When an unex­pect­ed med­ical cri­sis sends Nao­mi Wolf — author of the endur­ing fem­i­nist clas­sic The Beau­ty Myth—on a deeply per­son­al jour­ney to tease out the inter­sec­tions between sex and cre­ativ­i­ty, she dis­cov­ers, much to her own shock, an increas­ing body of evi­dence that sug­gests that the vagi­na is not mere­ly flesh, but is an intrin­sic com­po­nent of the female brain. In Vagi­na: A New Biog­ra­phy—a bril­liant and nuanced syn­the­sis of phys­i­ol­o­gy, his­to­ry, and cul­ture — Wolf sets out to explore the phys­i­cal, polit­i­cal, and spir­i­tu­al impli­ca­tions for women and for soci­ety as a whole of this star­tling sci­en­tif­ic break­through.

Utter­ly enthralling and total­ly fas­ci­nat­ing, Vagi­na: A New Biog­ra­phy is a com­plete revi­sion of the sta­tus quo that traces the dis­tance from his­tor­i­cal social con­trol of the vagi­na — which leads nat­u­ral­ly to social con­trol of women’s minds and inner lives — to con­tem­po­rary pres­sures brought to bear on it, from pornog­ra­phy to plas­tic surgery, deft­ly weav­ing in a path toward a rad­i­cal reclaim­ing of the body and the self.

An exhil­a­rat­ing and ground­break­ing work that com­bines grip­ping nar­ra­tive reportage with rig­or­ous lay sci­ence and deeply per­son­al con­sid­er­a­tions of female iden­ti­ty, Vagi­na: A New Biog­ra­phy is a book unlike any oth­er from a mind unlike any oth­er — the inim­itable Nao­mi Wolf, whose pas­sion, con­vic­tion, and keen intel­li­gence have pro­pelled her works-from The Beau­ty Myth to The End of Amer­i­ca—to the tops of best­seller lists and firm­ly into the realms of mod­ern classics.