the timboucher experience

I guess it was Freud who really popularized the mythological image of the vagina dentata: the toothed vagina. The concept fit well for him to show that in human culture all over the world, men exhibited a psychological castration anxiety (the flip-side of so-called penis envy in females).

This is from an interesting article on the subject at Rotten.com:

Rather than being a pan-human terror, vagina dentata crops up most often in societies where women “have no teeth”, where they have no power to enforce their words, their will. Little wonder then that some men in such cultures fear those teeth will one day crop up “down there” and wreak their revenge.

This is also interesting from an article on a health site about the legendary vagina dentata:

Apparently this vaginal teeth motif is in myths and stories and even jokes all over the world, showing up as a symbol of aggression in women, or of weapons that they can use to rape and kill men. In many of the stories, apparently the women marry the men who detoothed their vaginas and made them safe.

Grossly enough, this article actually says that there are documented cases of vagina dentata occurring in real life, thanks to dermoid cysts. A dermoid cyst is a tumor consisting of embryonic skin cells, and in them can be formed dermis, epidermis, hair follicles, sweat glands, hair, and even bone or teeth. They are very rare but occur most commonly in the ovary and brain.

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