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only one with infinite understanding would or could. Jake embodies the strength of
emotional stability of a man while being able to offer feminine comfort to his friends.
The idea of the wound being vaginal, or conversely female genitalia resembling a
wound is in fact, not entirely modern or Anglo-American. In Sri Lankan scholar Selvy
Thiruchandran’s “The Seductive Feminine Evil and the Creative Femininity”, she
discusses Hindu examples of poetry, focusing an author by the name of Pattinatar. In
Patinatar’s poetry, Thiruchandran cites lines of verse like, “The ‘yoni’ is a wound” (cited
in Thiruchandran). The root of the word “yoni” allows for the reading of this poetic line
to be better understood. “In Sanskrit, yoni means vulva and womb, and the yoni is the
symbol through which the female divine, in the form of the goddess Shakti, is worshiped
(her emphasis, Frueh 140). Thiruchandran herself writes, “In the section [of Pattinatar’s
poem] called Kacitiruahaval in nineteen lines [he] has condemned women in reproachful
and extremely repugnant language. Naming the parts of the female anatomy, he calls
them the ‘snare,’ the ‘wound’ and the entry point of lustful men who are led into the path
of ‘decay and destruction’”(Thiruchandran). For my purposes, the insights of
Thiruchandran are quite poignant: the “yoni” can lead to both decay and destruction.
These two words will later resound quite loudly when comparing them to the instances in
which some of our pro/an-tagonists find themselves feminized by injury. Once these men
inhabit the essentially feminine, they will indeed be led down these self-same paths of
which Pattinatar warns. These negative paths, however, are not closed-ended. Further
along, past difficult periods of self-reproach, can be an oasis of understanding.
Taking a contemporary feminist view of female genital slandering, Joanna Frueh
sees all that happens in and around the vagina (particularly intercourse and medical