The vaginas come and the vaginas go—young and old vaginas, fat and trim vaginas, hairy and shaven vaginas, clean and stinky vaginas. And though the vaginas may differ, they have all come here for the same reason. Behind each of these vaginas, lying on a soft velvet examination chair with her legs strapped securely in leather stirrups, is a woman seeking advice about her future.
Currently inhabiting the velvet chair is a rather inflamed, reddish, saggy vagina belonging to a severely overweight lass in her late teens. She says her name is “Valentina,” but I don’t believe her. Whatever her real name is, she’s a blubbery bundle of misery and despair. Her boyfriend of two years recently dumped her in favor of a thinner specimen. She fears that people are talking behind her back at work. She thinks that her boss is getting ready to fire her. She feels ugly and unappreciated. She can’t stop eating—even while spread-eagled and strapped to the chair, she’ll stop in mid-
sentence to pop another Butterfinger Bite into her eager maw—and frequently wishes she was dead. She’s been desperately seeking answers. She tried astrology, but it never seemed to work. Same with Tarot cards. Same with individual counseling and group therapy. Same with the “Holy Handkerchief” she’d bought for $39.95 from an Internet faith healer. Nothing worked.
Hunched over the girl’s vagina and sitting on a dusty Ottoman footstool is Juniper Splatzfus, self-described “Pudendal Prognosticator.” Swaddled in puka shells and a Navajo poncho, with long grey hair and those annoying John Denver eyeglasses, Splatzfus is one of a growing number of alternative health-care practitioners who claim they can tell a woman’s future by looking at her vagina.
“Labial soothsaying is not some new crackpot scam,” Splatzfus tells me as her thirteen cats screech and her two exotic birds squawk inside this tiny office which reeks of Nag Champa and whose interior-design scheme relies perhaps a touch too heavily on fuchsia. “It is an ancient practice which dates before Christ. After bathing in sacred waters, Persian women of yore would read each other’s vaginas for sport and pleasure. African witch doctors, after taking nary more than a peep at the labia of a tribal girl on the cusp of puberty, were able to tell with amazing accuracy whether or not she’d remain a spinster. But along came the Christians and the Muslims,” she sneers, “with their big-dick macho male Gods, and they actively suppressed this revered ritual of antiquity.”
Splatzfus, who holds a degree in Advanced Vaginomancy from Talullah Bankhead State College in San Luis Obispo, CA, likens vaginal soothsaying to better-known and more-respected practices such as palmistry and phrenology. She insists that every woman’s labial flaps contain an indelible blueprint for how her life will unfold. “A woman’s pussy lips are the road map to her future,” she says. “Goddess placed the labia there almost like an owner’s manual. You know the little wrinkles and crinkles and creases and folds that make each woman’s labia as unique as a pair of thumbprints? They all contain messages. And my job is to decipher these messages and advise the patient accordingly. Every woman holds a fortune cookie between her legs. My job is to crack open the cookie and read the message out loud.”
“Well, you don’t go merely on instinct, do you?” I ask skeptically. “I mean, there must be some sort of method to this—like in palm-reading, there’s a ‘life line,’ and its length determines how long the person will live. So tell me a little bit about the method.”
“There is a method,” she says with a giggle, “but it employs sacred knowledge, and if I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
“You know, I really, really, REALLY hate that fucking phrase—‘If I told you, I’d have to kill you.’ It’s been used ten million times. It’s not funny, and it’s not original.”
“OK, well,” she retreats, alarmed and possibly aroused by my ballsiness. “See this here?” she says, holding one of Valentina’s labia between her thumb and forefinger and stretching it out to at least a half-foot. “This is a BIG labia. Normally this is not considered cosmetically desirable by our culture, but the wisdom of the ancients tells us that this girl will live a long life. Big labia mean a long life. I also look for wrinkles—lots of wrinkles mean a girl will have many suitors.”
She then focuses her gaze on the hapless strapped whale Valentina. “You will live a long life and have many suitors. Family troubles will rectify themselves—give it time. Financial success is on the horizon, but you will need to work hard on it and not lose focus.” Valentina seems pleased with the forecast.
“And you can tell all this by looking at her vagina?” I ask Splatzfus.
She gazes at me as if I’m stupid. “You can tell everything about a girl by looking at her vagina.”