In her new book “Vagina. A biography” US-star feminist Naomi Wolf deconstructs female sexual myths. A conversation about orgasm, creativity, Obama and new feminism.

You cannot help but notice Naomi Wolf.The US-star feminist cannot even go to a gala dinner in New York without getting arrested on the way for joing a peaceful protest on the way. When not in trouble the author writes another book, which is guaranteed to create controversy. The very attractive journalist became famous with “The Beauty Myth” in 1991. With “The End Of America” she attacked fascist tendencies in George W. Bushs United States. When she noticed reduced pleasure with her own orgasms, she had herself checked. After an operation at her spine, which fixed a squeezed nerve, she wrote the book about the “central organ of female power”: “The Vagina. A Biography” was heavily critized in 2012: “Shoddy research” was diagnosed and Wolf was called a “sexual prophet”.

She takes it with good sense of humour. And in an interview with “profil” she attacks her critics with the same passion as she eats scones at an Afternoon Tea in London’s “Renaissance Hotel St Pancrass”.

profil: You wrote about the "Beauty myth", about fascism in the US, now about the female sexual organ. Is "Vagina" a less political book then your previous books?

Wolf: I would respectfully disagree with your analysis. The vagina has always been the ground zero of discrimination against women. This is not a private matter, 52 percent of the society have vaginas, it’s really important to discuss, what happens there. It is a very political book. And it is revolutionary.

Profil: What is revolutionary about it?

Wolf: How can our daughters be self-confident, if the very central organ of their sexuality is considered a joke or a bad joke or something simply bad. I have always wondered why the vagina has been so demeaned for centuries. It is clearly more than the right of who you are sleeping with. It’s about the right to defend your boundaries. About how to respect yourself. And about basic knowledge about your anatomy. It is shocking how little women are still being told.

profil: You write about the connection between vagina and brain, about the nerves connecting them via the spine. Neuroscience is currently very popular. But are your conclusions scientifically watertight?

Wolf: Look at my backnotes, if you have any doubt, go google them. They are all online. They are easy to understand. "Cosmopolitan" still speaks about clitoris and G-spot for example. But in fact anatonomers have found that G-spot is the South and clitoris is the North of the same structure. Recently a sexual centre in the cervix was discovered. Before that it was assumed that the vagina had no big nerve centres. That was wrong. Now we know that an episiotomy – a cut which doctors make at birth to prevent further tearing of tissue - for example goes right through a sexual nerve centre. Did you know that? It makes me angry that women are not being told that an episiotomy cuts straight through their sexual nerve centre and they will never experience sex again as they did before. There are ways to avoid episiotomy - women just need to be educated about it.

profil: You say that the vagina has a lot more nerves than the male sexual organ. But this is not necessarily new, we somehow already had a feeling that men are a little simpler in their sexual needs than women.

Wolf: Good for you. But mainstream media still talks about: Here is the clitoris. There is the G-spot. And good luck with it.

profil: Does Vagina science also mean we dare to go deeper?

Wolf: Sure, the clitoris was more obvious. What kills me is that women often do not get the explanations they need. 60 percent of women have vaginal pain, but mostly don’t know what it stems from. I also did not know - I was lucky, my gynacologist happens to be one of the main pelvic nerve disorder experts.

profil: I think you are a little advanced in this respect in New York. It might be difficult to find a gynacologist in Vienna who is a "pelvic nerve disorder" specialist.

Wolf: Did you know that there is a vaginal pulse that is measurable? No? I did not either. Did you know that women have a higher vaginal pulse when they look at natural beauty, artificial beauty? No? Me neither. I also did not know that masturbation is actually healthy and should be recommended. No doctor does that. They prescribe pills against depression instead of masturbation. Masturbation is a mood inhancer. Anti-depressant medication on the other hand is a libido lowerer. But nobody talks about that.

profil: How did the orgasm capacity of women develop?

Wolf: A third of women do not reach orgasm and this number has not changed since 1976. That’s big news! Some of results of new research we have known forever but it was culturally lost. I analysed 18th century porn, for example, "Fanny Hill”, and I found a lot of caressing, kissing and stroking and seduction. And today’s porn sites? One-and-a-half minutes and finished.

profil: You also say that stress is bad for the female libido - but did we not know that?

Wolf: Oh yes, of course. But now we have scientific proof. This makes a hell a lot of a difference. They thought we were crazy, when we said: "I am stressed because you did not do the laundry and now I don't want to make love." Now we can say that. We know we are not crazy. We are just stressed because we work, take care of the kids, do the laundry and at the end of it we are not relaxed enough for sex.

profil: "Darling, do the laundry please, afterwards we will have better sex!”? Are you expecting women to actually say that?

Wolf: Well, in addition to sharing work in the house men should be told that to bring her flowers, say nice things and make her feel great. It definetely enhances her libido. Because we know now that the vaginal nerve system reacts to it directly. It has a physiological effect on women's well being. So I get these emails saying: “You have changed our marriage!” A man recently wrote: “Where have I been? I am married for 45 years and I never said this to her? It changed my life.”

profil: You make a clear difference in organism quality. You claim there is a "worthy" orgasm and a "normal" orgasm. I am a little lost here, is this Two-class-system scientifically proven, too?

Wolf: We are usually taught a very narrow sense of what is possible. This is based on the male experience: You have an orgasm, that is the sense of sex. But for women activation is the goal for sex rather than orgasm. Activation means heightened heart rate. Blood is flowing through your skin, makes it more sensitive. The more activation you are giving yourself, the more fullfilling the orgasm will be. Women can have an orgasm and not have much activation. It’s ok but not as nice.

profil: Don’t men also have different orgasms and does this not have to do with romantic love? Or do you also explain love as purely scientific chemical process?

Wolf: I had a spinal injury and this is why I lost some of my orgasmic quality. There was sensuary input that was not reaching my brain because the connection was squashed. Reduced opioids were the consequence of this. What was so revelatory about this was, that orgasm is not only about spasms, it is about the brain function. Also after orgasm. So that's opioinds and dopomine - there is a chemical connection between vagina and brain.

profil: You also claim a connection between orgasm and creativity. One of your critics - Zoe Heller in "The New York Review Of Books" - makes fun of your claim and asks: So how about “Wuthering Heights" and Emily Bronté who was a virgin then?

Wolf: Who says Emily Bronté did not masturbate and experience great orgasms? It is very interesting how many critics attack a book I did not write. I never said you have to be in a relationship to be able to experience the boost in creativity. I respect Zoe Heller, but her review was just stupid.

profil: It would certainly be absurd to say that good sex does not make you happier and more creative. But I think your critics point to a weakness in your scientific research.

Wolf: Orgasm is about the feeling of being without boundaries. This is especially important for creative people. I made a survey among 17.000 people on Facebook. Many women told me the same thing: After their sexual awakening they could not stop painting.

profil: I honestly feel that there is an American-European divide if it comes to spiritual explanations for our sexual condition. In an urban, liberal, left wing social environment in Europe people would not easily bring themselves to talk about "the Goddess" in ourselves. In America I think it is socially a lot more acceptable to be “spiritual”.

Wolf: I understand what you are saying and my editor alerted me to this European resistance to this spiritiuality. Let me step back and explain what I mean: The one subculture I found were women were pretty happy was a subculture were they had an idea of the “Goddess”. Female sexuality as divine. As sacred. And I don't care, if women think of their sexuality as divine, thats not my thing to decide for them or advertize that at all. But there seemed to be something healing for them in there. I was very interested in it, but i am not a Tantra practioner - that is a religious thing. But as a reporter I was looking in various workshops and only in Tantra workshops I saw women of all shapes and sizes and all ethnicities leave happy and comfortable with themselves. A lot of women have been raised in very punitive sexual cultures. Like in fundamentalist Christian communities – this God does not like women.

profil: In classic concepts of feminism one of the basic ideas was equal rights to equal people - it was really not about anyting being sacred or holy or goddessy.

Wolf: I am not talking about "that" God.

profil: It sounds like "50 Shades of Grey" where the main character talks about her "inner Goddess".

Wolf: Oh really? I did not know that.

profil: If the Vagina really is the central organ of female power, why don't we have a better term for it than the Latin word for "sword shaft"?

Wolf: Please coin a new word. I am just trying to take back the word Vagina because we have not found a better one. I feel a lot better now about the word after writing the book because I described a lot of good things about the vagina - I am also not using it only in the literal sense, I describe the entire system surrounding it. We just take the Word Vagina back. I also hate being descriptive. The only place in the book where I am descriptive is when I tell men to be nice to their women.

profil: It actually reads a little like a column of Dr Ruth.

Wolf: What can I say?!? There are so many women whose marriages are ending because their husbands don't know how to make their wives happier. I figured if I spelled it out and gave the science behind it, you know, we have the outcome that I am getting. Which is letters saying Thank you. Divorce is hard, it's hard on kids, loneliness is hard, and love is hard. And women deserve to be treated well. And if someone thinks it reads like a sex manual - too bad, fine with me. I am here to help people with this information to feel better. Everyone deserves to be loved.

profil: You need to get the men to read it.

Wolf: That's what is happening.

profil: Do we still need feminism today? What has changed since you wrote "The beauty myth" in 1991?

Wolf: You ask these great big philosophical questions, that’s great! I don’t get this often in the States. I am smiling because I think these are the right questions to ask. There is no movement which has achieved more than the feminist movement in the last generation. A lot of the things women were facing in 1991 are gone now. In the United States we were then talking about the Hill-Thomas-hearings. Women were still being sexually harrassed at work. Today, it does happen, but there are mega million dollar law suits against men who harrass women. People are told that they are jeopardizing the company if they engage in that kind of behaviour.

profil: Economic pressure changes inequality - how American!

Wolf: The thinking has changed. Look at the debate about rape. Women were raped and felt ashamed and alone and guilty. Women still often get raped and are still being left alone with it. But there is much more of a discourse about this being a systemic problem and not a personal problem. Same with housework in two-career-couples: It might not be resolved, women still do a lot more than men in the house, but everyone knows they have to deal with it. One of the biggest changes is: All the men feel the need to be present in their children' life. There is much more to do still, but things that women thought were there own personal problems, are now understood to be systemic problems.

profil: A woman of 25 today might think, there is no need for a feminist movement anymore because they are at least as educated, smart, strong and self confident than their male peers. And they plan to take the same jobs.

Wolf: Many young women today may think it’s over, but often they hit the wall when they have children, or when they realize in mid-career that they are stuck forever in a position which is not high enough for their education and experience. They will analyse and realize that the old feminist slogans are still valid: Good child care, participation of fathers, quotas maybe in board rooms.

But my experience on campusses in the US is, that unlike in the Eighties and Nineties I find many fierce young feminists there now. They see it as a human rights issue what they are fighting for. Legislation is maybe better today than it was, but there is still a lot to fight for: against sexual violence, images of women in pornography; or the "slut walk" - thousands of young women and men in Austrialia and New Zealand, in America and Canada went out to say: "Don't use my appearance as a justification for sexual violence."

profil: You wrote a book about the threat of fascism in the US, it's called "The end of America". You wrote this in 2007 under the last Bush administration. I wonder how you see the situation now, is it better under Obama?

Wolf: You won’t like my answer, but it's worse under Obama. Obama took the foundations which the Bush lawyers laid and has taken it further. They are building a 49 million Dollar facility at Guantanamo right now. Obama asked for closing Guantanamo, but he is not. It was his first promise, but he has not kept it. He is still holding these people - they have been there for 10 years. Some are cleared to go, he is not letting them go. I am a back-up-plaintiff in a law suit against Obama that journalist Chris Hedges has brought and Birgitta Jonsdottir, the icelandic parlamentarian, and philosopher Noam Chomsky advocate together trying to stop the implemention of a very terrible thing called the "National defence authorisation act" which gives the military the power to hold people without charge or trial. I was in the court room when Obama's lawyers said he should have the right to do this. It is very terrifying.

profil: But it's still a democratic country and not a fascist state like the Third Reich.

Wolf: How democratic are we? Look at us today: They are using drones in the sky over New York City, it's a giant market. How do I explain it? What dictates foreign policy and domestic politics in the United States are corporate interests and their lobbyists. Don’t forget: Hitler came to power with democratic means.

Interview. Tessa Szyszkowitz/London