Abstract
Sexual experiences, rather than being neutral, are specifically male or female. Yet at present no conceptual framework exists for representing female sexual desire. This has resulted in frequent misrepresentations of female sexual experience. To correct this, a labial framework is proposed, not to replace or oppose a phallic framework, but to exist alongside it. The lips of the mouth and those of the genitals provide a felicitous doubling of sexuality and speech to represent female desire and sexual pleasure as labial. Phallic and labial rhythms are organized differently in sexual arousal and desire, since, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, “Man ‘gets stiff,’ but woman ‘gets wet.’” The labial framework therefore represents female psychosexuality more in terms of “wetware” than of “hardware.”
By our lips we are women.
Long ago Freud claimed that “the libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women” (1905, p. 219). One would be hard-pressed to find a contemporary psychoanalyst who accepts this claim, yet few representations of female sexuality (perhaps none) have been elaborated independently of a male phallic framework. This leaves us with no female images or symbols “to counterbalance the monopoly of the phallus in representing desire” (Benjamin 1988, p. 88).
The participants in a recent psychoanalytic panel, “The Changing Language of Female Development,” discussed how a lag in the development of appropriate language has impeded psychoanalytic theories as well as clinical listening (Long 2005). Some panelists insisted on changes to counter prevailing phallocentric representations—by, for instance, replacing “phallic phase” with “early genital phase,” “oedipal phase” with “triangular phase,” and “castration anxieties” with “genital anxieties” (p. 1174). The replacements are neutral, inclusive with respect to sexual difference, which of course is an improvement. I will, however, argue here that genital and sexual experiences are not neutral, and that we therefore need specifically female (and male) representations of sexuality, without which there is a danger that a phallic symbolic will continue to pose as neutral, as bisexual, and will still organize the representation of all sexual experience. For example, Elise (2008) notes that girls inhibit sexuality and aggression because of a representation of self as genitally powerless, a gendered inhibition and experience of shame. Seeking a representation of female potency that is expansive and can support experiences of sexual enthusiasm and excitement, she suggests detaching “phallic” from the penis and using it to speak about female psychosexual experience. Phallic metaphors lead to strong affective and somatic responses, they have “punch,” which is what Elise is after. She notes that “phallus” refers anatomically both to “the penis, the clitoris, or the sexually undifferentiated embryonic organ out of which either of these develops” (Elise 2008, p. 91, n.1). The sexual organs of males and females are indeed homologous (Kestenberg 1968; Laqueur 1990; Balsam 2003), 1 but this does not mean that male and female sexual experiences are homologous. Elise’s suggestion has a bisexual appeal, but bisexuality is a combination of two sexualities, and if one of these is represented in terms of the other, how will our terminological lag be overcome? For bisexuality not to be represented by one sexuality masquerading as two, we need to find a way to speak about female sexuality that neither borrows from, nor reduces to, male sexual experience. As Irigaray (1985a) cautions, “if we keep on speaking the same language, we’re going to reproduce the same history.” She continues: “if we don’t invent a language, if we don’t find our body’s language, it will have too few gestures to accompany our story” (p. 214). 2 In order to think “outside the phallus,” I suggest we turn to a different framework for female sexual representation, not to replace or oppose a phallic framework, but to exist alongside it. I propose a labial framework. Rooted in the morphology of the female body, that is, in the experiences of female anatomy, not the anatomy “itself,” a labial framework offers a powerful representation of female sexual experience, pleasure, and desire.
Sexuality, gender, and sex, though conceptually distinct, are experientially intertwined. I suspend considerations of gender here to attend more intensely to sexuality and its relation to the female sex, in order to theorize its representation as labial.
Contours of A Labial Framework
Irigaray (1985a) provocatively writes, “By our lips we are women” (pp. 209–210). The lips of the mouth and the lips of the genitals make for a felicitous doubling of sexuality and speech for representing female desire and sexual pleasure. Lips are inherently double, irreducible to one or to the penis. Thus, a labial representation is irreducible to a phallic one. Since in addition the labia fill no reproductive function, a labial sexuality is irreducible to reproduction, without excluding it.
Irigaray (1993a) conceives of lips as a “threshold” that both hides and reveals an interior mucous place (p. 18). A threshold is a limit between inside and outside, a limen. Liminality, in turn, is a space between precedent and possibility (Turner 1974), between the familiar and the unknown, wherein paradigms can be reimagined and rethought. Akin to a transitional space (Winnicott 1967), a liminal space invites creative thinking, so instead of traversing this threshold let us instead pause and linger on the labia in order to imagine some contours of a labial framework for representing female sexuality.
Focusing on the phenomenology (not the pathology) 3 of labial psychosexuality, I begin at the beginning. Both Freud and Laplanche identify the first erotic stirrings as labial. As eroticism spreads through the body, the impulses of female sexuality have been conceptualized as diffuse, in a sense of unorganized, confused, and immature, to be organized into separate zones as an achievement of maturity (Kulish 1991). This confusion originates in a misrepresentation of female sexual experience according to a “logic” of solids, within a framework of male psychosexual theory. I suggest that a framework for representing female psychosexuality be constructed according to a “logic” of viscosity and fluidity, that is, by thinking more in terms of “wetware” than of “hardware” (Harris 2005). 4 The lack of a framework for representing female sexual pleasure and desire has often resulted in shame and a deflation of female genital narcissism (Elise 2008). This brings into focus the importance of the transmission of sexuality, a mother’s response to her daughter’s sexual arousal (Fonagy 2008), as well as an argument for maternal sexual pleasure as undomesticated (Stein 1998a,b, 2008). The mythical figure Baubo helps disrupt psychoanalytic norms of maternal transferences as nonsexual by exposing her labia in a gesture of nondefensive exhibitionism (Kulish and Holtzman 2002). Finally, a new representation of the clitoris reveals a large and largely internal organ that swells to double or triple its size as it soaks up sexual excitement (Tuana 2004; Stiritz 2008). Perhaps exacerbating the fear among some that giving the clitoris a name gives a girl permission to experience sexual pleasure (Kulish 1991), I suggest that representations of the engorged clitoris be displayed along with diagrams of penile erections and the female organs of reproduction. I conclude that a labial framework for representing female sexual pleasure has the power to capture what Hesiod called the “stinging desire and limb-gnawing passion” of female eroticism (cited in Tuana 2004).
In the Beginning was the Labial
Molly, a five-year-old girl, was in bed listening to a story. Holding onto her “blanky,” a small smelly corner of what had been a blanket, she put two fingers in her mouth and began sucking. Soon her eyes were half closed and pleasure spread across her face, as saliva glistened around her lips.
In noting the pleasure and satisfaction a child finds “by sucking rhythmically at some part of the skin or mucous membrane,” Freud (1905) locates an erotogenic significance in the labial region. He continues, in what I consider a labial mode: “It was the child’s first and most vital activity, his sucking at his mother’s breast, or at substitutes for it, that must have familiarized him with this pleasure. The child’s lips, in our view, behave like an erotogenic zone, and no doubt stimulation by the warm flow of milk is the cause of the pleasurable sensation” (p. 181).
According to Freud, then, the first erotic stirrings are labial. They are anaclitic, leaning not on external caregivers but, intrapsychically, on functional, self-preservative instincts: “the first sexual satisfactions are experienced in attachment to the bodily functions necessary for the preservation of life” (Freud 1912, pp. 180–181). As labial eroticism swells, the desire for repeating the pleasure detaches from the need for nourishment. Laplanche (1976) follows Freud in locating the emergence of a psychosexual drive in the lips and the tongue, as well as in holding psychosexual drives to be rooted in, leaning on, functional and nonsexual instincts. The mouth is simultaneously a sexual and a functional organ. The nipple and the flow of milk stimulate the lips and tongue, as the object, aim, and source of the drive are intimately entwined, issuing simply in “It’s coming in by the mouth” (Laplanche 1976, p. 17).
If Freud and Laplanche are correct and the first erotic stirrings are labial for both male and female children, it might be that the amplification of pleasure in the swelling, moistening folds of the genital labia unfolds a sexual pleasure that continues in a girl’s experience, while these labial erotic stirrings diminish in a boy’s. Within the traditional, phallic representation of desire, the sexual drive aims to release its tension and return to a state of equilibrium or quiescence. 5 This framework has captured a boy’s sexual experience. (It may be that this would profit from a reconceptualization as well, but that is outside my scope here). According to Hägglund and Piha (1980), boys cathect their genitals as a protrusion of the body that is visible, moves, and changes form, while girls cathect their genital zone at a very early age and invest it with sensations connected with inner space. “Feeling with her fingers, a little girl cathects her genitals as a place in whose folds outside impulses can be received and through which there is access to the inside of her body” (p. 258). 6 Within the theoretical framework of phallic sexuality, female sexuality, experienced in an inner space, has appeared diffuse and unorganized. Within a theoretical framework that offers a different mode of representation, labial sexuality can be articulated as a matrix of erotic sensations that circulate in the body in waves of swelling wet and mucous engorgement and excitement.
Diffuse and Diffusing Erotic Experiences
Regarded through a phallic lens, diffuse eroticism is conceptualized as immature hazy awareness, as unfocused bodily sensations in undifferentiated parts of the female genitals, which has led to a “cloacal” fantasy—“that is, of a single body cavity consisting of rectum, vagina, and urethra combined” (Kulish 1991, p. 517; see also Fogel 1998).
There clearly is no such cavity in human females, though Figure 1 represents the female genital area as largely undifferentiated (compare this to the plethora of parts labeled in Figure 2, the male genital area). It seems that what is captured as diffuse has become confused and (mis)represented as a single site, rather than conceptualized as a fluid process, a pleasurable sensation spreading, diffusing throughout the body. 7 This in spite of the etymology of “diffuse” (from the Latin dis+fundere, to pour out and permit or cause to spread freely) and of the closely related adjective “effusive,” or overflowing. Troubled by the pejorative connotation of “diffuse” and by anxieties over diffuse genital sensation, Elise (2000) urges us to think of the difference conveyed were female sexual sensation “to be described as extensive, rather than diffuse” (p. 128). She suggests, elsewhere, that “too much emphasis is placed here on the body, with insufficient attention given to other factors interacting with it” (Elise 1998, p. 432), such as object-relatedness. I would argue not that too much emphasis has been placed on the body, but that a one-sided emphasis, filtered through a lens of male sexual experience, has been representative of the body, with insufficient emphasis placed on the body in female sexual experience.
(Christensen and Telford 1978, p. 182)
(Kimber et al. 1966, p. 708)
Poland (2006) argues that unboundaried and ungendered open sensuality is polymorphously normal sexuality and not, as Freud thought, perverse (p. 482; Freud 1905). 8 If it is possible to reappropriate the term diffusion—or, more accurately, diffusing (as gays have reappropriated queer)—diffusing may then be at the core of developmentally “normal” sexuality. I suggest that the lust for expansive and overflowing delight amplifies and spreads throughout the body in female sexual experiences, but has been diminished and considered immature when conceived within a phallic framework. So how might a diffusing and effusive eroticism be manifest and thought through a different lens, within a labial framework?
Karen Horney (1933) claimed that there is a close connection between oral and genital libido and, contrary to Helene Deutsch and Melanie Klein, that oral libido is not transferred to the genital zone but manifests itself there also from the very beginning (p. 66, n. 8). According to Barnett (1966), there is evidence that the vagina receives stimulation in neonate and infant girls and that “the girl ‘knows’ from her nursing experience that sucking the nipple causes genital stimulation” (p. 138). Vulvo-vaginal engorgements and vaginal lubrication accompany neonatal suckling at the breast (Masters and Johnson 1966), giving rise to rhythmic pulsations experienced as erotically pleasurable (Torsti 1993). This pleasure returns in sexual play and also in the nursing mother’s experience of her child sucking her nipple, as illustrated in this brief clinical vignette from a fifty-year-old woman in her third year of analysis.
I can’t begin to understand my parents’ concept of sexuality. To me all the experiences of sexuality, pregnancy, childbirth are related as sensuous bodily experiences. It stuns me when I think how they compartmentalized. How do you separate them? When a child sucks on your nipple and you have contractions like an orgasm . . . it is on a continuum, and none of it is bad. My picture of sexuality is . . . it all falls clearly into place. . . . It was a complete surprise in nursing my daughter that those were the sensations. It was never spoken about. Isn’t that amazing?
What do you make of it?
It’s bizarre. I know in my heart that it’s not being able to acknowledge or speak of it that causes it not to fall in place. It made me laugh when that happened. It all made so much sense—clearly a different experience. Not being able to speak of it must be what causes confusion.
Any thoughts about that?
It’s the bizarre rules of religion that women are sluts or virgins, that any woman who dresses like that deserves it, that sexual pleasure is not a good thing.
What about a woman’s sexual pleasure?
It was never a topic of discussion. It was not on the table.
The child’s “knowing” is what Bollas (1987) calls “the unthought known” (p. 282). In hypothesizing that the infant experiences the mother more as an environment than as an object, he articulates the mother’s care as “the unthought known,” a knowledge in which the sense of a person is registered somatically. The structure of the unthought known is something not yet thought or thought out, as is, by extension, a labial framework for representing female sexual experience. The experience of “nippled” libido, manifest also as genital contractions and pulsations, is still unrepresented, indicating the need for a framework for articulating these experiences, “putting them on the table,” so that female sexuality is no longer represented as confused and insufficiently focalized sexuality, but as fluid, effuse/overflowing, and polymorphously “normal” sexuality. I now turn to add some texture to a labial framework by considering psychosexual development, sexual rhythms, sexual wetness, and spinning excitement.
Textures of A Labial Framework
Representations of Psychosexual Development
While there is a claim of transfer from oral to anal to genital zone in the traditional representation of psychosexual development, the “unthought” or insufficiently articulated experience of erotic bodily sensations in girls seems more accurately conceptualized as arousal saturating multiple areas of the body simultaneously. The secretions that accompany sexual arousal, the mucous, viscous fluids generated, as waves of erotic excitement swell throughout and deep inside the body, are features of female experience throughout childhood and are constitutive of the experience of being a girl (Lasky 2000, p. 1392). 9 The experience of becoming wet and engorged is so specifically female that it is unrepresentable within a phallic framework that conceptualizes sexual arousal as becoming hard and erect.
Kulish finds Kestenberg’s proposal of an inner genital stage (1982) not to fit the developmental framework of the standard psychosexual sequence, but to be “tacked on” in an unintegrated way (Kulish 2000, p. 1371). There is a theoretical kinship here with Gilligan’s argument in In A Different Voice (1982): The girls in Lawrence Kohlberg’s experiments were considered morally immature compared to boys of the same age, because they were judged according to a theoretical framework that did not accurately conceptualize girls’ moral development. Similarly, an inner genital stage seems “tacked on” to the standard phallic framework that represents male psychosexual development and experience, causing girls’ sexual experience to appear unorganized and immature. If, however, the dynamics of girls’ sexual desire and development are viewed within a framework of specifically female sexuality—a labial framework—a different picture emerges. Rather than mapping girls’ psychosexual development onto the traditional successive stages, a developmental progression that proceeds from one erotized zone to another (while ignoring erotized nipples), female psychosexual development might be represented as a dynamic system that varies continuously (Lorenz 1993, pp. 12–13) and amplifies in intensity.
According to chaos theories, what appears random and disorganized (take for example the breaking of waves on the ocean shore) are processes of nonlinearity and complexity (Lorenz 1993, p. 4). Harris (2005) argues that chaos theory, what Thelen and Smith (1994) prefer to call nonlinear dynamic systems theory, designates a new approach to studying living systems, in particular developmental processes such as gender development. Using chaos theory, Harris abandons descriptions of gender development as linear processes with predetermined outcomes. Adopting such a model of change for a labial framework, a girl’s psychosexual development might be mapped as a nonlinear dynamic system and placed alongside the conceptualization of a boy’s psychosexual development.
A Brief Foray into Chaos Theory
Chaos theory challenges the mechanistic view of the world held by classical science, wherein chance plays no part and every event can be determined by initial conditions (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). The classical science paradigm emphasizes order, uniformity, equilibrium, and linear relationships, all governed within a closed system by universal laws. According to chaos theory, most of reality is more accurately characterized as open systems that are changing, unstable, and unordered. The universal laws of classical science apply only to limited and local regions of reality. Similarly, the theoretical framework of phallic sexuality applies only to limited regions of sexual experience. Chaos theory focuses on understanding how a system and its component parts interact, rather than on isolating and examining those component parts (Piers 2000, p. 6). Adapting this to a labial framework contributes to reconceptualizing libido as a matrix of polymorphously interacting erotic sensations that circulate in the body.
It is a fundamental tenet of chaos theory that nonequilibrium is a source of order (Juarrero 1999, p. 119). Order emerges out of chaos. Internal interactions and external disturbances are both required for change and allow a system as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization (Waldrop 1992). Complex self-organizing systems are adaptive, not merely passively responsive. They are dynamic, not just complicated, but spontaneous, and have an ability to bring order and chaos into some balance (Waldrop 1992). The balance point is the “edge of chaos,” a site of constant fluctuation where systems, poised between order and surprise, appear best able to coordinate complex activities and evolve (Kaufmann 1995, p. 26). A labial rhythm of female sexual arousal exemplifies sexuality at the edge of chaos.
A nonlinear system has an inherent capacity for discontinuous, nonproportional, and unpredictable change or evolution (Piers 2000, 2005). While traditional psychoanalytic models of character, mind, and development have adhered to linear and equilibrium-seeking dynamics, chaos theory considers equilibrium to be a limiting and temporary state, rather than the desired destination (Piers 2000, p. 11). Female sexual arousal aims at effusion and expansion, not a restoration of equilibrium. Piers argues that a mind’s capacity for multiplicity is determined by the mind’s organizing attitudes. In character pathology we see severely restrictive organizing attitudes that remain unresponsive to changing conditions, while healthy states of mind are characterized by variability and sensitive responsiveness (p. 5). Healthy sexuality, as an unstable chaotic system, would be not random or disorganized, but sensitive and actively responsive.
According to chaos theory, change and development are not incremental, stepwise, and theoretically predictable, as they are in linear systems, nor are they proportional. A small change can result in dramatic effects, as illustrated by the so-called butterfly effect: a butterfly’s flapping wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas (see, e.g., Waldrop 1992). Adapting this concept to psychotherapeutic change, Piers (2000) suggests that a change in an analyst’s affective attunement can destabilize a patient’s current adaptive state and lead to nonproportional and unpredictable transitions (p. 29). At the moment of insight, the mind, the system, is unstable and open to recognition, articulation, and integration of formerly disavowed aspects of subjective experience (p. 30). Such momentary destabilization can lead ultimately to structural change, a qualitative change in psychic organization. The profound effects of a small change capture how a small shift in lingual flutter on the clitoris can set off an orgasmic turbulence that cascades through the body.
Rather than thinking of developmental change as a stepwise and linear process moving through stages according to deterministic codes, nonlinear dynamic systems are understood according to a topological model as a landscape (Juarrero 1999, p. 151). Even learning how to walk is envisioned as development evolving in a dynamic landscape, not simply as maturational progression toward increasing stability (Thelen and Smith 1994). Psychosexual development can also be seen as emergent patterns of desire that vary continuously and amplify in intensity as a girl moves through her sexual landscape.
Phallic Rhythms and Labial Rhythms
Turning to the nature, phenomenology, and experience of sexual arousal and desire, the phallus has, as Irigaray (1985a) puts it, “dominate[d], as a keystone, a system of the economy of desire” (p. 110). Freud (1900) famously interprets dreams of going up and down staircases as representations of the sexual act. “We come to the top in a series of rhythmical movements and with increasing breathlessness and then, with a few rapid leaps, we can get to the bottom again. Thus the rhythmical pattern of copulation is reproduced in going upstairs” (p. 355, n. 2). This linear conceptualization of sexual rhythm characterizes a phallic rhythm organized according to the principle of constancy. The tension of mounting and breathlessness is relieved when “we can get to the bottom again,” when equilibrium is restored. Galatzer-Levy (2009), referring to Thom (1975), has noted that the worldview derived from linear mathematics has successfully described the physical world and been reinforced by an inattention to phenomena not encompassed within this view (p. 998). Discrediting the privilege of linearity, Galatzer-Levy continues: “The very term ‘non-linear’ reflects a linear worldview. Referring to non-linear systems is like referring to non-elephant biological organisms. It suggests a centrality for linearity that it does not have” (p. 998). Referring to nonlinear dynamics systems theory, rather than to chaos theory, in theorizing a labial framework for representing female sexuality might, pace Thelen and Smith, similarly suggest a centrality for a phallic representation of sexuality, which it does not, or should not, have. Decentering a phallic rhythm of sexual desire opens the way for conceptualizing desires as sexually different, with at least two modes of arousal represented. A woman’s labial experience of sexual arousal might then be conceptualized, within a dynamics of fluidity and viscosity, 10 to capture the experience of mucus being generated in the swelling of labial and other vulvar tissue. 11
A labial rhythm might organize female sexual arousal and desire according to a principle of fusion and diffusion. Lynn (1998) suggests that these are processes of “retroactive smoothing” conceived according to a logic of continuous differentiations that captures heterogeneous bodies emerging, gathering stability, and dispersing freely in the same gesture (pp. 143–144). An example of retroactive smoothing is the way insect or bird swarms describe a stabilization after territorial expansion (p. 144). The internal order of these supple bodies is “capable of flexibly responding to vague external forces through smooth retroactive gestures” (p. 145), as the vagina responds immediately to displacement with its at once yielding and constricting nature (Sevely 1987, p. 110). Similarly, a labial rhythm might be captured, according to a principle of fusion and diffusion, as expanding and retroactively smoothing, contracting and swelling, unraveling and melting, dispersing and gathering within fluid boundaries. Labial, “nonlinear,” and complex patterns of arousal are manifest in multiform ways among porous and overlapping libidinal spaces. Sexual arousal experienced as disequilibrium at the edge of chaos (Harris 2005, p. 172) yields multiple orgasmic crests that might be conceptualized as turbulence, that play and whirl on that edge, unraveling, spreading, gathering and dissipating, and breaking like waves on the ocean shore. A labial rhythm, akin to vibrations in a magnetic field, aims at effusion and expansion, not a restoration of equilibrium. To adapt Loewald’s characterization of relatedness in love (1988), female sexual desire can be described as “like waves, oscillations, vibrations in a magnetic field, not like a discharge phenomenon” (p. 464). Diffusing and fusing sexuality, and libidinal fluidity, might then be conceptualized as complex dynamic processes, as moving according to labial rhythms.
Sexual Wetness
A woman around forty years old opened a Monday session saying, “We had sex this weekend.” She and her husband had had infrequent and uninspired sex after the birth of their child. She sometimes acquiesced to her husband’s overtures out of a feeling of marital duty. This day she said, “I asked him, ‘Do you want to have sex?’ I felt sexy, hot.” When I asked what that was like, she said, “Turned on, thrilled, wet, like I can’t get enough.” While that discussion continued to explore what had caused the change in her libido, I want to take from it the excitement of a wet vulva, of slippery labia, and of mucous engorgement in feeling “hot.”
Hite (1976) asked women what arousal feels like, and a sampling of the answers suggests a dynamics of “wetware” (Harris 2005): “tingling, warmth, fullness, dampness, energy” (p. 139); “my body becomes soft and fluid” (p. 141); “electricity with outward streaks” (p. 141); “melting away from my anchors” (p. 143); “vaginal contractions radiate out over my body in waves” (p. 158); “just before orgasm . . . the moistness, heat and strength are all very satisfying” (p. 161).
Aristotle connected female fluids with pleasure: “the pleasure she experiences is sometimes similar to that of the male, and also is attended by a liquid discharge” (Barnes 1984, Book I:727b34–36). So also did Galen (ca. 130–ca. 200), physician to Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who distinguished female procreative from female pleasurable fluids, saying of the latter, “This liquid not only stimulates . . . the sexual act but also is able to give pleasure and moisten the passageway as it escapes. It manifestly flows from women as they experience the greatest pleasure in coitus” (quoted in Sevely 1987, p. 51). Following Sevely, Bell (1991) explores female ejaculation, the expulsion of fluids as a result of stimulation of “the G-spot.” 12 Her focus, thus, is more on female orgasmic response than on sexual excitement and arousal.
Noting that there is no theory of sexual excitement, even in the psychoanalytic literature, Stoller (1979) set out to formulate one. His interest, however, is in the etiology, the origin of lust, not the phenomenology, the experience of it, and his central argument is that hostility generates and enhances sexual excitement (p. 6). His conceptualization of arousal, revealed by his imagery, is similar to Freud’s, but instead of getting to the top of a staircase, Stoller’s image is that of getting to the edge of a cliff (p. 32). The conception of arousal remains organized within a phallic framework of desire.
Simone de Beauvoir (1949) claims that “woman is thoroughly indoctrinated with common notions that endow masculine passion with splendor and make a shameful abdication of feminine sex feeling: woman’s intimate experience confirms the fact of this asymmetry” (p. 361). She notes that the male organ is “simple and neat as a finger,” while the female one is “concealed, mucous, and humid” (p. 362). “Man ‘gets stiff,’ but woman ‘gets wet,’” and the sexual rhythms of the female and the male do not coincide (p. 369). Beauvoir describes female sexual pleasure as “a system of waves that rhythmically arise, disappear, and reform, attain from time to time a paroxysmal condition, become vague, and sink down without ever quite dying out. Because no definite term is set, woman’s sex feeling extends toward infinity” (p. 371).
This captures the principle of fusion and diffusion, of expansion and retroactive smoothing, as well as wetness. The pejorative connotation of “diffuse” emerges more clearly as being the negative of the precise conclusion of male ejaculation. The pattern of male sexual arousal is, according to Beauvoir, finite and discontinuous; it “rises like an arrow . . . and dies abruptly in the orgasm,” while the pattern of female desire “extends toward infinity” (p. 371).
“The most frequent evidence of female sexual desire,” though not the only, “is the expression of sexual fluids” (Sevely 1987, p. 95). According to Sevely, the ejaculation of female fluids during sexual stimulation was part of folk knowledge until the twentieth century, when physicians denied it, though no one, she notes, denies that “sexual stimulation makes the vagina rapidly become very wet” (p. 64). 13 She points out that “orgasm” is derived from the Greek verb meaning “to swell with moisture” and that the little lips, the labia minora, were in Greek called the nymphae, or water goddesses (p. 65). Historically, the goddesses of nature have been associated with water and fluids. Aphrodite was born in the water, and Ishtar was the goddess of the sea and of menstrual fluids (Sevely 1987, p. 52). Male actors playing the parts of women in Greek comedy wore “bags of fluid to denote sexual excitement” (Dickinson 1949, quoted in Sevely 1987, p. 65). In Japanese the word for having intercourse is nure, which means “to grow wet” (p. 65). And Helena, speaking of her unrequited love for Bertram, in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (I: iii), refers to “the waters of my love” (quoted in Sevely 1987, p. 91).
Wetness as a response to sexual excitement abounds (not surprisingly) in the lesbian pornography of N. Foster: Wet: True Lesbian Sex Stories (2002). A sampling of wetness in these stories includes “Did I mention I was already dripping wet?” (p. 4); “I can hear myself make a little sucking noise, it’s so wet down there” (p. 5); “I am slippery and I want it” (p. 5); “I feel so full and I can hear my wetness as the slippery purple thing goes in and out” (p. 6). These expressions of sexual arousal capture more bluntly the moistness, waves, fluidity, and melting that Hite recorded in her interviews with women.
Far from being the passive space, “a vessel in the service of the penis” (Sevely 1987, p. 99) suggested by Fallopio’s naming of the vagina (Latin for “sheath,” “scabbard”) in 1561, the vagina is a complex and active space that responds immediately to displacement (p. 103). During stimulation it is actively altered by the swelling of several sexually responsive parts, which, together with constricting muscles, create the “clasping action” of the vagina (p. 121). The Dutch anatomist Regnier de Graaf claimed in 1672 that the function of the female prostate, or corpus glandulosum, is “to generate a pituito-serous juice which makes women more libidinous with its pungency and saltiness and lubricates their sexual parts in agreeable fashion during coitus” (de Graaf 1672, quoted in Sevely 1987, p. 70). According to de Graaf, women can also be “stirred to this pleasure by ‘frisky fingers,’ and . . . ‘in libidinous women’ the liquid ‘often rushes out at the mere sight of a handsome man’” (Sevely p. 71).
Thus the generation of highly erotic sexual fluids contributes to the excitement of a wet vulva, of slippery labia, and of mucous engorgement in female sexual desire, in feeling “hot.”
Spinning Excitement
Adding to the complexity of female sexual desire, Kulish, appealing to both Kestenberg (1975) and Montgrain (1983), finds that circular movements and waves capture female sexual experience better than thrusts or spasms (Kulish 1991). According to her, the twirling or spinning games girls play represent both an expression of sexual excitement and an attempt to contain it. She suggests that the imagery in girls’ fantasies of endlessly spinning, like a ballerina or a figure skater on ice, captures, and is characteristic of, the sexual excitement of girls. This resonates with Irigaray’s reading of the fort-da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1920; Irigaray 1993b). Irigaray claims that girls and boys make different gestures and that the fort-da game expresses a male gesture that has posed as neutral because the child has been thought of as neuter, an “it” (Irigaray 1993b, pp. 94–95). Insisting that children are sexually different, she identifies this gesture as characteristic of a boy and claims that a girl would not make the same gesture.
Freud (1920) relates that his grandson Ernst played with a string tied around a spool. He threw the spool away from himself saying “o-o-o-o,” which Freud and his daughter took to mean fort (“gone”), and then retrieved it, “hail[ing] its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [‘there’]” (p. 15). Irigaray argues that while it is a fact that Ernst is a boy, the child could not have been a girl. A girl does not make the same gestures as a boy (when the mother goes away). The gesture of fort-da is phallic, a linear move like the to-and-fro of a penile thrust. A phallic rhythm is one of presence and absence, of tension and discharge. A girl’s gesture would instead be expressed as a whirling around. She might “tr[y] to reproduce around and within her an energetic circular movement that protects her from abandonment” (Irigaray 1993b, p. 98). A girl might throw herself to the ground in distress, play with a doll, or perhaps dance “to create a territory of her own in relation to the mother” (p. 97), but she would not “throw away the mother and retrieve her as an object,” a spool, in an attempt to master the loss of the mother’s presence (p. 98). Her gesture is relational rather than assimilating or subordinating. 14
The textures of a labial framework for representing female sexual desire, then, include (but are not completed by) conceptualizations of psychosexual development as processes of nonlinearity and complexity: rhythms of arousal as expanding and smoothing, contracting and swelling, or unraveling and melting; experiences of wetness and mucous engorgement as responses to sexual excitement; gestural patterns and fantasies of spinning and whirling around. These could begin to move psychoanalytic thinking toward a theory of specifically female sexual excitement.
Transmissions of Sexuality
The receptivity of the object is intrinsic to relating, and, if a relational gesture is to flourish as sexual excitement, the (m)other must be receptive, open to receiving the gesture. The capacity to freely experience sexual pleasure is importantly related to the transmission of sexuality from parent to child. Therefore, if a parent’s sexual desire is inhibited, he or she is likely to transmit it laced with shame and doubt. 15
Normative female sexuality has been riddled with splits treated as complementarities, that is, as differences conceived according to a logic of opposites (Benjamin 1998). One such split is between maternity and pleasure. Sexy and maternal do not go together (Elise 2007). Another is between sexual pleasure and the mind. The female mind has been desexed on the assumption that women cannot be both intellectually creative and sexual, a mind/body split. Freud (1905), however, noted that the sexual researches of children are connected to, and foster, curiosity, learning, and creativity (see also Elise 2007). But in identifying the female sexual aim as reproductive, intellectual creativity and development, as well as sexual pleasure, have been erased within the maternal. The womb has been “mistaken” for all the female sexual organs. It is vital then to restore sexual passion and pleasure to maternity, as well as to “undomesticate” female sexuality and link mind, vulva, and womb within a labial framework of desire. Irigaray (1993a,b) has long insisted that we do not have to give up being women to be mothers, that the mother be given back “the right to pleasure, to sexual experience, and to passion” (1993b, p. 18).
Shaming Sexual Desire
Given that “the ego is first and foremost a body ego” (Freud 1923, p. 26), “anatomy should,” according to Elise (2008), “be ecstasy” (p. 78). The engorged sexual body feels good and a girl should feel good about it. Elise (2000) argues that a boy’s phallic narcissism is inflated, even overinflated, while a girl’s desire is mostly deflated, unthought, and unrepresented. Psychoanalytic theorists have begun to note that an object-relational perspective focusing on the vulnerability and dependency of the small child has desexualized psychoanalysis (Green 1995; Benjamin 1998; Elise 2007; Fonagy 2008). Object relations theories, centered on the desire for love and connection, have tended to leave theorizing about the sexed body behind. Fonagy (2008) argues that we need a developmental model “that retains a substantive place for sexual feelings and behavior within the emotional context of unfolding object relationships” (p. 18). He conducted a survey showing that mothers, 90 percent of whom respond to an infant’s smiling, reported that their most common response to any sign of sexual arousal in infants, especially girls, was to ignore it and/or look away. Psychoanalytic infant observations confirmed this response pattern. Fonagy found no references to sexual arousal being mirrored and few to any sexual arousal at all. He claims that without mirroring there can be no full ownership of one’s feelings. A vacuous response to sexual arousal will result in a disruption of self-coherence and in an experience of one’s sexual feelings as alien. A girl becomes less aware of genital sensations as a result of her mother’s subtle and unconscious negation of her sexual excitement (Elise 2008). As Benjamin (1988) puts it, “The mother who does not experience her own will and body as sources of pleasure, who does not enjoy her own agency and desire, cannot recognize her daughter’s sexuality” (p. 98). If a girl’s genital narcissism, her positive sexual feelings, go unrecognized, she easily becomes sexually inhibited and sexual desire can be extinguished by shame and rejection.
Freud (1933) took shame to be a typical female characteristic that conceals a sense of genital deficiency, but shame is neither essentially female nor limited to females. “Genital deficiency” is an effect of ignorance of female genital geography, and may be a result of an unconscious transmission of the mother’s own inhibited experience of sexual excitement. As Horney (1933) puts it, “behind the ‘failure to discover’ the vagina is a denial of its existence” (p. 69). To Irigaray’s way of thinking, it is a failure of two lips not speaking together (1985a). When the lips that speak articulate distorted experiences of the genital lips, the result is, so to speak, linguistic sexual homelessness (Irigaray 1993a, p. 126) and gestures full of shame. If we don’t find ways to articulate a female body’s language, the gestures that accompany the developmental narrative of girls, women’s experiences of passion and lust, their body ego, and their labial narcissism will continue to be (mis)represented as inadequate, deflated, and defective. But first the mother must find her labial pleasure.
Maternal Sexuality in the Analytic Situation
As a colleague and I were talking, the conversation turned to erotic transferences. I asked a question about hers and she answered, “Oh, no, my analyst is very maternal.” Elise (2007) explores the impact desexualization of the maternal has on the development and transmission of female sexuality. Her paper flows out of an analytic experience with a preoedipal erotic transference, what she prefers to call a “primary maternal oedipal situation” (Elise 2000). Analyst and analysand had slipped into the fluidity of a mother-daughter eros, with a transference fantasy that they were mermaids swimming around in womblike bliss, “in a sea of sensuality and erotic attachment” (Elise 2007, p. 793). This rather typical conception of a primary maternal preoccupation (Winnicott 1956) was disrupted when the patient thought she saw her analyst on the street with a tall black man with a foreign accent. In contrast to the analyst’s professional attire, flowing skirts, and blouses in neutral colors, the woman on the street wore provocatively colorful clothes and sexy high-heeled shoes. The patient was astonished, and the analyst pointed out that what seemed so disturbing was the thought that the analyst was sexual. A female analyst is not supposed to be sexy (Elise 2007). Office decor and attire mute her sexuality to the point of neutering it. Her analytic identity often seems asexual. In addition, sexuality and maternity are seen as mutually exclusive. A maternal transference is typically characterized as preoedipal, with the analyst providing a holding, containing function, which is desexualized. 16 Sexuality arrives on the scene as a disruption of the maternal holding environment and as “a displacement from the center of her world” (Elise 2007, p. 851). The disruption of the mother-child dyad is the traditional hallmark of the oedipal situation, which, as noted above, some analysts seek to rearticulate as the triangular phase. Elise remarks that there is not really a triangularity here, but that the experience of feeling excluded and displaced is framed within a structure of two dyads. The mother/analyst has a relationship with the child/analysand, and she has a relationship with another, often a sexual partner (hetero- or homosexual). Elise points out that the central link in these parallel dyads is the mother’s desire. In noting that the reality of maternal sexuality is at first unwelcome, denied, and that, since the mother is represented as an object rather than a subject of desire, the disruption is blamed on the intruding phallus (Elise 2007), she brings out the profound desexualization of the maternal figure (Benjamin 1988, p. 88).
Sexual Disruptions and Labial Pleasures
Let us revisit the Demeter and Persephone myth with a focus on the desexualization of maternal sexuality. As Kore (Persephone’s “maiden” name) is picking a narcissus, Hades, the intruding phallus, snatches her away and introduces her to sexuality in the realm of death (Holtzman and Kulish 2000, 2003). Holtzman and Kulish (2003) see this moment as a girl’s transition into a triangular phase, characterized not by a change in libidinal object but by the addition of one (2003, p. 1134). They emphasize the separation issues, the fear of loss of the mother and/or her love, and suggest that the “major persephonal punishment for the little girl” (p. 1145), the loss of her mother, may lead her to inhibit and disavow her agency over sexuality. Finding “the female oedipal phase” to be an oxymoron, they rename it the “persephone complex” (p. 1130) to emphasize the reaction formation or compromise solution of oscillating between two worlds, thus concealing the desire for sexual agency behind inhibition rooted in a perceived loyalty conflict. If sexuality is transmitted from the mother’s unconscious to her daughter’s, Demeter can be seen as transmitting a view of heterosexual female desire as an object of desire waiting to be snatched away / swept away by a male who is a subject of desire. Her daughter is sequestered in what Elise (2002) calls “a waiting-game.” The daughter resolves her “persephone complex” by defensively splitting her time between the dark realm of sexuality with the god of the underworld / her father and the safe, sunny, and nonsexual world with her mother. A girl, it seems, has to abdicate her sexual agency in order to remain loyal to her mother and to preserve their closeness. While Persephone inhabits the dark realm of sexuality, Demeter externalizes her barrenness onto the earth. Her fertility gone and feeling disempowered, she mourns the mother-daughter eros. She also is represented as not being a subject of her own desire. Regarded through the lens of sexuality, she might be seen as the romanticized mourning mermaid. Her sexuality is absent from the story. She is represented as all womb, no vulva. Her legs are molded shut. When the little mermaid of the fairy tale is granted her wish to be human, she pays the price of losing her voice (Andersen 1836). Having two legs denies her having two lips. The mute woman has surrendered her voice. She is marked as a female masochist who would rather wither and die than rage (Tseelon 1995). Split apart in the Demeter and Persephone myth, sexuality is the domain of the phallus while maternity and masochism are the domain of the womb. Maternal sexuality aimed at pleasure, not only reproduction, is unrepresented, without vitality or voice. Hence, Irigaray (1994) reads this myth as capturing a moment of the patriarchal structuring of sexuality, wherein the world of sexuality is assigned to the father / the male, while the world of affection and reproduction is assigned to the mother / the female. And this has not changed. According to Benjamin (1988), “the division between the exciting, outside father and the holding, inside mother is still embedded in the culture” (p. 103). The mythical figure Baubo levels a tactical strike at this situation of maternal desexualization, opening the possibility for a representation of maternal sexual desire and pleasure within a labial framework.
Baubo, an old woman, enters the scene in every version of the Demeter and Persephone myth. Seeing Demeter’s distress, she squats and raises her skirts in a gesture of genital exhibitionism and pleasure, making Demeter laugh, thus bringing her out of her depression (Kulish and Holtzman 2002). Exhibitionism has been interpreted as a defense against castration anxiety and feelings of shame (Freud 1900), but Freud also describes children’s pleasure in exhibitionism as intoxicating (Freud 1905; Kulish and Holtzman 2002). While laughter has often been interpreted as a sign of anxiety, Kulish and Holtzman note how little there is in psychoanalytic literature that relates laughter to female pleasure in sex (p. 119). Baubo’s lusty gesture can be seen not as defensive, but as representing a primary pleasure in exhibitionism and laughter, a labial narcissism. She serves then as a mythic image for a labial representation of sexual pleasure. In lifting her skirts she exhibits, at least, the labia majora, the outer lips of the vulva, to open Demeter’s lips in laughter.
17
Baubo figurines, originating in the seventh century
Undomesticated Sexuality
In developing a phenomenological account of sexuality, Stein (1998a,b, 2008) gives texture to the notion of an undomesticated sexuality as poignant, excessive, and enigmatic. 19 Psychosexuality is experienced as embodied, displaced, and fantasy-soaked (1998b). The object of sexuality is displaced from the original functional organ and object, and replaced with fantasy (1998a). A tension arc of nonprocreative sexuality spans bodily excitations and displaced fantastic objects. One’s corporeality is thus endowed with meaning in the desire for a displaced and fantasmatic object, not a concrete one. The poignancy of sexuality emerges in being overcome by involuntary pleasure and desire that amplifies as it resonates with an other’s overwhelming arousal (2008). Sexuality is excessive in its brimming with desire and energy. The intensity that generates orgasms in the undomesticated nature of sexuality transgresses boundaries of many kinds: of self, culture, convention, reason, of inner limits that expose the self as lustful, excited, and therefore vulnerable (Stein 1998a), an estrangement of the familiar in the other and in oneself.
The experience of sexual desire is uncanny, at once familiar and strange, enigmatic yet ordinary, as a phantasmatic object split off from, but propped on, the original, vital instinct. The sense of excess and enigma captures desire as a form of intense, aching, and pleasurable curiosity (Stein 1998a). The enigmatic otherness of sexuality is transmitted to the child in what Laplanche (1976) calls a primal seduction. The mother unconsciously transmits her own sexuality as an enigmatic message to her child. This enigma is seductive; it is unconscious and opaque, both to the infant, who at first vaguely experiences it, and to the mother, in whose unconscious the excess of her sexuality is uncontained. She is a stranger to herself, as we all are (Kristeva 1991), and thus the message she sends is compromised by her unconscious. The mother regularly mystifies her child as she unconsciously transmits an adult sexual universe into the child’s world. A child’s desire is awakened, but is at first unassimilated. The child might vaguely wonder, “Who am I in this scene?” (Stein 1998b, p. 264). The seduction awakens the child’s sexuality and forms the matrix of later sexual development (Stein 1998a). While this primal seduction has a traumatic edge, we are of course speaking here about nonabusive and nonpathological seductions. Marked by enigma and excess, erotic interplay between mother and child is asymmetric and nonmutual; according to Stein, later erotic mutuality depends on some form of nonmutuality, since sexuality plays with the experience of the other as hidden and not revealed, which leads to a desire to uncover the other. This attraction to the otherness, the alterity, and the enigma of the other makes sexuality different from more ordinary mutual recognition (Stein 1998a). The mother/analyst must be able to tolerate this enigma, the poignancy and the excess of sexuality, in order to be open and free to transmit an undomesticated and fantasy-soaked sexuality to a child/analysand in the transference.
Representing the Clitoris
The failure to resonate with the erotic aspects of a child’s body can cause the experience of sexuality to become disruptive of the self (Stein 1998a). Genital swelling and engorgement may be registered but ignored because a framework for representing them is unavailable. The mother who looks away colludes unconsciously in a cultural ignorance (Fonagy 2008). Her inability to resonate with her daughter’s erotic arousal may be of a piece with what she later consciously transmits about sexuality in teaching her daughter from books and diagrams of genital anatomy. And in most scientific representations of female sexual anatomy the clitoris is either mislabeled or not labeled at all (Lerner 1976; Ash 1980; Tuana 2004; Stiritz 2008).
According to Kulish (1991), it is difficult to attain mastery over sexual impulses when the clitoris has an ill-defined representation (p. 518). I agree with this and understand the sense of mastery to be not “control over,” but “coming to terms with” (Loewald 1962, p. 261), even achieving excellence in. What is difficult for women and girls is to allow the swelling of sexual excitement to take over the body with its waves of excessive and overwhelming arousal. The clitoris and its role in women’s sexuality have been ill defined and ill represented.
Kulish (1991) surveys the role of the clitoris in psychoanalytic theories of female development. Freud (1905) considered the clitoris homologous to the penis as a leading erotogenic zone (p. 220) and claimed that clitoral feelings must be transferred to the vagina. Lampl–de Groot (1982) considered these feelings to be added rather than transferred to vaginal excitement, while Masters and Johnson (1962, cited in Kulish 1991) found that vaginal responsiveness accompanies clitoral stimulation and vice versa and that vaginal and clitoral orgasms are physiologically indistinguishable. Marcus and Francis (1975, cited in Kulish 1991) have claimed that the entire genital and anal areas are responsive throughout childhood. Lasky (2000) points to the internal manifestation of tumescence when a girl’s “erectile tissue” becomes engorged during sexual arousal, and describes it as “a deep and rich inner-body experience, the sensations of which actively libidinize the interior of the body” (p. 1390). The special hypercathexis of the boy’s penis, as if it were an object external to the body, cultivates splits both in his body image and in his relations with girls, separating loving feelings from sexual ones, while in girls sexual arousal saturates diffuse areas of the body interior, making the entire body a locus of pleasure. Her tumescence encourages an interrelatedness between body experience, body image, body ego, and self-representation, supporting the claim that the ego is a body ego, and therefore partly shaped by genital structures and experiences (Elise 2007, 2008). Lasky’s claim that the integration of sexually influenced self-representations occurs earlier in girls than in boys resonates with Kestenberg’s claim (1975) that an inner genital stage precedes an external genital (or phallic) stage. Moreover, vaginal secretions accompany sexual arousal and tumescence from earliest infancy, are a feature of female experience throughout childhood, and are “an important constituent of the experience of being a girl” (Lasky 2000, p. 1392). The experience of sexuality, therefore, is neither solely male nor bisexual, in some sense of being neutral, but it is sexually different, male or female from the beginning. This is at the heart of Irigaray’s concept of sexual difference.
Kulish cites what might be seen as two powerful motives for the mislabeling or omitted labeling of the clitoris: adult males associate the clitoris with castration anxieties (clinical evidence in Róheim [1945] and Siegel [1971], cited in Kulish [1991]), and the clitoris is the only human organ that functions solely for pleasure (Baill and Money 1981, cited in Kulish 1991). Kulish concludes: “To give the clitoris a name is to give the little girl permission to experience sexual pleasure and to point the way to masturbation. The child considers sexual excitement dangerous and fragmenting. Since she experiences sensations in a place in her body she cannot see, the girl may have special difficulty in developing a sense of control over sexual impulses” (p. 518).
Kulish offers a clinical case vignette to illustrate the fear of this dangerous female sexual excitement, attributing the fear to “uncontrollable and bad” drives and desires (p. 533). She tells us that Miss T’s parents were devoutly religious and that she had engaged in sex play with a younger brother throughout her childhood and early adolescence, but Kulish does not consider the impact of these on Miss T’s crippling symptoms, which included “a fear of spilling liquids and of touching ‘things’” (p. 531). Regarding a girl’s sexuality in an instinctual vacuum perpetuates the focus on female sexual pleasure as something that inherently is accompanied by anxiety and dread and therefore needs mastery and containment (in the sense of control). But the problem with female sexual pleasure is not the dangerous content or inner space (Y. Stein 1988), it is not castration anxiety or aphanesis (Richards 1992; Jones 1927); it is not an infantile and unorganized polymorphously perverse disposition, which may persist in “an average uncultivated woman” (Freud 1905, p. 191); rather, it is, as Elise (2008) has pointed out, that girls do not feel free to experience sexual pleasure. The problem is the underinflation and/or deflation of girls’ genital narcissism.
“To give the clitoris a name is to give the little girl permission to experience sexual pleasure” (Kulish 1991, p. 518). Horney’s claim (1933) about the vagina applies to the clitoris also: “behind the failure to ‘discover’ the [clitoris] is a denial of its existence” (p. 69). Stiritz (2008) notes that this denial is a function of patriarchal culture, and Tuana (2004) argues, from a philosophical standpoint, that the denial of the clitoris is related to an epistemological ignorance. She claims that a politics of sex has been aimed at not understanding female pleasure, and thus an epistemology of ignorance regarding the structure and function of the clitoris has been maintained and disseminated. 20 This is, according to Tuana, no simple lack or absence of knowledge, but a repressive silence that reveals the role of power in maintaining reproduction as the function central to female sexuality.
Tuana, a professor of philosophy, reports that her students’ primary knowledge about sexuality consists in the menstrual cycle and the reproductive organs. Two decades after the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (1984) published Our Bodies, Ourselves, with a new view of the structure and response patterns of the clitoris, minimal knowledge of it is still reflected in scientific representations and in textbooks of human sexual anatomy. The detailed drawings in Our Bodies, Ourselves show the clitoris to have three parts (the shaft, the glans, and the crura) and to be large, two-thirds hidden beneath the skin of the vulva, and therefore largely internal (Figure 3).
Figure of the pelvic floor, clitoris, etc. (Boston Women’s Health Collective 1984, p. 206)
When sexually stimulated, the clitoris swells to double or triple its size, as the labia and the urethral and perineal sponges soak up sexual excitement and become engorged (Figure 4). This spongy engorgement swells and overflows into a multitude of orgasmic pleasures. 21 When, in spite of this, contemporary anatomy books still depict the clitoris as a little nub of flesh, and American college students know much more about the structure of male genitals and the female reproductive organs than about the clitoris, one can only conclude, with Tuana, that a politics of sex is at work to maintain an epistemology of ignorance about women’s sexual pleasure. A lid remains closed on “the hornets’ nest of stinging [female] desire” (Tuana 2004, p. 210). Were the clitoris not only given a name, but were all children shown views of the engorged clitoris and the expansive, porous texture of the vulva, alongside diagrams of penile erection and the female organs of reproduction, female desire, sexual experience, and labial narcissism might begin to swell.
Side view of the clitoris (Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers 1981, p. 48)
The Swelling Power of Female Sexual Pleasure
“By our lips we are women” (Irigaray 1985a, pp. 209–210). Women have at least two sets of lips, which open the horizon for representing female sexuality as not simple and contained, but rather as multiple, swelling, and excessive. Women have a multiplicity of sexual organs: lips, breasts, nipples, pubis, clitoris, urethral sponge (“discovered” by Ernst Graffenberg in 1950 and popularized as the G-spot [Tuana 2004]), perineal sponge, labia, vulva, vagina, neck of uterus, and womb. Within the vaginal lips is a doubling of inner and outer labia. A labial model of sexuality conceptualizes a sexuality grounded in the morphology, the experience, of the female body, irreducible to, and nonderivative of, the morphology, the experience, of the phallic body. The mermaid fantasy calls attention to preoedipal maternal transferences conceived as though the analyst’s legs were molded shut (Elise 2007), while a labial framework restores two legs that open to display the double lips of the vulva and sexuality to maternal transferences, to female analysts, and to maternity. Opening these doublings reveals the false dichotomies of maternity and sexuality, of female analyst and sexuality. A labial framework captures the double aims of female sexuality: the nonreproductive pleasures of the swelling, engorging vulva and the circulating energy of multiple orgasms, as well as the fantasies and pleasures of pregnancy, the swelling of the belly, so visible and so overlooked. Balsam (2003) has noted an erasure of the pregnant female body from psychoanalytic theories of female development. She usefully distinguishes fantasies and concepts of the pregnant body from motherhood, from a maternal instinct, and from a social need to bear children. Focusing on the corporeal pregnant body, its plasticity and instability, the gigantic proportions of the pregnant belly and swelling breasts, Balsam shows how representations of the pregnant body, including mental representations and fantasies, have been marginalized by references to male body representations and fantasies, because, she speculates, of a male unconscious dread of the pregnant female body.
Irigaray (1993b) represents the female body’s power to swell and expand as puissance (p. 17), in contrast to pouvoir, which she associates with patriarchal power, the power to penetrate (Irigaray 1994). La puissance, power as generativity, is associated with ancient female authority and tradition. It is the power of maternal ancestry that Antigone is buried alive for defending, and it is the power of fecundity that Demeter loses when her daughter is abducted. A labial framework can restore our capacity to acknowledge what is there, as we look through a different lens. It is a representation of female potency that does not have punch, but rather a swelling power (puissance) to capture female psychosexual experiences, as the swelling of the vulva displays the engorgement of “stinging desire and limb-gnawing passion” (Hesiod, quoted in Tuana 2004, p. 228, n.14), as the swelling of the belly marks the power of women to give birth, and as the swell of the sea moves in powerful waves that wash over the shore. Adopting a labial framework, we are able to conceptualize, see what is in full view, and, inspired by Baubo, look at the whole vulva and listen to the sounds of soft, as well as full-throated, laughter of female sexual pleasure and passion.
Footnotes
Dean and faculty, St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute; Chair and Professor of Philosophy, Webster University, St. Louis.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Psychoanalytic Association meeting, San Francisco, June 8–12, 2011.
1
For example, the hood that covers the external portion of the clitoral glans, a fold of skin that is part of the labia minora, is homologous to the foreskin of the penis.
2
I hasten to note that this does not imply a grounding in essentialism. As Tuana (2004) puts it, “Perhaps the body speaks, but understanding what it says requires interpretation” (p. 219). Nor am I claiming that there is one single female experience of sexual pleasure; rather, there are commonalities that suggest patterns (see 
).
3
Much of the literature on female sexual experiences connects them to pathology—e.g., female castration anxiety (Mayer 1985), the dangerous content of, or the dangerous space inside, the uterus (Stein 1988), the fear of female sexuality (Kulish 1991), a hollow emptiness (Stewart 1985), or separation issues and oedipal conflicts ().
4
Following Wittgenstein, I take “logic” to be a family resemblance concept, that is, a concept with many related meanings, rather than a single essence (Wittgenstein 1953, §65). I use the concept here in the sense of a description of a system of logical (or “grammatical,” which Wittgenstein uses interchangeably) relations relevant to and underlying a practice. (For an application of this to psychoanalytic discourse, see .)
5
6
recounts the case of a woman whose minor labia were fused until pre-puberty, blocking access to her inner vaginal space, and manifest symptomatically as blocking access to her inner mental space. Her symptoms were inhibitions in learning and in work and “an unusual form of self-mutilation, sewing her fingers together” (p. 126). Unable to finger the genitals and find access to the inside of her body through the folds of the labia, the girl sewed her fingertips together and then stretched them open, causing the thread to break. Her genital anxiety was not only a castration anxiety, but an anxiety over having no access to her inner genital space, her “hidden chamber.”
7
According to the dictionary, “cloaca” is a chamber of intestinal, urinal, and generative discharge in animals such as birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish. As points out, “The ascetic tradition treated the entire inside as a mass of undifferentiated excrement, allowing excrement to stand as the appropriate symbol for all the stuff within” (p. 58).
8
9
10
I want to note the distinction of the libidinal fluidity of female psychosexual experiences from sexual fluidity related to object choice, flexible patterns of sexual responsiveness in terms of sexual orientation and identity. argues that women’s sexual fluidity is made possible by arousability, a situation-dependent receptivity to persons rather than to gender, and by women having greater cultural permission to develop intense affectionate bonds with same-sex friends. Sexual fluidity as arousability is a capacity for novel forms of sexual experience that emerge unexpectedly over a life span.
Viscosity of the libidinal drive has been characterized as sluggishness, reluctance (Sterba 1951), and stagnation (King and Steiner 1991). note that viscosity (Klebrigkeit) evokes “the Freudian image of the libido as a flow of liquid” (p. 12) and go on to claim that Freud conceived of viscosity as susceptibility to fixation, the very opposite of libidinal motility.
Some might experience a difficulty in considering a sexual dynamics of viscosity because of disgust. has expressed the repulsion for the viscous as a Medusa-like moment of touch. “When the viscous is touched it changes from an initial soft and docile thing to an awareness of the sticky and the enveloping. One begins to feel danger in the presence of the viscous—it takes one to the edge of dread. The viscous is to be avoided” (p. 199).
11
Fluids range from liquids to gelatinous forms that behave more like sticky solids than liquids (, p. 146). Viscous fluids like honey and vaginal mucus are pliant forms characterized both by cohesive stability and adhesive stickiness (p. 146) and are capable of yielding under pressure so as not to shear (p. 114).
12
The book of that title (Ladas, Whipple, and Perry 1982) also has a chapter on female ejaculations, in which one woman describes her orgasms induced by stimulation of the “Gräfenberg Spot” as subtle, soothing, and creating “tremendous amounts of liquid gushing from the vagina. This liquid neither looks, smells, nor feels like urine” (pp. 84–85). Bell too argues in favor of keeping the term ejaculation, despite its identification with a male phenomenon.
13
In arguing for a new theory of female sexuality, from anatomy rather than phenomenology, Sevely aims to show the symmetry of male and female sexual organs. She therefore retains “ejaculation” for the expression of sexual fluids and, following Deter, Caldwell, and Folsom (1946), retains “female prostate gland” for “female peri-urethral glands” to emphasize the homology of the male and female glands. Her focus is more on the profuse prostatic fluid, which in females is “ejaculated through thirty-one ducts scattered along the length of the urethra so that the fluid pressure is more diffuse” than in males, where the fluid is ejaculated through two ducts, which puts the fluid under much greater pressure (Sevely 1987, p. 94). She distinguishes this profuse prostatic fluid from the “very scant Bartholin fluid released early on”; this is “thicker and relatively sticky, whereas the prostatic fluid is a clear, glycerine-like substance” (p. 95). The Bartholin fluid is expressed by the gland of that name, discovered by the Danish physician Caspar Bartholin (p. 88). When claims that “any thinking of or about the female has to think through the mucous [sic]” (p. 110), she might be focusing on the fluid released by the Bartholin gland.
14
finds it useful to conceptualize psychoanalytic interpersonal interaction as relational, in terms of a system of coupled oscillators to describe the resonance between an analyst “in sync” with an analysand’s frame of mind. The resonant vibrations of, for example, piano strings or the back-and-forth movements of dance partners form an increasingly unified whole, though the participants do not necessarily become more alike (p. 1000). But just as one hand clapping does not make a sound, one girl’s spinning dance / whirling around does not form a system of coupled oscillators. I would, however, suggest that the spinning gesture signals an openness and a desire for such linking.
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It may be culturally biased to consider the transmission of sexuality limited to a nuclear family setting, but it is beyond my scope here to consider this transmission within other cultural contexts.
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Siopis (2008) writes about a squatting dark terra cotta female figurine on a shelf in Freud’s study, with one hand lifting her skirt to expose her genitals and the other gesturing to the site of exposure. This is “reputedly” a Baubo figurine, and to Siopis she appears to be “the perfect embodiment of a joking sexuality” (p. 144). Siopis speculates that Freud may have received it from a reader of his paper “A Mythological Parallel to a Visual Obsession” (), where he writes about Baubo making Demeter laugh “by suddenly lifting up her dress and exposing her body” (p. 338).
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Stein follows Laplanche in her account, and it should be noted that neither one considers it specific to female sexuality.