In the Middle Ages the prevailing anti-sex, anti-woman Christian paradigm conjured up the trope of the vagina dentata, or toothed vagina, rimmed with a circular array of nasty gnashers, as a potent visual symbol of male anxiety over sexual intercourse and the fear, dread, and loathing of women and the physicality of erotic desire and reproduction. A vag ready to snap like a steel-jawed bear, or man-trap, on an unsuspecting husband or lover and either simply emasculate him or even devour him whole, as in the image of a drowning sailor being swept down the throat of a malevolent whirlpool, or in modern imagery an unwanted baby alligator being flushed down an urban toilet, must have troubled the nocturnal repose of many an otherwise stalwart peasant, knight and squire.

But the learned philosophers and doctors of theology failed to take account of their personal observations of life. As confirmed celibates they would have had no truck or intercourse with the female gender, yet there is one inevitable verity of earthly existence that did not prompt them to a revision of their dictates...namely aging, and the effects thereof. After all, when people aged, in an age prior to modern dentistry, their teeth inevitably decayed, blackened (as with Queen Elizabeth 1 of England who coquettishly always had a fan or other obstruction in front of her black-toothed mouth in her later years), and gradually loosened and fell out. What then, one wonders, of the fate of the vagina dentata? Would not its vicious teeth also be rendered harmless by the passage of time? There is no record that the theologians ever reached such a conclusion. If anything, older women, as repositories of subversive pagan folk wisdom, in the healing arts especially, were always feared as potential, if not actual, witches, and as threatening to the divinely ordained patriarchal order. The vagina dentata's teeth were therefore assumed to be immune to the ravages of time and remained as a constant cautionary tale against excessive male fondness for and familiarity with the female birth canal.

But, at the same time, the Church was terrified of inversion, or male homosexuality. Its incidence is well recorded in the abbeys and monasteries of the time, yet no similar cautionary tale of a rectum dentata is on record, or in any of the folk tales or memories or ribald classics of the age. Despite its professed terror of buggery and sodomy, the Church in her infinite wisdom never created a mythology of male-member-eating behinds to thwart the homosexual urges of her male faithful. Hmmm...

Fast forward to the early post-Enlightenment era. George Washington gets wooden dentures...yet there is no mention in Puritan American Literature of any similar remediation for the pudenda of the Pilgrim Founding Mothers of the New World. Had the vagina dentata disappeared from folklore...or just gone underground?

Then in the mid-19th century, the first generations of modern physiologists and medical men, trained in the university medical schools of Europe, described the existence of the teratoma. An exceedingly rare, and extremely gross, category of tumor, growing on a body part, usually the neck or torso of an otherwise healthy individual, the teratoma is a miniature, grotesquely misshapen simulacrum of a develoiping feotal head, sans brain and eyes, but with the incipient facial features of nose and mouth, complete with teeth. It grows slowly and is one of nature's weirdest genetic aberrations, a failed late-onset twin on a person already fully grown. Next to the scatoma, or intestinal blockage of feces impacted in the intestinal lining, the teratoma is the most disgusting physiological abnormality that could happen to a human being. And so, pranksters in the 'yellow press' of the late 1800s (yellow having nothing to do with the color of urine) added a diabolical twist...in the equivalent of our late 20th century National Enquirer and lurid tabloid confabulations they write of 'a woman's private parts growing around the toothed mouth of a monstrous chimera perched on the chest or neck of a damned patient...' But the Victorian environment of the time would allow no more than a very rare remark along such shocking lines, and the vag dentata remained for the most part in obscurity.

Fast forward to the 1960s and the Vietnam War. American GIs in-country are warned about South Vietnamese prostitutes who are secret Viet Cong sympathizers and who put razor blades in their vaginas to lacerate a GI John's privates in a carnal encounter. The destroying vagina has gone Gillette and Schick.

Finally we come to the present. Operation Iraqi Freedom, the liberation and occupation of post-Saddam Iraq. It is remarkable that in all the reportage and blogs from the Iraq theater, despite military control of the press, that there is nary a mention of American soldiers' fraternization with Iraqi prostitutes. Does the American public really believe that with over hallf a million male soldiers having served in Iraq to date that the Defense Department's control of soldiers and marines there has been so absolute that there has been no statistically significant sample of cases of Americans, including the large number of slimy Blackwater and other mercenary thugs, buying the sexual favors of Iraqi prostitutes? Has the controlled rape of Iraqi women prisoners in American detention, as small a number as it has been, poured cold water on the recording of all incidences of sexual contact?  Or is something else at play?

Is it the case that a) the decapitation of soldier penises has been hushed up in a Bush-Cheney-Rove conspiracy in order to protect the image of an omnipotent post-modern American patriarchy in its colonial/imperial adventures abroad, or b) that the prevalence of Prince Albert and ampallang, etc., male genital piercings (Carl Rove's step-father is reported to have had a Prince Albert piercing) among a significant percentage of the Y-Generation rave-hip MTV-reared and parentally neglected enlistees has inured and toughened the present generation of US fighting men and made them laugh off the attacks of razor blades, razor, and barbed wire lurking inside the nether regions of the fraternizing female strumpet set in Iraq. Only fearless and independent journalistic intrepitude can bring us the answer.

Finally, we come to the home front. If the fearsome 'vagina dentata' is still with us in the early 21st century, reposing silently in an aging domestic female boomer population in the form of a massive X-Files- type  dental groin prosthetic conspiracy, can ads on TV touting vaginal Polident...'Fix It and Forget It, and Fuck On' commercials be far away?