I got an invitation the other day to attend the launch of some incendiary tract about Europe published by a think-tank. I get quite a few of these, especially stuff from what was once the Tory far right (and by ‘far’ I mean ‘far’ as in sort of Alpha Centauri, i.e. more easily measurable in light years than inches). I have nothing which constitutes a ‘life’, as such, so I go to one or two of these bashes every year — largely out of gratitude that anyone would ever invite me to anything. They’re always the same — suffocating room, unrefreshed by unchilled Pinot Grigio and some conference league canapés, usually involving spinach; over there in the corner a chap who is very very old and who I vaguely remember being dismissed from a Thatcher cabinet for letting slip to a reporter something which would not altogether accord with the views of Martin Luther King; dishevelled rodentine author with revolving eyes and bad breath, and a large northern man who manufactures meat pies, and who stumped up the money for the booklet, dumbly gladhanding everybody.
No chicks, no glitz, no glamour. The sort of party which never makes the papers, although it might get a belated write-up in the Salisbury Review. The sort of party where they would never, ever, under any circumstances, not if hell froze over, serve pasta in the shape of a vulva. And nor should they do such a thing, you might be thinking to yourself — and you are probably right in this repulsive instinct. Yet those are the sorts of parties I would like to be invited to, if I’m honest, but the invitations never land on my front doormat. The ones where there’s vaginal pasta. They go to other people, people I wish I was more like.
For example, the feminist author Naomi Wolf’s book launch featured pasta shaped like a vulva — indeed, the guests were encouraged to mingle in the kitchen and create their own pasta growlers out of dough (without question a dough made by hand from Tuscan 00 pasta flour and organic rape-free eggs). Which is what they did, the guests. When Naomi got to the party there were loads of happy and consensual metro liberal people in the kitchen dipping and delving and moulding and rounding — and already lined up on the worktop were scores of little vulvas, all smirking up at the author, pouting their caringly fashioned little lips, beseeching her: look at us, look at us, look at us all. We are empowered pasta vaginas. Take us in your hands, and then put us in a pot of boiling water for seven minutes.
At first, reading this, I thought it was the brilliant imagination of Malcolm Bradbury at work, until I remembered that the poor chap has been dead for quite a few years. It was instead the work of Naomi Wolf, straight reportage.
Naomi is one of the two big league post-structuralist feminist writers, along with the more right-of-centre Camille Paglia. Both are, in a very American way, quite foxy, although I’m sure this has had no beneficial effect upon their success as thinkers, writers, holists of the human spirit. Anyway, Naomi’s latest book is called simply Vagina, which is why one of her associates thought that this vagina-pasta thing might be an appropriate, even unavoidable, manner of driving the point home to the assembled guests.
I am not going to explain the thesis of Wolf’s book, because it is written in prose which is quite unintelligible to human beings, like all of her other books. I’m sure that somewhere within it she locates a truth about vaginas which previously we had not dared imagine, not even if we had endured the Vagina Monologues; there is a lot of self-important labia-beating in modern feminist circles and I am more than happy to leave them to it. What interests me is the party, and what happened when Naomi found those people in the kitchen making pasta. At first she found the vulvas ‘rather sweet-looking’, she explained, with ‘each person’s experience (or body, perhaps) informing his or her interpretation. There was an energy of respect and even would-be celebration,’ she wittered. But then the mood darkened. It had to. An air of tension manifested itself.
‘I heard a sizzling sound,’ she writes, ‘I looked to the kitchen: the sound was coming from several dozen enormous sausages, ranged in iron skillets on the big industrial stove. I got it: ha, sausages to go with the “cuntini”. The room had become more tense… the tension that I was familiar with by now, as I was recognising those moments when women feel demeaned….’
You will note that the sausages were ‘enormous’. Of course they were: vast, thrusting, gristly confections which you could not possibly swallow whole. I should add too that the party had been arranged by a male friend of Naomi’s. Clearly he had not understood that pasta does not always need some sort of meat to go with it. As soon as you put those sausages together with the pasta they would become defined by the sausage, rather than the thing on which, plangently, they rested. In one simple act then, Naomi’s friend had both subverted the message of her brilliant book and, in a way, sort of proved its point. By serving cock sausages to encroach upon the pristine vulva pasta.
So just to be clear: that’s the sort of party that I want to go to in future. The left does parties better than the right, because they are both more creative and the people more psychopathically fractious.
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