[Note: this was written by my good friend, Lindsay McLaughlin. I was planning to write a review, but hers was so good, I asked her permission to share it. Enjoy.]
"Pussy: A Reclamation" is a provocative book gathering a woman's sensual pleasure experienced through the clitoris, vulva, vagina into a word, pussy, and presenting it as a portal to the transcendent, Divine Feminine. This resonates, because it connects with woman's reproductive, life-giving abilities, her intrinsic, deep ties to the cycles of moon and Earth, to the primal, creative life-force. The sensate opera embedded in the clitoris can be seen as a hyperlink launching a woman into layers and layers of experience, meaning, and connection. It also has the advantage of making it impossible to image the Divine as anything other than feminine. It completely overtakes all other attempts to bring the Divine Feminine foremost in the western imagination-whether that is thinking of Mary as Mother, using the feminine when naming God ("Mother"), etc. because all these images have the masculine as a reference (Mary relates to Jesus, Mother God implies Father God) and most western minds cannot wipe the masculine out of the picture. Not so, when your portal is a vulva.
At its heart, and its best, "Pussy" ushers women into belonging, which is the source of a joyful, empowered life. If women are connected to the Divine, are Divine, are the Sun and life source, then we Belong. We know our place in the family of things, and it is central. This bestows a renewed sense of self-worth and self-love and forgiveness which overflows into an understanding of connection and community, and particularly in this book, of sisterhood.
Regena is good at demolishing centuries of women's seeing themselves (at unconscious levels, of course) as flawed, lacking, less than, guilty. She does this by guiding women to acknowledge (and practice) their universe-given pleasure playground, which conveys the message of deserving, worthiness, and wholeness at a gut, cellular, nervous, primal level. We deserve to feel wonderful; not only that, we are meant to feel wonderful; the universe wants and needs us to feel wonderful.
From there, it is possible to project a forceful community of wonderful-feeling women ("radiant") who are empowered to live with awareness, love, soul. And who knows what will happen then?
"Pussy" is an all-encompassing term as Regena uses it. It includes the physical, sensual pleasure derived specifically from clitoris, and the intuitive, dark inward knowing impulses/wisdom, a dream-poetic-mythic realm, and the Divine/Goddess. In her reclamation, it is a word to be reckoned with.
I definitely feel that this book is a find and that women everywhere should read it, if they can bring themselves to open the cover. I have sent it to my daughter-in-law. It would be scary and fascinating to attend the School of Womanly Arts. Sure, it has its "Oprah-esque" passages, and despite references to women struggling with poverty, or in Syria, etc., it cannot shake its New York, urban/suburban milieu. Nor should we expect it to.
Regena mentions many women in the book who have not or did not come into their radiance solely, or even at all, through the practices she advocates so passionately. Mother Teresa, Rachel Carson, and Sojourner Truth are a few that come to mind. This underscores that the roads to women's empowerment, the recovery of the Feminine, and the healing of the Earth (and culture) are many, varied, and woven together from these sources.
"Pussy" prods women to live by a story that says we deserve pleasure, that the universe needs women to feel good, empowered, beautiful and to own our place as creatures of divinity. That's a message I can get behind 100%.