Authors: Betty Dodson Inga Muscio
Cunt (13 page)
We laughed and splashed and chanted and flooded the whole bathroom.
I hope this experience has a positive effect on Mademoiselle Precious’s sexuality.
I hope she remembers all her life that there’s not a problem in the world with her
jilling off. However, even if our conversation gets lost in her shuffle of growing
up, our little talk heartened me tremendously. I felt like I’d righted an inadvertent
wrong committed against me when I was a little girl.
Felt the cards of karma riffle into place.
In my cosmology, Wilhelm Reich holds the distinction of being the only male psychoanalyst
who could knock on my door and be invited in for tea.
Reich’s books were banned in America for many years, while he himself was ostracized—even
imprisoned—by the U.S. government during McCarthy’s scary reign.
He challenged the puritanical ideas about sexuality in our culture. In laywoman terms,
Reich believed humans store emotions in our muscles. During orgasm, muscles in the
body contract, then relax, thus releasing emotions. Reich asserted that all aspects
of healthy human psychology are dependent upon one’s sexual expression.
When you cry, laugh or feel free as a bird after coming, it is partly because you
just released a bunch of yucky crap that’s been building up inside your body for days,
months, years, possibly your entire lifetime.
A moment of epiphany on this subject occurred after six months of Reichian therapy.
I was at the beach, thinking and watching the waves. The revelation assailed me quite
suddenly, as revelations are wont to do: Each wave is an orgasm. Sometimes they’re
big. Sometimes they’re small. Sometimes they tear faces of cliff from the earth’s
surface. If the ocean did not have waves, it would be a big, salty lake. A lake is
a still pool of water. Personally, I don’t venture into water that doesn’t move. Bored,
malevolent monsters live in bodies of water that do not move.
When women function like the ocean, we live happy, healthy lives. Holding on to stuff
that does not serve us in our present situation creates actual, physical blockages
within our bodies.
Bored, malevolent monsters.
Which, on the individual level, manifest in bitterness, stifled creativity, sexual
perversion and unwillingness to trust, love and/or touch.
Collectively—when an entire society is sexually repressed—phenomena such as war, rape,
racism, greed and wholesale shitty behavior are considered acceptable.
It is difficult to strip away cultural thought-patterns and stereotypes to arrive
at the pulsating naked core of Woman: Cuntlovin’ Fucklove Prophetess. I realized the
enormity of this very task on New Year’s Day in 1995.
I was walking down the street when a gentleman whose family and tribe have lived in
the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years asked me for some spare change.
Due to the rising cost of living, I don’t believe in spare change. As I handed him
a dollar, he peered into my eyes and smiling, asked, “Hey, did you get Any for New
Year’s?”
I was just about to say, “That’s none of your fucking business, dickhead,” but his
eyeballs caught me off guard. He didn’t have perving eyeballs. He had very nice, open
eyeballs with a pretty glint in them. He was just good-naturedly asking me if I rang
in the new year with a celebratory tumble in the sack. And, as it happened, I actually
did ring in the new year in just such a manner.
So I said, “Yeah.”
The gentleman positively
beamed.
He said, “Hey! Me too! Ain’t nothin’ like gettin’ Some on New Year’s to humble ya,
know what I mean?”
As I walked home, I thought about this man and his message. I thought, sex truly is
humbling. I thought, sex, birth, life and death are all humbling. Most of all, I thought
how thankful I was to this gentleman for giving me a beautiful message about sex,
something seldom resonated in society. I tried to think of all the positive, reinforcing
messages about sex I have access to on a general basis whenever I leave my home, or
otherwise subject myself to this culture.
The only one I readily managed to summon was the words of a very nice Lummi gentleman
on New Year’s Day in 1995.
All my life, I’ve absorbed stimuli about sex from my culture, family, friends and
teachers. Most of this information has been hopelessly gnarled all up with violence,
racism, power, purity, shame, denial, guilt, humiliation, victimization, objectification,
rejection and unimaginative stereotypes of sexual identity.
Probably even more stuff than that.
It all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all, all stems from fear of women and our enormous
sexual power.
When we were children, one of my older brother’s favorite means of torment was to
sit down near me, cut a
foul
, noiseless fart and wait. As soon as he ascertained that I’d detected his gastric
horror, he’d restrain my hands so I could neither run nor cover my nose, and diabolically
whisper, “Silence is deadly.”
While his farts miraculously never threatened my life, I agree with this sentiment
wholeheartedly.
Since the early days of the church, women had been barred from speaking in the house
of God as well as preaching, teaching, or speaking in public: “As in all the churches
of the saints,” wrote St. Paul, “wives should keep silence in the churches. They are
not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there
is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful
for a woman to speak in church.” This prohibition grew out of the synthesis of separate
traditions, the Greek, which taught that women were by nature inferior to men and
therefore should be their subordinates, and the Biblical, which suggested to many
readers that women be perpetually silent as a punishment for the sins of Eve, whose
garrulousness brought disaster to all mankind: “The curse of God pronounced on your
sex weighs still on the world. Guilty you must bear its hardships,” wrote Tertullian
in the third century, “You are the devil’s gateway . . . you softened up with your
cajoling words the man against whom the devil could not prevail by force.” Over the
centuries these themes hardened until silence became a virtue particularly recommended
to women. “By silence, indeed, women achieve the fame of eloquence,” wrote one Renaissance
commentator. (Brown, 1986, 59)
The enforced silence of women allows men’s fear of us and our sexual power to reign
unchallenged. Thus the wisdom of brilliant people such as Audre Lorde is not venerated,
and we are still sent to schools where idiotic puds like Aristotle are worshipped.
A-hem:
Just as it sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents,
and sometimes not, so the offspring produced by a female are sometimes female, sometimes
not, but male. The reason is that the female is as it were a deformed male; and the
menstrual charge is semen, though . . . it lacks one constituent, and only one, the
principle of Soul.... Thus the physical part, the body, comes from the female, and
the Soul from the male, since the Soul is the essence of a particular body.... females
are weaker and colder in their nature, and we should look upon the female state as
being as it were a deformity, though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature.
(Aristotle, as quoted in Brown, 1986, 188)
To the best of my knowledge, it wasn’t until 1968 when Valerie Solanas published her
S. C. U.M. Manifesto
, that this particular form of intolerance was duplicated with any serious eloquence:
It is now technically possible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that
matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so.
Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a
biological accident: the y (male) gene is an incomplete x (female) gene, that is,
has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female,
a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally
limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.
The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself, incapable of empathizing
or identifying with others, of love, friendship, affection or tenderness. He is a
completely isolated unit, incapable of rapport with anyone. His responses are entirely
visceral, not cerebral; his intelligence is a mere tool in the service of his drives
and needs, he is incapable of mental passion, mental interaction; he can’t relate
to anything other than his own physical sensations. He is a half dead, unresponsive
lump, incapable of giving or receiving pleasure or happiness; consequently, he is
at best an utter bore, an inoffensive blob, since only those capable of absorption
in others can be charming. He is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans
and apes, and is far worse off than apes because, unlike the apes, he is capable of
a large array of negative feelings—hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame,
doubt—and moreover he is
aware
of what he is and isn’t.
While Aristotle is lauded in our culture, Valerie Solanas is considered—when she’s
considered at all—to be a terribly unhinged individual who died homeless on the streets
of San Francisco in 1988. Whereas, if you changed the pronouns throughout her manifesto,
and backdated it a couple of decades, you’d probably have the ramblings of a brilliant,
Pulitzer Prize— winning male scholar.
See how that works?
Women and silence have been historically mashed together like potatoes and cheese.
Our true erotic nature is not exalted. Rather, it is mutated into some manageable
illusion created and sustained by men. Meanwhile, the Washington Monument alone attests
to the grandeur with which male erotic nature is glorified.
This same pattern is found in the scant funding for both breast cancer research and
the risk of female-to-female transmission of the HIV virus, versus the gazillions
of dollars poured into research for prostate cancer, and the risk of male-to-male
transmission of the HIV virus.
In an interview in
Bust
#10, the beautiful, genius porn star, Nina Hartley describes what’s at stake here.
I got the first edition of
Our Bodies
,
Ourselves
for my 13th brithday and it was the most powerful book I’d ever read next to
Sex for One
, which saved my life. Sex is enlightening. The reality is that once a woman knows
that the pleasure goddess is at the end of her arm, then she can swing her hand in
front of her crotch anytime and woops! there it is, anytime she wants. It’s really
easy—let’s see: teddy bears, washing machines, jacuzzi jets, vibrators, cunnilingus,
fucking, ooo, lots of things can do it. Women are denied pleasure because pleasure
is very, very powerful, very, very potent. (93)
Women reach orgasm via our clitoris, through contractions of the muscles deep within
our cunts or by stimulation of our G-spots. Sometimes all three, or any combination.
Women ejaculate. Fingers or other apparati strategically placed up a woman’s ass can
lead to ten-minute-long multiple orgasms. Women can come just by looking at—or imagining—some
major turn-on for a while. Women can come over and over, one orgasm right after the
last. Women have orgasms in many, many different ways.
Men, on the other hand, come when their cock is stroked, via a hand, mouth, cunt or
anus. Many men can also achieve orgasm through stimulation of their prostate gland,
via their asshole. Sadly though, the general feeling among straight men is, “I ain’t
no fucking faggot, so keep clear of my ass.” Thus, a lot of men deprive themselves
of this (I’ve gathered) highly pleasurable sensation.
After a man comes, he’s usually spent for at least fifteen minutes, and generally,
that’s it for the session. This, of course, is in the event that he has not studied
any Tantric-type breathing and muscle control practices, which the vast majority of
men in our culture don’t have the opportunity, inclination or self-discipline to explore.
As a dick is a finite structure, with a visible beginning and end, so too is the potential
for a male orgasm.
As a cunt is infinite—how many bloody mysteries and future generations are hiding
up there, somewhere?—so too is the potential for female orgasm.