socks, and that’s all. She understands what is about to happen, though sometimes that’s not always the case. She has been told that this is a Big Girl thing. Despite the judgement of the other women, her skittish mother has given her a few crushed oxytocin, a thing said mother will later claim to regret and promise to forgo with the next, because suffering is the most spiritual of all experiences.
Anesthetized, the girl is as muddy as a fat fly in afternoon heat. But she’s smiling, leaning into the hands that are touching her, pleased to be the center of attention, to have everyone’s eyes, to be the most important person in the room. It’s so much harder when they’re afraid, when they don’t want it. And then what? This isn’t a right of passage. To the women in the room, this is just a necessary thing, and how often we associate painful but necessary things with teeth.
Anesthetized, the girl only whimpers a little when the first tool is pushed inside her.
The woman wielding the tools doesn’t look any different from the others. She doesn’t have blue hair or wear flowing skirts. She’s overweight and has on Walmart jeans and calls herself a doula and has assisted many of the women in this room with their homebirths. She has been arrested twice for practicing without a license. In her left hand is a screwdriver. On the table to her right is a pair of pliers and a hammer.
“Now watch carefully,” she says to the girl’s mother. “For all your other daughters.”
This is a lesson, in more ways than one.
The doula positions the screwdriver, and reaches with her other hand for the hammer. With it, she taps the back of the screwdriver twice, her strokes hard and exact. The muddiness vanishes from the girl’s face. Her eyes bulge. She starts to cry, to fight, and her family-women surge forward to hold her down. The screw-driver is removed, the pliers then applied, sunk up to the handle. They catch, and the doula presses against the girl’s thin broomstick thigh and tugs. Tugs.
It takes almost five minutes of pulling before the first tooth is dragged out. Ivory white, trailing its long red root like a loose string. Another woman stands to one side with a catching receptacle: an empty beer can.
• • • •
An unnamed monk studying in the Basilica of Saint-Pierre-aux-Nonnains rediscovered dentata in the Western world in 825 AD and wrote of them extensively in a text that remains incomplete. The monk described the teeth’s placement in the body and in relation to each other, their exact lengths and weights, his account accurate enough it’s assumed that these are the reported results of an autopsy. The dissected woman is never named, the details of her death never provided.
• • • •
I was nineteen the first time I had sex. My boyfriend Nathan and I had just left a party, and we made it two blocks before realizing neither one of us was sober enough to be driving. He pulled over into a parking lot and we climbed into the back seat to sleep it off. One thing led to another.
It was his first time, too, and we’d talked about it exhaustively. “I need to know I can trust you,” he’d said.
He had only been inside of me a minute or so before I bit him.
He stopped his thrust mid-groan, the bliss disappearing from his expression like I’d shot it off.
• • • •
Vivian said, half-lit and giggling, “If one of them got near me that would be the end of it. CHOMP.”
I was thirteen, at a sleepover, nail polish stains on the carpet, a bottle of Everclear I had stolen from my parents’ liquor cabinet. There were six of us: myself, Vivian Paternoster, Chloe Okorie, Marina Saldana, Andrea Kaur and Ilona Kruckel. Boys weren’t invited yet, though they would be within a year or two, on the nights when Vivian’s mother went out of town for work.
We were in Vivian’s room. A net full of stuffed animals hung over her bed. We sipped Everclear mixed with Sprite and pretended we enjoyed it. We thumbed through Tiger Beat, comparing boys and debating who we would let do it to us.
None of us really had a concrete understand of sex, I don’t think, but thirteen had made us suddenly and intimately aware that we had teeth, because that was the age most of us were fitted with both kinds of braces. Braces are sometimes medically necessary for lower sets the same way they are for uppers, of course—the lower set can grow in incorrectly, sideways towards the urethra or rectum, or protrude so much they cut the vaginal walls and cause infections or pose a risk to some future expected infant. (My mother hadn’t had braces, and I have two mother-scars, both on my scalp. In my baby pictures they’re dark red and angry looking, haphazardly covered with bows.)
Looking back, we probably didn’t all need braces. Looking back, we probably got them because it scared the boys away from us—the idea that they would be shoving themselves into the equivalent of an open soda can. The braces only seemed to come off after we hit eighteen.
“No, you would not,” Chloe said, rolling her eyes. She had let Marina into her sleeping bag with her and they were cuddled together, like Vivian was telling a horror story. “You can’t even, like, really bite with them.”
“Oh yeah you can.” Vivian rose and staggered from the room, giggling. We heard her thump down the stairs and passed glances—What the hell is she doing?—then heard the fridge open and slam close. She returned with a bag of baby carrots and a drunken grin.
“OhmyGAWD,” Chloe crowed as Vivian disappeared into the bathroom. There was some grunting and a calamitous falling sound. After a minute she returned, triumphant, with a baby carrot in hand that looked like a chewed tree.
“I swear to god that slut Tricia Lytar can shove a whole apple up there and bite it into the shape of a swan,” she said.
“You did that with your upper set,” Andrea accused hotly. “Don’t pretend.”
Vivian grinned wickedly and chucked the carrot at Andrea, who shrieked and batted it away.
“Who’s next?” Vivian said and shook the bag.
We whined and protested, but nevertheless we went one by one into the bathroom, taking a baby carrot from Vivian as she stood by the door. Maybe because we were drunk for one of the first times, if not the first time. Maybe because the makeup and the nail polish made all of us feel more like adults, more like women, but also worse, like fakers, like imposters. Maybe because the night was hot and sultry and pressurized somehow, strange—like this was a funny thing, but also a necessary thing we knew we were doing, a thing that must be.
Though maybe I’m assigning this only in retrospect, moving things around in my memory. Youth is full of those nights, the oncoming-train feeling of change that is both terrible and exhilarating, that paralyzes the air. Maybe we didn’t think anything of this at all.
“You’re up,” Vivian said to me, and handed me a carrot that was the size of my index finger, though crooked like it knew what I was about to do and did not approve. The bathroom was too small. June bugs crawled in the pit of the tub drain, and there were deltas of sweat in both my armpits and the small of my back. I pulled down my underpants (not called panties, yet, and I’ve always hated the sound of that word, the dog pant before the sneering ies). There were no shreds of carrot in the toilet, and I wondered where the carrot pieces went, if we could swallow them backwards—health class never said—or if someone was just going to end up with underpants full of orange flecks.
I perched over the toilet with this baby carrot in my hand wondering how I was going to stick it up there when I had never even used a tampon before.
My braces were medically necessary—upper set perfect, lower set like a bag of broken porcelain. My pubic bone was undersized, too, so my teeth were not only growing all the wrong way but crowding each other. Rather than getting any of my teeth pulled, my parents had had my gynecologist fit me with a bone-widening device that left a metal bar across my vaginal opening. Twice a week, I was supposed to push a thin metal key that looked like an Allen wrench up and into that metal bar and turn it, lengthening the bar a hair’s width, forcing my pubic floor to likewise widen. It left me walking slow and sore for a couple of days.
At thirteen, I was 4’11” and ninety pounds. Most things were too big for me—including that metal bar contraption. I can push a finger inside of myself still and feel the ridges where the frame of it cut into me and left its mark, like water-clefts worn into a stone. I bled constantly.
“Irregular periods aren’t uncommon,” my gynecologist said when I complained. “And cramps are incredibly common.” When I tried to explain that these weren’t cramps, I knew what cramps felt like, just look would you? she rolled her eyes the way I did when my friends complained about similar things. Stop being dramatic, that look said.
Right then, though, that metal bar meant that carrot wasn’t going anywhere. So I just sat on the toilet, drunk-woozy, and nibbled it down with my upper set until it somewhat resembled Vivian’s.
When I came out of the bathroom, Vivian looked at my carrot and shook her head.
“You’re going to be a virgin for forever,” she said to me, and I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment or an insult.
Ilona was the last to go in. We heard her crying after a long while. The group of us rose, humor gone. We stood together and tapped on the bathroom door, calling in a soft chorus:
It’s just a joke, Ilona.
You don’t have to if you don’t want to.
You don’t have to.
• • • •
In the Museum of London there is a bronze-age dildo from Mesopotamia on display, carved from marble. It’s believed women would have inserted this in order to grind their lower set into inoffensive nubs. I have seen similar tools for sale on the streets in Sofia, Guangzhou, Mexico City, Seattle, and Sidney.
I have seen ones made of diamond in Dubai.
• • • •
Andrea was the first of us to lose her virginity. I remember this because she was the only one of us not coy about specifics. How he jammed one finger in, and then two.
“He kind of just poked them in and out, like he was cleaning a pipe.” She was fifteen, then, her boyfriend twenty-four—old enough to know the braces didn’t pose a threat. His name was Kyler; he had cystic acne and worked at Target. He bought us booze so we wouldn’t have to steal from my parents anymore, who had gotten suspicious of the condensation inside their vodka bottles.
“Or no!” She laughed, but it was hectic, her eyes too wide, pupils small. Staring not at us by the light overhead. “You know how when you can’t get your quarters out of the change slot in a Coke machine? That’s how he did it. Like he was trying to get a quarter out of me. And then he just kind of rammed the whole thing in.”
There were only five of us—Marina had a boyfriend now, too, and didn’t come around anymore—but those of us who remained made soft noises, that’s awful noises, even though Andrea was still laughing, had laughed herself to tears.
She pawed at her eyes with the heels of her hands. “No, no, it’s fine. I mean, it’s gotten better.”
There were other conversations as the hammock of stuffed animals came down, as the boy band posters were replaced with arthouse movie prints. We started passing around advice along with Kyler’s liquor: how to keep our teeth tucked back, what muscles to work and exercise. Questions about if we could bite accidentally.
“Kyler says that’s why he has to be careful, why I can’t enjoy it too much,” Andrea explained. “Because if you have an orgasm your muscles might spasm.”
“CHOMP!” Vivian laughed, and then snapped a sulky, “What?” when we shot her dirty looks.
We related the horror stories of accidental bitings that came to us third- and fourth-hand, the ones the boys whispered in their locker rooms: how Dennis Culher was literally dickless because he’d gone out with Ashton Pierce, who was willing to fuck anyone but also had (rumor went) vaginal Tourette’s, and so anyone sticking it in was playing Russian roulette. Or the one about the girl over in Greensboro who did it on purpose, who preserved the bitten-off dicks and kept them nailed to her headboard as trophies. That story had a whole narrative arc, with innocent boys coming into her room and seeing what looked, to them, like a row of dried apricots, and if she liked a boy enough, she would leave his dick intact and feed him one of these when he was spent.
If our mothers ever talked about it, it was just to tell us that we mustn’t ever, not ever.
• • • •
The most obvious evolutionary explanation for dentata is that they are a rape deterrent, except no one seems to want to settle on this as the answer. Every few years another hypothesis gains popularity: they are a vestigial trait ofsome long-ago ancestor that bit penises off during reproduction, like banana slugs. Or an ancient abortifacient. Or they’re like hiccups and serve no purpose at all.
This lack of certainty is partly because the teeth are largely useless. The necessary pelvic muscles just don’t exist. Vaginal contraction for the average woman results in only about twenty-four pounds of pressure, far less than that of a human jaw, which is around 171 pounds. This might explain why the rape statistics in countries where more women keep their teeth are not noticeably lower than those countries where women have them removed at high rates, when all other socio-economic factors are accounted for.
Those women who do pose some threat most often become headlines. The highest biting power recorded was by Eligia Jaskólski, a thirty-one-year-old sex worker from Norway. Her record-setting lower bite stands at 244 pounds, the same as a German shepherd. You can find videos of her on fetish websites, clamping onto ropes stuffed inside of her with her lower set and pulling various vehicles around parking lots, crawling on her hands and knees.
• • • •
Nathan and I talked about it exhaustively beforehand.
Would he like it?
No, no he would not like that. He would not like that at all.
Would I be able to control myself?
Yes, yes, I could.
It was his first time, too.
“I need to know I can trust you,” he said.
• • • •
This time the procedure is done in an operating room—clean and sterile, with professionals of all forms. The girl is thirteen and wearing a beautiful white confirmation dress, which is traded out for a hospital gown before she’s wheeled away.
The procedure will take about four hours. She will be up and walking in two days. She will never miss her teeth. After, her family will be mailed a certificate with the doctor’s signature and that of a witness (usually the attending nurse), which will be filed alongside her birth certificate and the results of various blood tests as the necessary components for a state marriage license, though this specific certificate requirement has been suspended by a federal judge (for now). Some 92% of the women in this particular religion have had the procedure.
“This is an important moment,” says the hospital counselor, who coordinates with various faith and governmental organizations to make sure the process runs smoothly. “We want to make it as safe as possible for the girls.”
I ask her what she means, aside from obvious sanitation concerns. Women who keep their teeth are at a slightly higher risk of contracting STIs.
“There are cultural mores associated with the practice, of course,” she replies. “And this will protect her from liability in the court system. Even accidental biting can be prosecuted as assault.” She deftly segues into an almost-subject change. “Not to mention that a man should never face the threat of pain at the whim of his partner, not when he is at his most vulnerable. Sex is based on trust. This system has simply codified that.”
When I look unconvinced, she leans in. “We want our lovers to trust us, don’t we? We don’t ever want them to be afraid of us. We don’t ever want to hurt them. Isn’t that true?”
Doesn’t she, I ask, find teeth removal to be disempowering?
“Only if you’re equating empowerment with violence,” she says, the statement sounding like a rebuke.
• • • •
I should elaborate.
I was nineteen the first time I had sex. My boyfriend Nathan and I had just left a party. Nathan wasn’t supposed to be drinking—he told me he’d be the DD, told me to have fun, and when I found him a few hours later, it was with a beer in his hand. He insisted he was sober. I was drunk. We fought. I asked him to take me home. After a few crawling blocks in darkness (he’d forgotten to turn the head-lights on), he said, “I really shouldn’t be driving.” He pulled over into the parking lot of a movie theater whose last showing was letting out.
“We can just sleep here,” he said, letting out a sour, beery burp. He got out and pushed the back seats down. When instead I tried to sleep in the front seat, my jacket draped over me, he called nastily, “So that’s how you’re going to be? It’s the end of the fucking world because I had a drink?”
And because I was nineteen and I didn’t want to be a bitch, I got into the back seat with him. He cuddled up to me, wrapped his arms around me, made contented noises in his throat. This is nice, isn’t it? I thought. Kind of romantic? as the shadows of late-night moviegoers passed us by.
And then his hands moved. He rubbed my thighs, squeezed my breasts. Moved my hands to touch his erection, which poked like a pipe into my back.
“Stop,” I said, and pulled my hands away. He made a noise—you know what it sounds like, don’t you? That why are you being such a bitch about this? noise. Why can’t you ever be fun?
He let me go and turned away from me, which in the tiny backseat was a feat.
And because I was nineteen and didn’t want to be a bitch, I said, “Wait. Okay,” and put my hand on his hip. When he turned over, looking suspicious, like I was trying to trick him, I pulled off my shirt. I thrilled at the way his face lit up.
We’d tried to have sex before this, so maybe “first time” isn’t quite right. But every time before, when he started push inside me, all my muscles seized up until I was afraid something was going to tear. I asked him to stop even though I knew a girl’s first time always hurt, it was supposed to hurt, and I might as well get it over with (though from talking to my friends I knew this wasn’t always a one-time thing, that it might keep on hurting forever).
He did stop, those other times, though always while making a sound that is a cousin to that other noise—impatience. Exasperation. Annoyance.
That night, I thought the beer would help loosen me up. But when he pushed into me it happened again, everything tensing, everything pushing back at that invading pressure.
“Stop,” I said, trying to twist away from him. “Stop, that hurts.”
“Well, it’s going to,” he said. His weight felt like the whole world on top of me, and he kept pushing, pushing, that terrible pressure building and never letting up, never breaking. “You’re just going to have to accept that it’s going to hurt the first time and get through it.”
And so I bit him, just a little.
• • • •
This ceremony takes place in a gymnasium, the floor marked with game lines and streaked with shoe rubber waxed to a shining gleam. Pink and white rolls of crepe paper have been tossed into high-above rafters, and pink and white balloons drift between the rows of folded-out metal chairs and utility tables that have been covered in white plastic tablecloths. The tables are piled with store-bought cupcakes transported from their plastic casings onto glass serving platters. Cuts of fresh fruits are speared and ready to be dipped in a Crock-Pot full of melted chocolate.
The girls come in silk and tulle, in soft Easter colors: baby pinks and baby yellows and white, so much white. Their fathers come in black suits, in contrast as straight and tall as exclamation marks, the monotony of their suits broken only by their boutonnieres—flowers chosen to match their daughters’ dresses. Roses and carnations, daffodils, and lilies.
Sometimes the girls are as young as a few months, and their fathers carry them. Other times, they’re nearly college aged. This time, they’re all eleven or so, their elbows crooked from reaching up to hold their fathers’ hands. There will be dancing, after, universally to slow ’80s prom songs sung by Cyndi Lauper and ABBA, the littlest girls standing on their fathers’ sweeping feet.
This ceremony is not always religious, and so is not always performed by a priest. Sometimes a school principal, or a legislator, or a general. Someone of otherwise special note.
“Today, we congratulate you special young girls on your first step into womanhood,” the speaker says.
The father-daughter pairs advance to the podium when he beckons. It is the father who signs the contract that is presented to him: to protect his daughter’s mind, body, and spirit. To be a man of honor and strength so she will never have cause to doubt him. The girl stands with him only as witness, and while he writes his name on the signing line she smiles and smiles and smiles.
There will be another ceremony, in a month or two. All the girls will return in their pastel dresses, their fathers in their suits. The tables and the decorations and the dancing will be the same. Only this time the girls will stand in a line and, to the thunderous applause of their friends and family members, present to their fathers the velvet boxes that contain their extracted teeth.
Smiling and smiling, all of these daughters, glowing under the lights like stars.
• • • •
“I’m sorry,” I said. Nathan had gotten up and dressed hurriedly, cursing, calling me every permutation of bitch and cunt and whore that existed. I sat in the front seat crying, even so soon after unsure if I’d really meant to bite or not. If it was just reflex, or if I really was a monster.
Eventually, he got in the car. Under the thin streetlight his expression was black cast, the line of his brow thundery, his eyes wet, his hands shaking.
“You have to make it up to me,” he said.
I nodded, wiping my nose on my sleeve.
• • • •
The first time I had sex it was with a boy’s hands around my neck, so he could trust me.
