The

Clitoral Woman and the Vaginal Woman (La donna clitoridea e la

donna vaginale) Draft translation by Jasmine Curcio

The female sex organ is the clitoris, the male sex organ is the penis.

The vagina is the cavity of the female body that receives the sperm of man and
sends it forth into the uterus so that the fertilisation of the egg may come about.
It is through this cavity that the body of the child leaves that of the mother.

The moment in which the penis of man emits sperm is the moment of his
orgasm. The vagina is therefore that part of the female body in which, at the
same time of the orgasm of man, initiates the process of fertilisation.

In man therefore the mechanism of pleasure is strictly connected to the

mechanism of reproduction, in woman the mechanism of pleasure and the
mechanism of reproduction communicate but do not coincide.

To have imposed upon woman a coincidence that has not existed as a given of
fact within her physiology has been an act of cultural violence that has a
comparison in no other type of colonisation.

“Once we were friends,

but now I give orders to you

because I am a man – see –

and I hold in my hand a blade

and I operate on you.

Your clitoris, which is guarded jealously,

I will tear out, cast it to the ground,

because I am a man, today.

I have a heart of stone:

otherwise I would not operate on you.

After, you will take care of the wound,

and I will know many things:

I will know those who care,

those who do not care.”

(Initiating song of elders who practice the excision of the clitoris to Manja
women, Ubanghi, Africa)

“Do not speak in such a way, sisters.

My heart is afraid.

I have great fear.

If you could mutilate me as a bird!

Immediately I would fly away!”

(Ritual song of the Manja young men during the operation previously
mentioned)

An apex, in colonisation, has been reached when woman, deprived of the

expression of her proper and autonomous sexuality, is forbidden to resort to
abortive solutions. A process of unwanted gestation is already of itself a
consequence of an act of abuse – that responds to the sexual and psychological
satisfaction of the patriarchal man. The denial of the right to bring a stop to this
process has been a further act of abuse to which light has brought into crisis the
values of the amorous relation with which a male culture has hidden its
imposition of a sexual model.

With this sexual model imposed by man, woman, deprived of the discovery and
of the manifestation of her own sexuality, acquires renunciation and submission
as characteristics of her being feminine.

Enjoying a pleasure as a response to the pleasure of man, a woman loses herself

as an autonomous being, exalting her complementarity to man, finding in him
her reason for existence.
Patriarchal sexual culture, being rigorously procreative, has created for woman a
model of vaginal pleasure.

Contraceptives, abortion, sterilisation, reveal an incongruence with the

patriarchal world: they place themselves as evidence that procreation and
pleasure cannot at all be identical. But, instead of placing the procreative sexual
model into discussion as a ‘natural’ model, they reconfirm it, mobilising a series
of measures that render the procreative act as non-procreative.

The procreative model of sexuality shows itself for what it is: a culture, its
values and its taboos reflecting the concept of ‘nature’ which has been elaborated
in relation to the objective of the society which has expressed it.

With control over birth, women, who had firsthand seen the devaluation of their
sexuality, see the devaluation also of maternity in whose overabundance the
world glimpses its own cataclysm much sooner.

[Excerpt and diagram of the clitoris from W.H. Masters & V.E. Johnson, The
sexual act in woman and man]

The roles of wife and of mother in which woman must realise herself in the
patriarchal world so risk to reveal themselves as an alienated structure: sexual
freedom in marriage and maternity through free choice tighten to return social
dignity to these roles, but true and proper reforms are surrogates for the thoughts
of revolutionaries.

Meanwhile the patriarchal world and its culture, by positing a remedy for the
population problem, do not succeed at intuiting a change in sexual culture that
shall level the field of pleasure by condemning the procreative model, woman
discovers the circumstance for creating that leap in civilisation which
corresponds to her entrance into the erotic relationship as a subject.

Here is an organ of pleasure independent of procreation, the clitoris, losing this

secondary and transitory role within female sexuality that had been decreed by
patriarchy and becomes the organ on the basis of which ‘nature’ authorises and
demands a type of sexuality that is non-procreative.

The function of pleasure connected to procreation distinguishes itself from the

function of pleasure independent of procreation: in fact, the first is of
guaranteeing the continuation of the species, the second of expressing a
biological necessity fundamental to the individual.

Complementarity is a concept that regards woman and man in the reproductive

moment, not in the erotico-sexual moment.

Woman asks herself: on what basis is it postulated that clitoral pleasure

expresses a female personality that is infantile and immature? Perhaps because it
does not correspond to the procreative sexual model? But is the procreative
model not that in which the heterosexual relation is crystallised – even when the
end of the procreative model is carefully avoided – according to the clear
preference of penis-hegemony? Therefore clitoral pleasure owes its discredit to
the fact of not being functional with the male genital model.

Regarding the erotic behaviour of man with respect to woman, on the one hand it
is that which arouses her, on the other hand it is that which renders her
dominated and dependent. This correlation opens to woman the possibility of a
psychologically acceptable coitus.

Woman does not need to appreciate herself through the attention which man
turns toward her in the rituals of courtship. If she is not in fact thus made inferior
and objectified, she shall no longer serve masculine adulation as compensation
and ransom.

In order to fully enjoy clitoral orgasm, woman must find a psychic autonomy
from man. This psychic autonomy manifests in such a way inconceivable for
male society as being a refusal of man, as a presupposition of an inclination
towards women. In the patriarchal world therefore, it is reserved with more
ostracism than it holds for everything else, that which it suspects as an opening
for homosexuality.

We do not speak about heterosexuality: we are not so blind as not to see that it is
a pillar of patriarchy, we are not so ideological as to refute it a priori. Every one
of is able to study patriarchy and man as much as she likes or dislikes.

From the patriarchal point of view the vaginal woman is considered that who
manifests a correct sexuality while the clitoral woman represents immaturity and
masculinity, for Freudian psychoanalysis it absolutely represents frigidity.
Instead, feminism affirms that the true valuation of these responses to the
relationship with the sex that oppresses is the following: the vaginal woman*
is that woman who, in captivity, has been brought to a measure of consenting for
the enjoyment of patriarchy while the clitoral woman is one who has not
complied to the emotional suggestions of integration with the other sex. There
are those women who have taken on the passive woman, and it is expressed in a
sexuality not coinciding with coitus. Through these two responses to their
condition and to male sexual culture, it posits that entire part of women whose
situation in sex reflects a scarce possibility of identifying themselves within the
phenomenon, in an infinity of subjective and objective circumstances that arrives
at the end of an absolute negativity in any form of sexuality.

Woman senses unconsciously the act of submission that is requested of her to do

to herself to access heterosexual pleasure. The monogamous ideal which is
imposed finds a point of joining with its own authenticity: in fact she is
permitted to raise herself to a title in a ‘unique’ relationship of dedication to the
other that, if extended to more men, she loses her ethical value, of a choice

‘particular’ and ‘particularly’ motivated to reveal itself as a generalised condition

of women to the benefit of man.

The monogamous woman of whom Engels speaks as the bringer of value to the
couple is the woman colonised by the patriarchal system.

Male jealousy placates itself with difficult even when woman affirms having had
a pure sexual relationship without ulterior involvements. But man knows that for
woman, in the actual sexual culture, there does not exist a relation without
involvements: man takes, woman gives.

All of the calls for the emancipation of female behaviour/attitude that should be
put into action {“to take initiative”) find in woman a comprehensible resistance.
In fact, that signifies for her to request a man in a sexual relationship when at
that time what will develop between them will be the sexual relationship
conducted by man.

The clitoral woman represents all that which is authentic and inauthentic in the
female world that is detached from the visceralism with man. Authentically, she
has reclaimed herself; alienating herself, the female Other has simulated on the
level of pleasure and has aspired to the final ends of man upon the cultural and
social plane.

To seek from man the freedom of abortion to resolve the problem of unwanted
pregnancies is as absurd as asking him for a robust penis, capable of lasting long,
and varied positions to bring woman towards reaching orgasm.

The vaginal orgasm, as a scientific question, is at this point tantamount to the

internal dispute to the fairer sex. There exist women concerning whom the
cultural conditioning of enjoyment during coitus is successful and the others, the
majority, concerning whom it is not successful. In this latter case woman either
finds an autonomous condition from man and claims her own orgasm in the
clitoris or hesitates to recognise it in her own sex and she remains in
intermediate, painful, chaotic stages.

It is important for us to affirm our own sex and not to have satisfied it alone.
What liberatory meaning can hold the solution offered to the emancipated
woman? In presumed equality with man which places in the act diverse
techniques for varying sexual pleasure, she finds her clitoral orgasm so
satisfactory, but she lacks the consciousness of a sexuality in itself being
expressed. She will remain, therefore, dependent on man and on the male sexual
model: she will double her abilities in order to forget her own betrayal to the
penis and her unsuitability to man, regarding which she feels humiliated.

The clitoral woman who becomes the candidate for vaginal womanhood is
neutralised in her creativity and proposes, on the cultural plane, that dependence
on the male world that her sexual autonomy has placed into doubt on the erotic
plane.

The vaginal woman, she who has reacted sexually to oppression, is the woman
doubly deceived. She has placed at the disposition of man, as her special
mission, all the creativity whose bearer is a male human being, without at all
finding the strength to desire the entire range of the creative experience, which is
above all a concentration on self. In fact the vaginal woman feels anxiety and a
sense of fault for every kind of her own pleasure and associates herself with man
in contempt of the clitoral orgasm because she fears to discover herself as a
human being outside the destiny of the couple, that is, the union gratified with a
superior being.

The woman within the couple declares herself deprived of resources and of trust
in herself as a woman, and meanwhile lives the life of a dog by consolidating
resources and trust in her very husband, must understand that she has been
habituated to operate a transfer which every woman is requested by every man.
She may try to withdraw the transfer: all of her energies converge again upon
him.

For us, to affirm our own sex does not mean to empoverish the encounter
between man and woman because we do not lose our sight, instead we wish to
re-evaluate the problematic of a human relation with all of its uniqueness. In the
present, the epoch in which the world of sentiments has a scuffle which ends in
mythical unions, in monogamous relations of blackmail and of opportunism, the
so-called human relationship is highly publicised, but meanwhile it appears split
from eroticism and has become a process which extinguishes itself in formality
without a living outlet.

The vaginal woman is reluctant to investigate her sex organ because, having
connected it with sentiment, is afraid to deprive him of transcendence with
which he has surrounded himself. Man, of course, is behind the scenes and
assures himself that the ethos of an ingratitude is not taken up by his object,
which makes her valuable and harmless. Man relies on the sentiment of woman
because she enjoys, and not with consciousness of her own sexuality.

We suggest pondering why a long coitus is boring. Many variations of love

appear to be male fantasies, or coarseness if they fail to guarantee a woman’s
orgasm.

Why does the vaginal woman hesitate to acquire consciousness of a problematic

so vast, of woman during sex? How does she justify that female humanity shall
be in the most part disbanded and suffering from her sexuality? To identify
herself with the condition of millions of women who lack a firm point of
reference in pleasure Is most painful, but they cannot at all settle with the
patriarchal rationale accusing her of being in the wrong, or the slow transition
from repression to normality.

Millions of women who have long expressed a profound universal discomfort in

sex are a constant in the history of female humanity who denounces it and
reconfirms the necessity of changing the world.

The category of repression, adopted by male culture to explain the dysfunctions

in which the relations between the sexes take place, is a new screen which
conceals the drama of the oppression of woman.

The study of infantile sexuality has expressed the patriarchal illusion that it is
possible to rationalise the oppression of woman as a consequence of unrepressed
infancy. The fact that a repressed infancy would give “abnormal” results on a
sexual level omits to even consider the results

“abnormal” that make an unrepressed infancy for the goals of a civilisation in

which women ought to be subject. Indeed if the female child maintained an
isolation from man, in the prohibition of masturbation and sexual activities in the
mortification of her creative personality which could grow enough mythomania
to subordinate herself to man and to try to gratify her senses with him, the girl-
child who begins to be raised outside of these taboos cannot but come across a
series of conflicts and negative responses when culture pretends that the result of
her infantile liberation is a spontaneous adhesion to subjugation and to a role.

“Reaching more or less orgasm, numerous females display satisfaction from the
observation that the husband or sexual partner has enjoyed the contact and from
the observation of having possibly raised the pleasure of the man. We have
biographies of married persons over a great number of years, in the course of
which the wives never reached orgasm; nevertheless the marriages have
remained standing considering the high level of familial harmony” (Kinsey).

Feminism, for woman, takes the place of psychoanalysis for man. In the latter
man finds the motives that render his supremacy unassailable and scientific as a
permanent structure responding to the freedom of all (men), in feminism woman
finds the collective consciousness that elaborates the themes of her liberation.
The category of repression in psychoanalysis is equivalent to that master-slave
dialectic in Marxism: both have a patriarchal utopia in sight where woman is
actually programmed as the last oppressed human being and subjugated to
sustain the grandiose effort of the patriarchal world that breaks for only himself
the chains of oppression and slavery.

Without the abolition of the male sexual schema and without an acquisition of
consciousness by the vaginal woman, there is no feminism. And patriarchy, as an
historical epoch, is still protected from its finality. In fact it means that marriage
will resist as the model of relationships because it is contested only as an
institution and not as sex roles and the structure of the couple.

The erect penis is a symbol of power, of rank and threat in the animal world that
expresses the aggressive behaviour of man; to woman remains the alternative
between a submissive behaviour and an escape. “The male copulatory organ is a
subsidiary structure that is developed at a later time and only in those animals
whose behaviour during the sexual act was such as to adapt to its presence. The
hierarchical relationships and relationships of force existing between the sexes
have sustained a role of primary importance in determining the position that the
male and female assume during coupling. The strongest and most authoritative
pursuer asserted their supremacy mounting the behind of their companion. As
regards mammals, including humans, it is not true that copulation occurs
because they have a penis; the contrary is true: they have a penis because the
sexual behaviour of their ancestors who were without prepared the way for their
development” (W.

Wickler).

The father behaves badly, the penis behaves badly: this is a reality of the
patriarchal world. Why should the girl-child be so blind as to consider good and
maintain a relationship of trust with them?

Will it not be right to betray that trust and when she will hurry to open her eyes,
will it not be too late?

Fortunately for us many women have been children whose trust in patriarchy has
collapsed into an apocalyptic disdain or into stunned astonishment. Today they
bring to light moment by moment the unconscious contents of an operation
whose adventurousness is still in full bloom.

When we speak of placing our energy into the clitoral woman we intend to
create a discrimination in value between women, only indicating the reaction in
character that holds in itself the premises of self-consciousness. In fact she is the
woman, who in the whole network of random and voluntary situations of her
life, has tasted the inebriated moments of her establishment of self as an
individual, to find feminism in its natural outlet. And feminism acquires reality
appropriate to her previous experience; in fact it exists as an affirmation of a
point of truth that comes to light, and not only as lament. As tiring as they are,
the proofs through which woman does not identify with her role is

forced to pass, the acquisition of feminist consciousness does not embrace it

without energy.

Realising the cause of every authentic act, she also notices why she was not
understood and why she had not felt completely frustrated, and maintained her
boldness. Meanwhile the vaginal woman can live feminism as a traumatic event
in the meantime because she is unused to independent thought and then because
it is through independent thought, she becomes aware of the deceptions which
made her encounter her characteristic disposition to trust, and unite with, man.
For this woman feminism is a turning-point in her life and not a continuation,
therefore autonomy from man can have a painful aspect of the most complete
disillusionment, but the wrath of lived slavery is a recovery indispensable to
feminism as their rebellion has contrasted.

In anatomy and physiology it is no mystery that the part of the female body most
rich in nerve endings is the clitoris and that the vagina represents a reactive place
only in the vestibulum or outer third, and the rest is a true and proper
“anatomical impossibility” (Kinsey) as to the seat of orgasm.

On the other hand, from the beginning of time every erotic culture has rambled
on the necessity of particular techniques and amatory wisdom on the part of man
to attain woman’s pleasure in coitus and to make her arrive at liberatory stages of
sexual tension. In effect, during coitus a rhythmic indirect massage of the clitoris
is performed – during the stretching of the genital membrane and often during
contact with the body of man – that, combined and multiplied by the psychic
excitation transmitted to the clitoris. From this altered state, it determines the
orgasmic reaction: from the clitoris, the pleasure irradiates in the entire sexual
apparatus of woman. The pernicious phallic analogy with which the clitoris has
been interpreted by Freud has made it impossible to identify within the organ the
pleasure spontaneously found by the girl-child in masturbation, the pleasure
organ of woman. But this is only the circumstance of a fatal error for generations
of women and the pretext that has permitted the content that was necessary to the
patriarchal world in order to confine woman, at the dawn of her liberation, to the
ancient state of dependence.

The fact is that man has desired vaginal pleasure against all physiological
evidence that ought to make him doubt: since man has always wanted a woman
not free, but in slavery. Woman does not express herself in any area of life, nor
in the reflection on her sexuality: she has not written her own Kama Sutra, she
has not investigated her own sex organ if not in lieu of preconditions already
established by other men. Is it possible that she could not suspect the fury with
which man has preoccupied himself with, showing her what was the true way of
femininity?
Concerning the affirmations that the stimulation of erotic fantasy in woman is
almost absent, woman must take into account the fact that she, not expressing
her own sexuality, is eroticised by the psychic contents of the state of receptivity.
She awaits suggestions and stimulus from man and she adapts herself to them.
This is not repression: it is the procedure of pleasure in woman constrained to a
sexual substitution.

The moment of union, when she tastes the complementary end of her own
incompleteness, creating the profound penetration by man that she enjoys, has
become the psychic motor that has enabled the pleasure of woman.

This she asks: but why is the vagina passive? Why can’t it show itself as
something that she takes, that acts, instead of something that receives, that
conforms, that submits? This is an interpretation of man that suggests to woman
active emotions, or above all varies her pleasure from possessing a being
absorbed and possessed by woman.

In patriarchal sexual culture it is not man who seeks woman, but his penis which
seeks the vagina.

That which woman lives with value in the union, man lives as an episode of sex,
in order to then pass onto another.

“All the instances that the Purushayta will enjoy, woman will have to remember
that, in lacking a special effort on her part, the pleasure of her husband will be
far from perfect and which as she must exert herself to succeed to close and
tighten the Yoni (vagina) in a way by closely moulding to the Lingam (penis),
dilating itself and compressing at will, similarly, in one word, like the hand of a
Gopala milkmaid when milking a cow. That she can learn only with long
practice, and especially directing her will to her own organ, as men do which is
exciting themselves through sharpening their sense of hearing or touch. Doing
thus… it will be of comfort to know that once acquired, this art will never be
lost. Thus the husband will appreciate it above every other woman and would
not exchange her for the most beautiful Rani (queen) of both worlds: so much it
is precious to man, the Yoni that closes itself up!”

(From the Kama Shastra. Indian Art of Love, of K. Malla) Notwithstanding the
courteous and amorous literature that accompanies the heterosexual relations in
culture, man does not become impotent knowing that woman does not enjoy sex.
The penis reveals itself thus, in all of its truth as an authoritative organ that
valourises the place where his own pleasure comes from, for as much as he
needs it and not for reciprocity.

Woman has the fantasy of being raped during coitus: this is interpreted as the
product of repression created by society and which has pushed her towards
accepting pleasure if lived masochistically and against her will. We consider
instead that this could be a truth which directs itself to the unconscious of
woman and if she welcomes it, it is because there does not exist another way to
that of subjugation which leads her to vaginal pleasure.

The great man abuses a woman during coitus: this is interpreted as the product of
repression created by society and which has pushed him to eroticise her in an
irresponsible fit of violence. Even in this phenomenon, we see a diverse truth
latent in the masculine unconscious: woman truly is used in the sexual act, and
that she refuses it and finally is taken; she is used to reflect a magnified image of
his virility, therefore of his power.

Why is it, that man who is so proud of his availability in sex, finds that his best
condition for equilibrium is in reflecting himself in a woman, who lacks that
disengagement every time she envelops herself with him? And why does he need
to demonstrate as annoying his attachment to woman, and instead feels lost
when he just assumed to find before him a partner who has opened her eyes
upon her condition of object and does no longer adapt herself to fill this object
with emotive delicacies – tremor, abnegation, admiration… – which complete
the pleasure consumed by the male? Man feels reassured by this because the sex
he has so casually, has not turned against him, making it become his object in
turn.

The woman in the monogamous couple, who through a conscious and voluntary
effort, passes from the clitoral stage to that of vaginal, notes that it is a contract
for her to unblock herself psychologically with respect to man in order to taste
more absolute pleasures and be in complete accord. It is evident that to accept
the role of wife and mother, thus that of realising herself in lavishing for others,
but claiming in the relationship a sexuality of her own, is a situation of

unsustainable schizophrenia. She acts as a poor imitation of the vaginal woman,

that is, as an unhappy vaginal woman, a slave, continually dissociated from her
attempts at autonomy and her realistic perspective of man, she feels deeply
guilty. One escape from guilt is that of reiterating and confirming even in sex her
adjustment to the values of dependency, renunciating her true and proper clitoral
orgasm, promising and challenging every outlet of autonomy, whose real decline
in her experience is because no particle of her brain is more willing to connect to
him. The other escape, that which arises from the acquisition of feminist
consciousness, is of strengthening the drive to exist independently from roles, in
a way that recomposes her psychic unity via self-affirmation and not via the
pleasure of losing herself. This path does not offer the guarantee of another
normality and she does not gratify herself for the approval of the patriarchal
man: it leads to the unexpected qualities of imagination that woman consciously
takes upon herself.

Patriarchal society reproduces the privileges that the community of mammals

have conferred upon the aggressivity of man: it is true that the harem is a need of
the horse like many other mammals, but the need of mares is not that of being
dominated by the stallion. So much is true that to gather them and to possess
them, the latter relies on violence and they (the mares) rebel desperately. Only
when they were bitten, bleeding in lengthy battles, defeated, do they accept their
role.

By masturbation the male sexual culture not only means autoeroticism, but every
form of stimulation of the sexual organs that is not coitus. This is an
interpretation that uniquely expresses the supremacy of the virile activity of
penetration and of the sensations on the active party with the privileged locus in
the vagina; even if the terms of coitus are used to penetrate other places, such as
oral or anal coitus. Therefore, through such a sexual culture, female sexuality
can actualise itself only through acts of masturbation even if involving a partner.
The conventional character of this distinction is evident, as every reaching of
orgasm invariably produces itself during the rhythmic friction of the sexual
organs. It is interesting to note instead that homosexual coitus with the female
vagina, a relationship not co-ordinated a priori, is considered as masturbation
via the vagina. It appears evident that, with the idea of masturbation, there is a
sense of pleasure lived in solitude and separation: how is it possible to use one’s
terms to signify the pleasure procured reciprocally in the urges of the
lovemaking session?

According to us the difference between masturbation and non-masturbation lies

in the indication of a presence of another and in mutual eroticism, not in the
execution of the coital model in order to accustom oneself to another and in
order to ignore each other or to see oneself in a conditioned reflection. This is an
imposition of the privileged act of patriarchy that guards its virility and the
ideological values of procreative heterosexual penetration.

The socialisation of the two sexes of human beings is most dissimilar in infancy
and in puberty: while one sex, the male sex, is stimulated in the exercise of the
sexual act in itself, the other sex is fed an intense concentration to raise the act in
itself into a catharsis of sentiment in which she seems destined to nullify herself.
We are before these two conditionings of the same kind, that first has had an end
in marriage or the monogamous couple with the oppression of woman, but today
young men search for a sexual encounter. These two great diversities make one
fall without a way of escape, and with these dramatic events that no
accommodation a posteriori can heal.

Psychoanalysis errs when it affirms that the maturity of the female human being
consists of the disposition to give herself, or else surrender to a male Other. This
disposition is instead that which,

counterposed to the discovered path of autoeroticism by the girl-child, is far

away from true eroticism and relegates her to the field of sentiment where,
pushed into this deception by man, she plunges into pure carnal sensations,
already autonomous and quite self-sufficient in achieving the highest peaks of
pleasure.

We distrust the optimism of all emancipated women who place forward as an

example to follow their sportive agreement without dramas with man. We not
only deny that any woman today could have any satisfying relationship in any
field of the masculine world, but we observe that, behaving herself according to
the “noblesse oblige” of woman in the current of all privileges and male
nonchalantness, she offers to man the obedient comprehension for a slavery of
another kind, but integrating that of a traditional wife. So as it has always been,
in more fortunate historical periods and in the social categories of success and of
representation. The emancipated woman gives man the comfort of adjusting her
emotivity to his, her need with that of his, her version of facts with that of his,
and so destroys her authenticity in the illusion of not being conquered.

Autonomy for woman does not mean isolation from man as is the fear of vaginal
women accustomed to finding their interests in the heterosexual couple; but it
means holding in herself that power which for millennia she has surrendered to
her lord.

The woman who has laboriously passed, more or less, from the clitoral
experience to that of the vaginal, is the woman who largely refuses an autonomy
from man as a value. She seems to hold in her hand the solution to the problem
since she possesses a status of paragon on the level of pleasures between a lesser
and greater psychic preoccupation and involvement, and therefore physical, with
man. But the lesser involvement she lives as separation is concordant in
substance with the Freudian interpretations which consider the woman capable
of surrendering herself to another man without reservations, mature. The lesser
or greater involvement with man are synonymous with the lesser or greater
realisation and identification of self with man, therefore the lesser or greater
pleasure. The weight of these women, who constitute the real defence of
patriarchal sexual culture and the piece of support to impose it upon the great
majority of women with the blackmail of an objective and a proven superiority
of sensations; is, unbeknownst to them, enormous. The ingenuity of offering a
convincing echo around the great pleasure in the offer of an orgasm
contemporaneous to that of man and in the location chosen by him, comes from
having been predisposed to think that maximum eroticism is the reaching of this
condition. The vaginal woman tends to remain far from true eroticism, which is
not the fusion with the other or the loss of conscience bound to the psychic
emotionality towards him, connected to the teenage dream of falling in love, but
the game and exaltation in which the possibility of a dilation of self she feels to
spring directly from the mutual responses of the body of one woman and an
other, man. Pure eroticism, comes from the state of consciousness, the free
capacity in the human being of becoming an individual, while to woman, left to
the sensation and the ecstasy of unison, has been removed from the carnal pole,
along with the ethical, which would have given her a sense of completeness
which leads to the creative release.

Vaginal pleasure is not the most profound and complete pleasure for woman, but
the official pleasure of patriarchal sexual culture. For woman to attain it, means
feeling herself realised in the only model gratifying for her: one that satisfies the
expectations of man.

“So it is understood, that the greatest physiological intensity of the orgasmic

response of woman, having subjectively felt it or objectively registered, has been
reached by the experimental sample mediating techniques of self-manipulation
or even with mechanical means controlled by the same subject. Immediately
after, the stages of intense eroticism have been realised, reached with the
manipulation effected by the partner. The minimum level of intensity in the
response of the target organs has been registered during coitus.” (W. H. Masters
and Virginia E. Johnston).

Man does not at all know who woman is when she escapes from her colonisation
and from her roles through which he was preparing for her an experience already
made and repeated through millennia: mother, virgin, wife, lover, daughter,
sister, cousin, friend and prostitute. Woman has been a product created in such a
way that he would have nothing to discover in such a human being.

Every role has presented its safeguards for him; to escape from these safeguards
was to fall out of man’s consideration; this has been the point. Every “different”
woman today knows that every man in his heart decrees to her a role as her end,
because, not coming to classify her, he feels irritated and impotent before the
fact that the understanding between the sexes is not at all clear. Having been
aided in this by psychoanalysis, which reflects the masculine hostility through
admitting that woman is a problem for him, he takes note of every woman not
identified with a role, via a judgement upon her psychosexual health.

“Amongst the hundreds of patients observed by me and tracked over the course
of some years”, affirms W. Reich, referring experiences during 1920-25, “there
was not a single woman who didn’t suffer from a complete absence of vaginal
orgasm. For men, approximately 60 or 70 percent have presented severe genital
disorders.” The others, some 30 or 40 percent who did not present evident
disorders with impotence or premature ejaculation, describe their sensations and
their performance during the sexual act, convinced Reich that even they suffered
from severe disorders of the genitalia.

Reich so insists on the conviction that it would be impossible to find genitally

healthy patients of the female sex. “Woman has remained genitally healthy when
she has succeeded to attain a clitoral orgasm. The distinction between clitoral
and vaginal excitation has been unknown. In short, nobody has the least idea of
the natural function of orgasm.”

Departing from the presupposition of a normal coitus with surrender, tenderness

and reciprocal desire as a goal into which flows the neurotic personality of man,
substantially rapist, sadist, exhibitionist even when present in the degree of the
regular terms of the sex act; and the neurotic personality of woman, incapable of
vaginal orgasm and her attachments toward her partner reflect anxiety, coldness,
masculinity; Reich reinforces the Freudian ideology of the vaginal orgasm. Now
we do not see how it can be sustained that woman in the stage of reaching the
clitoral orgasm and not the vaginal, is a woman incapable of orgasmic potency
and how she is comparable to, for example, a man who declares himself without
pleasurable sensations during ejaculation. It would perhaps be comparable, if
even women affirmed not having obtained a peak sensation or unloading of
sexual tension from her clitoral orgasm. But this only occurs when woman is
made aware of the negative and transitory assessment that male sexual culture
attributes to the clitoral orgasm, perhaps through the reaction of her partner, and
from the test that awaits her femininity in the passage to a superior, definitive
vaginal orgasm. The optimal experience and solely healthy simultaneous orgasm
in coitus in which both partners give themselves reciprocally without
reservations, once it has abolished the characteristic sexuophobic armour from
repression, is an absolute assumption that furthers the sexual model responsible
for female anguish.

The union between the sexes on the level of pleasure in a reality where the sexes
are enemies not through a tragic misunderstanding created by repression, but
through a thousand-year control of the world on the part of man and a thousand-
year exercise of male power, has always been a failed operation in which woman
is pushed to fall. Today woman wants orgasm not via the rationale of the couple,
but for her physical and mental health, because she finds frightening the
embarkment with a partner that she does not know well, which for millennia has
been proposed to her to voluntarily get off at, or as the placement of fate and a
disposition of hers towards man -- all while not knowing the possibility of
return. And because the alternative is already more frightening, of refusing
herself excitation at a time where it is not within the power of woman to
guarantee an exit from it, for herself. Instead, the security of orgasm, of
consciousness and of the right conduct to attain it, is that which allows woman to
react in sex and to participate actively in excitation. The passivity of woman is
the remedy to the woman who does not collaborate with a process whose result
she does not control; and that is the state of frustration that makes her become
the instrument of another. There remains to woman, the scope of pleasure
experienced to the limits of anguish. Even this of Reich is a typically male vision
of the world which, departing from the terrifying cruelty of the given, and of
suffering in sex, arrives at the mirage of total solutions where patriarchy is
saved.
Givens of fact of gender should convince male humanity to abandon the
dictatorship of the human race: all the saviours of the world are patriarchs, but
the world will not be saved in that way. From inside patriarchy, it is clear that it
will not save it.

“Woman is a cup of silver into which man deposits his fruit of gold” (Goethe).

Patriarchy gives a sheen of cultural prestige to every hue that belongs to the male
sex who, even from a situation of individual mediocrity, enjoys a surplus from
which woman remains fascinated in every relationship that should be love - that
is, of work. This lie has entrusted woman to the mercy of man stabilising a
condition of imbalance from which no woman can reassemble herself during the
course of her life. Feminism dissuades her from taking seriously the craving with
which every man feels obligated to leave an unperishable trace of himself, even
if this trace justifies neither the effort of man, nor, more seriously, the myth that
woman holds of the cultural operation of the other who does not succeed to see
absolute superficiality.

In Reich there lacks consciousness of the real crisis between a colonising sex
and a colonised sex: since he occupies himself with woman because he cannot
neglect the complement to man; but it is this latter, tragic protagonist in the years
of Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, McCarthyism that haunts Reich with a sense of
total perversion of instincts. And it is for him that Reich prophesises a
regeneratory bath of the originary energy of the cosmos. But female humanity
must exorcise the power of man in the course of the entire evolution of the
species and frees her from the contempt which an inequality of forces and of
functions has destined her. Woman asks herself whether it is true that the female
of inferior and superior animals, until the primates from whom we descend, is
deprived of the vital discharge of orgasm, and looks with scepticism at nature as
men have called it as testimony. Testimony of what? To reach orgasm during
coitus has been undoubtedly, for woman, a bringing of understanding,
understanding of being subjugated that establishes with a superior being that
psychic link which escapes the female animal. But the understanding that has
allowed woman to emotionally accord herself to the pleasure of the hegemonic
sex is that which from the beginning of time has kept her subjugated to the will
of the other. The particular intelligence of

woman that feminism recognises is that which releases her from the captivity of
man and manifests itself in the refutation of theories which attribute the
excitation and orgasm obtained during coitus to the expression of female
sexuality. Aware of an orgasm obtained via the instigation of physical union of
the bodies of which one, that pertaining to a superior race, in automatic
condition of enjoyment, woman declares as a cause a sexuality in itself whose
orgasmic resolution is not connected to any mental condition of the acceptance
of servitude. Woman begins to think in first person and does not listen to
demands from the other sex that are not those for her liberation, and distrusting
above all, nature as the cosmic order. She does not want to hear grandiloquence
as regards sex, union, pleasure. Finally, in possession of her sexuality, no-one
ought to convince her that an effort of hers will be well compensated and that the
pleasure of a moment would be a life of a slave.

Before the theories of cosmic superimposition and of compenetration of two

orgonotic systems, woman, no longer dependent on a sexual model and on the
myth of man, can easily establish that her clitoral orgasm and the male orgasm
obtained in erotic reciprocity are the same phenomenon.

However he may insist on the biologico-emotional values of the relation of the

couple and on the surrender to the other, we have understood that it is
fundamental only to surrender to the phenomenon.

In order to attain orgasm during coitus, woman must have from man an idea that
transcends the idea that she has of herself, that convinces her to stand with a man
at the height of the high idea that she has of man.

There is an instance in the life of a young woman that passes like a meteor. It is
when she is released from the house of her father and, alone, confusedly
perceives all of the potentiality of her being. She asks herself why this period of
autonomy is so brief, why the approach of a boy is so immediately a
capitulation. The waiting for an encounter with man, which is the basis of her
preparation of life, has created in her a disposition which has been triggered
before she could acquire consciousness: nothing of which was hers, not least
pleasure acquired from masturbation, maintaining consistency before the
derangement that contact with the male world procures in her. Ignorance,
indifference, tolerance or hostility towards man regarding his specific sexual
enjoyment and regarding the ways of attaining it, are determined via her reaction
on the boundaries of pleasure. Upon the rush of youth, when the young man is
absorbed by the exuberant exercise of his sexuality, the young woman however
suffers a sudden change of route which disorients and deludes her. She loses
trust in herself, which has caused an eruption in her psyche for an instant of
released external pressure and perceives it as a fall in personality that reconfirms
herself in attachment to man. It is in this passage which itself establishes a state
of anxiety regarding her own fragility and it is in this state of anxiety that man
operates. As an ancient Indian author says: “All young girls listen to that which
men tell them, but sometimes they do not respond even with a single word”.

We do not forget that the moment in which woman touches the source of her
life’s suffering in male culture is that moment in which she arrives
unconsciously towards the habit of lacking pleasure with the male partner’s self-
imposition for satisfying collected needs mythicised by man, and in his presence
in her own life. It is not a moment of eroticism.

Traditionally woman has sought self-affirmation in culture and, now more

coveted, in male creativity. The fact remains that, losing ground in adolescence
and in youth, the young woman,

exalting herself or withdrawing herself, occasionally finds, spontaneously, an

outpour of expression and tries to arrive at a creative destiny. Today feminism
looks at women at this point and invites them to reflect that the first operation by
which they acquire a share of the female existence is that which, recognising in
sexual colonisation the basic condition of enfeeblement and of woman’s
subjugation, departs from where every woman departs to liberate herself. If she
gives precedence to expression in the masculine world, she must know that there
unwinds an activity within which it cultivates and demonstrates an energy of
creativity ultimately in order to compete with men separately, and to be placed
amongst them. Feminism finds this kind of activity to be prior to the
autocoscienza of women and respects it only if woman obtains liberation from
cultural deference to man.

The vaginal woman is the woman who surrenders to the myth of the immense
power of the penis and who safeguards the ideology of patriarchal virility. She is
the projection of the pride of man and becomes the constant threat to his
biological decline. But if it is true, as has been demonstrated by Masters and
Johnson, that the orgasmic phenomenology occurring in woman is due to the
function of the clitoris and is identical to it, with the involvement of all genital
organs, through any stimulation that may be obtained – directly or indirectly of
the clitoris, somatic or psychic – and if it is true that within direct stimulation,
alone or with a partner, it is more intense and faster and more securely
indictable, why do the same researchers who have discovered this data continue
to speak of the vagina as the “primary organ of female sexual expression” with
respect to the clitoris which is the “focal point of the female sexual reaction”?
What are the reasons to maintain this dualism? And why does it remain a fact
not commentated, the fact that the female sexual reaction “verifies itself
invariably as a psychic component with consequent stimulus of the clitoris”?
And why are they amazed that the problem of orgasm has been a problem for
woman while for man it is discounted and appears instead substituted by the
problem of erection? Obviously there does not exist a response internal to an
imposition, in which it is affirmed, notwithstanding everything, that “the
function of the penis is to provide an organic means for physical and
psychological phenomena, and of the successive resolution of, female and male
sexual tensions”. Because it is in this dogmatic passage that the node of
deception hides, that has carried and maintained the impotency of the female sex
regarding orgasm and the voluntariness of the erection of the male sex.

Man has subjugated woman, creating of her a pleasurable instrument out of her
sexuality, but in this way he feels that he loses power via the way he loses his
virility: it is here that the antagonistic mechanism begins, with young men and
the segregation and possession of woman. Phallic patriarchal culture is a
reflection of the masculine obsession once he has completed the penis-power
identification. The clitoral woman, affirming a sexuality whose functioning does
not coincide with the stimulation of the penis, leaves the penis to itself. All that
which regards the penis no longer coincides with the expression of domination,
from which man draws his exhibitionist stimuli and his sadistic attitude, but with
the pure and simple manifestation of pleasure. The erection is not requested by
woman, neither is power, nor force, nothing. The penis is the particular sex
organ of man and for man: he must rediscover in this new dimension of
consciousness the delirium of power which makes him reflect himself in female
ecstasy and creates her need for him, which is a self-deception of his own
domination. Woman has a privileged and precious place of her own, perfect and
infallible from which all ecstasies depart which a human being is able to attain,
and which is not directly linked to the penis. If man draws from this feminist
autocoscienza ugly presentiments and

feels threatened, it signifies that he does not see space for himself in the world if
not through the imposition of myths of masculinity and the subjugation of
woman.
The female baboon, or an inferior male, in performing the act of submission,
turn their back to the stronger male. This sanctions the new relationship of
dependency with the rite of a feigned coitus.

Even if man could become a pacifist through ideology, an egalitarian, anti-

military, anti-authoritarian, pro-feminist; woman whom he knows in the sexual
moment, knows that he feels invested in his virility as a force of nature, and that
his cultural contestation halts itself before the aggressive, chauvinist role, the
violent, authoritarian and anti-feminist dimensions of his patriarchal penis.

Within the amorous setting, woman must not expect from man the clumsy
initiatives towards the clitoris which disturb it, but must herself demonstrate
which is the preferred rhythmic caress that, uninterrupted, brings her to the point
of enjoyment. The relationship with a woman who desires clitoral pleasure as a
sexuality in itself does not presuppose a technique and unused erotic gestures,
but a diverse relationship between subjects who rediscover their sources of
pleasure and suitable gestures for women. Man must know that the vagina is, for
woman, a moderately erogenous zone and adapted to sexual play, while the
clitoris is the central organ of her excitation and of her orgasm.

Sex is an essential biological function of the human being and lives in two
moments: one personal and private which is masturbation, the other, the relation
that is the erotic interchange with a partner. The prohibition of masturbation has
strongly struck woman because, not only has it deprived or disturbed her in this
realisation of self, but has even consigned her as unskilled or made her feel
guilty before the myth of vaginal orgasm, which for her has become “sex”.

“Awake, arise, my bright falcon! On foot I have traversed the entire earth to
reach thee; three pairs of iron shoes I have used, three canes of steel I have
broken, three scales of stone loaves I have eaten. Awake and rise, my bright
falcon: take pity on me!” (Popular Russian fairy-tale, Finist the Bright Falcon).

The clitoral woman is not the liberated woman, nor is she the woman who has
not suffered the masculine myth – because these women do not exist in the
society in which we would find them –

but she who has faced moment after moment the intrusiveness of this myth and
has not been seized by it. Her task has not been ideological, but experienced
during the better part of her own life through every type of deviation from the
norm, deviations which in male culture are interpreted as an obvious
manifestation of the foolish ambition of an inferior. But it has been through these
particularly that woman has been able to test her own initiative, resisting the
pressure of colonisation that heavily calls her back to her roles with the promise
of gratification and consensus with man. The clitoral woman has registered with
rage, powerless and total unfreedom to save at least herself, the moment in
which her own sisters have been swallowed by the male world and disappeared
without a trace of themselves and have not been able to give a reason for all
those lost lives, of fatalism with which to the end they have accepted that
another man shall inspire their thoughts and their acts, and has intuited a
historical machination against their own sex. The clitoral woman is a woman
who has resisted with her self-consciousness reprimanding in herself the entirety
of the part of femininity until she has found that it was the part of femininity that
man has

imposed upon and fed woman, but she has not done so on the guarantee of her
liberation, but on the authenticity that will end in a stalemate.

Amongst the classic texts of the patriarchal union are the texts of the techniques
of Indian love distributed as the Kama Sutra. In the actual world these have been
re-seized by men in a record heat of virility and of amorous distribution, and by
women who believe what men say about sex, and then aspiring to look at
themselves through the most exceptional models proposed by them. But that
which woman now acquires consciousness of, is that vaginal enjoyment is
obtained in unison; and the unison determines itself with woman’s adaptation. In
fact, man in coitus is engaged in a chain of physiological reactions which woman
must accustom herself to finding stimuli until she orgasms. It is evident that
woman has expressed herself so much more in masturbation and heavy petting,
finding it so much more psychically difficult to attain this need. And it is evident
even that she does not deal with pure and simple sexual adaptation that is able to
be brought into operation, but of the entire attachment of woman which gives
priority in life and the world to man. Thus she cannot escape that the complete
subjection of woman has been the condition that has permitted the flowering of
the golden moments of the eroticism of the couple, in the patriarchal world. And
that femininity, whose continuation Freud and Reich would ensure in the present.

‘Man is Logos, Woman is Eros’ signifies that man is the penis and woman the
vagina. Man satisfies himself in the encounter with an object, woman satisfies
herself exalting herself as a subject.
The fact that woman is objectified in patriarchal culture verifies itself by how the
destiny of an adult man is different from that of an adult woman. One exercises
an attraction of personality that carries an aura of erotic meaning, even towards
his own decline; the other brutally perceives that the self-tarnish of her physical
freshness has raised at most, a tolerance that evades or slows her erotic
exclusion. Man makes use of the myth, woman does not have the personal
resources that would be sufficient to create one. Those women who have tried it
alone, have undergone a stress from which their life has been shortened.

Not only has Reich reiterated in an absolutely definitive way, the sexual model
of coitus, but, realising that this model was realised in a state of enmity between
the sexes, has postulated in such a real orgasm, the test of a new alliance. But
orgasm, contrary to how much Reich believes it, is not the same problem for
man and for woman within the patriarchal culture: in coitus, one obtains it
automatically, the other obtains it on average. If the psychic mediation does not
function, woman cannot have one. She will have one automatically with the
direct stimulation of the clitoris.

Impotence and premature ejaculation are not linked to a difficulty of orgasmic

resolution, but to a difficulty of erection. All of these conditions therefore, hold
to one who sees with the sexual model of coitus, that is, a cultural model of
virility and femininity, and not with orgasm. Reich has therefore sustained a
virile, patriarchal man, and has imagined to arrive at driving out the sadistic
component, now inseparable and which derives from the tradition of domination.
Leaving intact the sexual act of dominion while affirming the vaginal orgasm as
the complete function of woman, he has repeated and aggravated the Freudian
prejudice toward the clitoris, and has given a patriarchal response of anxiety to
woman during coitus. Man is left with the orgasm he has had, woman is left with
the choice between an orgasm that ratifies her as the complement of man, and a
superficial, infantile and masculine orgasm, and the deprivation of orgasm. The
ideology of repression has created a false expectation for humanity through a
false diagnosis. It is thought that there was a history of

spontaneity to recover – this manoeuvre from behind is typical of patriarchal

society’s way of charging from the front – because it has been inconceivable that
anything new could happen. But woman, who proceeds from historical
oppression protracted over millennia, does not have any paradise fallen from her
shoulders, and observing all the degrees of passage from animality to humanity
she sees dominated by the male, therefore from coitus. She is oppressed by the
sexual model, not repressed because she does not respond to the sexual
model. And now there exists a kind of intelligence, connected to the subjective
method of intending and desiring pleasure, that brings her to trace it externally,
her own repression, from the animal-procreative stage to the stage of pleasure
for her self.

The confusion provoked by the theories of Reich stand within the fact that in
him there coexists a new consciousness of the function of pleasure and of the
orgasm – on the point of his theorising that the primum of plasmatic substance is
contraction and expansion, charge and discharge, and that reproduction only
represents a subsequent accidentality – and an absolutely procreative vision of
sexuality with the patriarchal rejection of the clitoris. In the Reichian ideology
there is no place for the only organ whose function is purely and exclusively of
pleasure.

The clitoral woman has nothing essential to offer to man, and does not expect
anything essential from him. She does not suffer from duality and does not want
to become one. She does not aspire to matriarchy, which is a mythical epoch of
glorified vaginal women. Woman is not the Great Mother, the vagina of the
world, but the small clitoris for her liberation. She seeks caresses, not heroisms;
she wants to give caresses, not absolution and adoration. Woman is a sexed
human being. Outside insubstitutable links commences the life between the
sexes. It is no longer heterosexuality at any cost, but heterosexuality as if it had
none. All the ingredients are mixed and woman assumes it inasmuch as she
regards the constitution of her person and not insofar as she is destined by
patriarchy in belonging to a sex.

School teaches young people the functioning of procreation, not sexual pleasure.
This has always been known, but today we notice that the model of subjection is
taught to girls and to boys, the consciousness of their own sex and ignorance of
the female sex. What does it mean for the girl who has discovered her clitoris,
and moreso, for she who has not discovered it, who is informed that her sex
organ is the vagina? The phases of subjective consciousness of pleasure
departing from the autoerotic experience in boys and girls, and adolescents, must
be respected: that is the sex education which in such a moment has a nexus of
sensations and emotions appropriate to them. All the remainder is an imposition
of a reformed, paternalist sexuophobia; discouraging the development of the
young girl.
One instance of the safeguarding of adolescent emotivity is that of the tenderness
towards the parts belonging to the same sex. This phase of turbulence in female
sexuality is most important, perhaps because it leaves a more acute sensibility
and solidarity towards women, perhaps because it places upon the foundation of
consciousness an unrealisable hypothesis, but a not unrealisable disposition.

We want to affirm clitoral love as the model of female sexuality in the

heterosexual relationship, because there is not enough regard of the clitoris as
the point of conscious reference during coitus, nor do we want it to be that the
authority on the clitoris to belong to the lesbian relationship. But we are
convinced that as long as heterosexuality will be a dogma, woman will remain in
whichever way the complement of man while she can carry in her baggage of
intuitions from adolescence, an

impulse towards women upon which to reassess the occurrence of the

development of heterosexual relations.

Woman is monogamous, man is polygamous; woman is receptive, man is

aggressive; woman is passive, man is active; woman is for the family, man is for
society; woman is executive, man is creative; woman is prey, man is the hunter;
woman is irresponsible, man is responsible; woman is immanence, man is
transcendence. Woman is the vagina, man is the penis.

Within amorous glances, man wishes to hold woman in profundity, because she
loses herself. He wishes to wear down her resistance, her initiative, her
autonomy. He wishes to investigate the boundary at which point her dedication
and self-acceptance collapses, that is able to collapse upon her forgetting of
herself. Man knows that right which belongs to him and demands it; he feels
insecure if it (sex) does not occur, not because it is necessary for reciprocity but
for his sense of self as a man. Thus he can come to consciously refuse all
commitment and to search for a type of emancipated woman existing only on a
sexual level. But he does not abandon his knowing glance upon his roles
because, everything notwithstanding, he has the need for a woman whose
sexuality is developed within the conditioned reflex of vaginal gratification.
Thus the sexual freedom of man requests an ulterior conflict in woman, who is
constrained to respond to the traditional sexual model and to be ashamed by any
emotionality connected to the necessary functioning of the same model,
according to the explicit pretext of the dominant sex whose domineering attitude
increases with the increase of his freedom.
We reclaim the feminism where Lenin had sealed and repressed it in order to
facilitate the development of an organisation of communist women deprived of
self-consciousness. We know that bourgeois feminists have found in proletarian
women an immediate correspondence and enthusiasm for sexual questions and
who themselves had here been interrupted with anathema and blackmail. They
were not the questions of the order of the day, and they would not have known
them to stand any longer. Lenin was promising freedom, but was not willing to
permit the process of liberation which for feminists, departs from sex. The
freedom promised was therefore a new abuse of power. Revolution on
ideological bases reinforce patriarchal power because, refusing the value of the
process of the liberation of women through autocoscienza, it cuts out the
collectivity of creative expression, and enables the paternalistic spurring towards
authorisation and obedience as the first stage in which one’s sense of
responsibility is measured. Feminism is spontaneously oriented upon the
acquiring of consciousness, that does not confuse it with the passive adhesion to
an indoctrination: in fact it does not promise freedom to women, but it is women
who proceed day after day their process of liberation while man continues to
propagate his own patriarchal virility in ideology, in self-criticism, in
experimentalism that lead humanity to every kind of laceration and alienation.

One can ask themselves: what is it that is lacking in socialist theory that
feminism would have been able to offer? We respond: for example, this: that the
subordination of women is sanctioned in the sex act of coitus from which man
draws the natural conviction of his supremacy, that this is the presupposition of
the patriarchal family – authoritarian, oppressive and anti-social – therefore, the
accumulation of goods and prestige, and which is the base of human society that
must transform itself through autocoscienza in order to creatively discover new
forms of association corresponding to their liberation. This is the fundamental
historical passage that feminism has been seeking to toss

into flames by means of the work of groups: inasmuch that woman speaks
authentically of herself, of her discredited experiences and anything that has
never found an audience in any area of male culture, the millenarian abyss
exposes itself with every consecutive day, into which she plunges, and escapes
the oppression of woman and reveals the oppressive structure of patriarchy in all
its complexity of plot that cannot be disentangled without the contribution of
each woman.

Within the ancient world of monkeys the inferior-superior relation is clearly

modelled on the female-male relation in a gesture of greeting between
components of the pack: independently of the sexes, it consists of the offer of
copulation as a signal aimed at calming aggressiveness. Presenting the posterior
with the tail raised or aside, the female and the subordinate male offer a social
satisfaction even before an occasion of copulation with a superior: this
conciliatory gesture of submission to relations of force and of rank guarantees
them survival in group life. In other mammals like the chimpanzee, when a male
is seized by a fit of anger and mounts his fellow, male or female, his fellow stays
near him and pleases him by performing a real or a simulated copulation.
Blending in with the females thus becomes the more secure means that nature
concedes to the young males of any species of monkeys to neutralise the menace
of the head adults until they become able to take their place: their genitals
assume their colouring and the females’ genitals assume their swelling in the
period of heat, and in such a state they repeat the gesture of offering. In this
sense, the juvenile adult and slave-master relations can be interpreted as an
institution, in the human world, of the inferior-superior relation which has the
permanent “natural” condition in the woman-man relation.

Rebelling, the young man, as a slave, claims his virility, therefore his patriarchal
penis, and posits the question of the seizure of power. Rebelling, woman reveals
the archetype of oppression that is coitus, as the first act of violence and of
hierarchical disparity between beings.

The vaginal woman who acquires consciousness in feminism breaks the silence
with man and reveals the crises in which she has remained caught in the
patriarchal impasse: on the one hand she suffers from the masculine myth until
she accepts any arbitrary act of his, on the other hand she is aroused by it and not
by another relationship with man. The situation of the couple with the
submission of the female sex, that the clitoral woman shuns and which raises all
of her indignation, becomes understood in the moment that woman rebels
against and escapes the union with the oppressor. It is here where two types of
women can be removed from their different attitudes toward each other and
towards their partner, since both recognise each other inside the patriarchal
system: one with a life wasted away in the subjugation to the traditional bond,
the other with a life, before feminism, relegated to a stage of self-resistance. The
clitoral woman calculates why the psychoanalysts have defined her as infantile
and masculinised and have found detestable her obstinacy towards maintain
herself as her proper sex. Not being disposed to eroticise herself upon the themes
of amorous possession and of the fusion with a male other, she lacks that tragic
experience of self-dedication that brings the vaginal woman to a depth of
humanity in which man has always recognised his companion as she who, with
suffering, implicitly contrasts the history of his supremacy, but, since she does
not impede it, she serves to validate it and increases it with pathos. Manifesting a
tendency to give precedence to herself instead of giving it to man, the clitoral
woman seems to repeat something particular to masculinity, while simply
abandoning the emotional condition which she could accept, gratified, a status of
insignificance. The infantilism of the clitoral woman is her intuition of a
different course of the female life with a freshness that is not spoiled like that of
Natasha, in contact with the patriarchal man who towers above and extinguishes
her in the apathetic resignation of mature age; but slowly disperses herself in the
flowing of a life not necessarily settled.

Having entered into the vaginal mechanism, woman touches at once the
foundation of her colonisation, since she becomes incapable of reacting before
the considerations of possession: it is there where she struggles to recover herself
in whatever way, participating in a repressive dialectic and involuntarily makes
herself custodian of blackmailing masculine values. It is in this certainty that
patriarchy entrusts her with the minding and education of children, because it
has understood that there is no relief for her.

The vaginal woman who leaves her role, can leave it with the sensation of the
breakdown of every possible relationship with man; the clitoral woman, instead,
who has not felt guilty with man when continually making her demands as an
individual, takes into account that her traumatic clash with patriarchy had come
in a previous moment which gave rise to the first indications of consciousness,
being both a reaction and as a development of unforeseen potentiality. In a world
where clitoral pleasure is invisible to men and to the majority of vaginal women,
the woman who has made the clitoris the centre of her eroticism seems to be an
unimaginable being, different both on human and cultural levels. Hers is a
conquest of self and of her own womanhood that is not concentrated on the
complementary place to that of man, but extends itself outside patriarchal
heterosexuality.

That which is said to be human in this society reflects the degree of positive
participation of the person in patriarchal ventures. The clitoral woman who is
herself estranged from such participation, is as if she must continually face a
lack of humanity, because the intertwine of psychosocial relations between the
sexes, in which she lives, she is estranged from herself, and there does not exist
another cultural or social dimension in which it would be possible for her to
recognise herself. To have remained at length in this condition of unrealisation,
that is, of the loss of patriarchal personality without recovering alternative
solutions of identification, has been an existential process whose unforeseen
result has been the formation of her autonomy. In fact she is not defined with
respect to the actions breaking from the norm, but she is consolidated in
authentic gestures of concentration on self. This clarification has permitted her to
observe that her conduct has not sprung only from rebellion or negative
participation, but from something else that has not been possible to isolate prior
to feminism. In fact, feminism, certain of its points, has itself realised the
autocoscienza of woman who conducts the struggle against patriarchy standing
on her own terrain.

The emptiness of humanity that she can discern in herself, from the patriarchal
point of view, becomes, on the other side, the need of humanity for her presence.

Within the more pragmatic tendencies, researchers, intending to resolve the

sexual difficulties of couples, have realised that the best results are obtained
upon a scientific basis of correct sexual behaviour, in developing between
partners the emotional conditions that bring to a coitus satisfaction. They are
thus stimulated in woman, perhaps after years of sexually frigid marriage, the
perceptive reflexes of penetration; and they suggest to her the concomitant
emotions that bring her to arousal and orgasm.

The specific deception of the vaginal woman is in that moment where she
reaches climax in coitus, through the establishment of a conditioned reflex of
sensations, hence such that “his penis takes care of my part, as my vagina does
his”, that is through the perception of “that” relation, while man has an orgasm
automatically in this or another relation and regardless of what sensations and
erotic fantasies that he could insert for his pleasure.

This vaginal orgasm, which was to Freud the fruit of a psychosexual maturation
of woman, is to feminism the product of her psychosexual adaptation.

“The diagnosis of primary orgasmic dysfunction is permitted when woman has

not even had one instance of orgasm in her entire life. There is no comparable
male sexual dysfunction to this. The woman affected by insufficient
masturbatory orgasm does not obtain an orgasmic release through self-
manipulation or by a partner, neither in homosexual nor heterosexual
experiences. She can and does reach orgasmic expression during coitus.
Insufficient coital orgasm is the dysfunction which many women suffer who
have not at all succeeded to obtain orgasm during coitus. In this category fall
women capable of masturbating or being masturbated until orgasm”.

Next to these affirmations of Masters and Johnson which, unlike psychoanalysis,

at least equate the conditions of insufficient orgasm during the direct or indirect
stimulation of the clitoris, we read:

“The influences that weigh in the balance of female sexual reactivity are
multiple. It is fortunate that the two most important systems of influence,
biophysical and psychosocial, reconcile such variables during an involuntary
interaction of character. If there were no chance of such a mixture, the occasions
of female orgasmic experience would be relatively few”.

And at the same time: “The facility of the physiological response of woman to
sexual tensions and her capacity of orgasmic release have not at all been
appreciated for their fair value”. It seems to be very close to a possible
reflection: that coital activity lacks an orgasmic outcome in the great majority
because the sexual model of coitus requires a psychosocial disposition towards
the other sex to whom woman is always less and less convinced that she ought to
yield. So much is true of what Masters and Johnson affirm, that woman sexually
responds more to the psychosocial system, in coitus crowned with orgasm, than
to an action of the biophysical system. It demonstrates the fact that “in a
situation of advanced physical disability, the identification with a partner-lover
can give orgasmic impetus to a woman physically destined to sexual non-
reactivity”. Naturally this reflection has not been conceived; in fact the
researchers in question firmly maintain the coital sexual model as such a
wretched obligation of the female sex is not at all known, because the chain of
difficulty that the partner determines in the other is above all evident, and the
correct operation ceases to be, with woman, a kind of voluntary learning of a
mystification which, with a global response of her own, she desires to bring to an
end. “Through an unconscious motive”, conclude Masters and Johnson on
female sexual dysfunction, “a position of stalemate is revealed in the process of
sociosexual adaptation to the point in which the desire of woman clashes against
fear or the conviction that her role as a sexual entity may lack the insubstitutable
contribution represented by herself as an individual.”

This sensation of woman that indicates the sexuality alienated from her person is
the motive from which springs even penis envy. What else could this envy be,
indeed, if not the desire of a non-complementary sexuality, therefore not bound
up with a destiny of dependence contrasting with the push towards autonomy
that the individual feels? Envying the penis or refusing a role, woman expresses
what else if not the need for the truth about her own sex which is, precisely, an
organ equivalent to the penis, an organ in itself and not a cavity which manifests
only as incompleteness, receptivity, expectation? In what sense has it been said
of the clitoris as “a unique organ in the complex of human anatomy”? It is a sex
organ, simply, and has a relation of equivalence with the penis inasmuch as a
centre of pleasure: but equivalence does not mean equality in a reduced
dimension. In fact it does not become erect, does not penetrate, emits neither
sperm nor urine, thus it cannot provide to woman another participation in those
experiences typical of virility which is

connected to the phallic patriarchal myth. It has instead a unique particularity: it

allows multiple and uninterrupted orgasms if subjected to adequate stimulation.
So this has happened: a sex organ that presents itself as a specific organ of
pleasure, therefore of orgasm, has been the sex organ that in patriarchal culture
has succeeded to be kept hidden and unused, to the benefit of the sex organ of
man that, although handicapped by its procreative function, has twisted upon
woman every contradiction provoked by his very anatomy. This is a node of
such oppression in male culture that we cannot succeed to ponder enough: it
brings us out, into an absurd place that, from effort, we manage to consider
historical.

“As well as for copulation, the penis of mammals serves also for urination and
urine in turn serves, quite frequently, to mark a territory. Normally the task of
drawing boundaries is the responsibility of the animal of the highest status, the
alpha, when it draws those of the animals who conduct social life… The erection
of the penis indicates the common origin of two forms of animal behaviour that
are signified through urine and the animal it couples with … Amongst the
monkeys, still more evolved than the ancient period, the penis is placed
ostentatiously on display. Since these animals no longer live in stable territories
delimited by olfactory traces, the exhibition of genitals serves to demonstrate
which is the momentary line of demarcation established for the group. The males
become the sentry with the penis, which has in itself a clearly demonstrative
character” (W.

Wickler).
The supposed guarantee of the lack of biological aggressivity in woman is her
lack of a penis. She appears to be a different entity from that of man, with
another history: through this we do not believe in feminine values counterposed
to those of males as good idealistically at the disposition of all, but we believe in
women and in the values that belong to their experience, even wanting it to end
with the death of fatigue and of alienation in confronting life with that original
stimulus of aggressivity which man enacts and that he justifies in his culture.
Man and only man has had the ability to become dangerous to the very life of the
planet: half of the human race can no longer continue to powerlessly assist with
this preparation of catastrophe.

The delusion that feminism has had, even in the hippie movement, derives from
the fact that the young man who does not make war but love, succeeds to restore
his spite, whose functioning he confirms as the defender of the primary nucleus
of patriarchy. Indeed, while trying to find an exit from the ills of social actuality
through the execution of communitarian, anti-repressive and anti-authoritarian
ideals discovered in every culture and religion, he flees an essential element that
is indeed that which he does not want to accept in feminist autocoscienza. The
invitation to love is a dangerously fascinating formula because it attributes new
value, sincerity, a miraculous halo to the masculine sexual model, reinforcing the
myth of the archaic goodness of the couple and its related roles. The feminist
woman does not believe in patriarchal love as an antidote to war, because in both
she does not see instances excluding one another, but virile images integrating
with one another in society, and discovers that model of virility which is the true
expression of male superiority and therefore the basis of all bellicosity.

In psychologists and psychoanalysts who are occupied with female sexuality, the
certitude of the suffering of woman in her sexual predestination to the vagina,
reaches unsurpassed attestations of credibility and participation. Their orthodoxy
to the masculine cultural line appears much more absurd: with masochistic
ruthlessness they refuse every piece of evidence in order to develop and

confirm the motivations that they posit as the normal state for woman, in the
overcoming of the clitoral phase in favour of vaginal excitation, even without a
release in orgasm.

Meanwhile, in the masculine world the vaginal woman has been the favourite,
the clitoral woman has drawn upon herself all the hostility of man, exposing
naked the rationale of virility. Man has the need for a pact of alliance with
woman: inside it every dissidence is allowed, but to adventure outside of it
becomes an inconceivable psychic phenomenon. The psychoanalysts have
persecuted the clitoral woman, creating a kind of ghetto within her own
discrimination between the sexes.

Positing an objective of healing humanity, psychoanalysis envisaged, in reality, a

restoration of patriarchy: here, the clitoral woman has had all the air of wanting
to ruin the project. One part of female humanity has not made of man the centre
of her emotions, she has manifested the taste for subjecthood, she has had
thought, pride, courage, dignity: she was therefore a diseased part, traumatised,
neurotic, frigid. The German and English sociologists of the end of the 19th
Century were in the right when they recognised the normality of woman in
clitoral orgasm no less than in that of the vaginal, but that which has evaded
them Freud had discovered instead, that which is only that the vaginal woman is
passive, therefore feminine, because she is suited to the necessary role for the
maintenance of the couple. It will be significant to re-read the texts in which
they have singled out – rightly and promptly – the clitoral woman: they can say
much on the patriarchal dispositions in the encounters with the opposite sex; in
this renewed witch hunt man throws light on himself, on his terrors and his
abuses. The vaginal woman, destroying the symbiosis with man, has found with
the clitoral woman a totality of experiences, from whom man removes them,
instigating in them an attitude of defence and of incomprehension which in
reality is his own.

Passivity is not the essence of femininity, but the effect of an oppression that
renders woman helpless in the world. The clitoral woman represents the handing
down of a femininity that does not recognise itself in passive essence.

The process of vaginal substitution corresponds, for woman, to a process of

identification with a partner. We know, for example, that a woman not orgasming
can finally have an orgasm with a man without the implied repeatability of the
phenomenon with other men. It is always the element of female monogamy that
we encounter on the track of acculturation. The clitoral woman, instead, is the
woman whose sexual functioning does not appear disposed to identification with
other men: she places herself in a state of alarm when she is induced into unison
with man. Something she knows, even if not on a conscious level, is that in the
moment in which the inferior is above all passive, she will set off a longstanding
and efficient trap. She can even desire to smash this obstacle toward self-
realisation present in the values of the patriarchal couple and of an proper
conduct imposing itself from outside; but in this way she responds simply to a
conformism, that in the vaginal woman is absent because she acts beneath the
operation of a plagiarism that forms itself totally in the adhesion to man. In a
masculine culture, the clitoral woman is a failure if she does not arrive at
effectively identifying herself in her role; regarding feminism, the
unacceptability of her role, she has a point of historical integrity recoverable
beyond every dissociation, which can allow her to find that unity with herself
that she has intuited in the vaginal woman at the same time that she profoundly
disturbs such an acceptance of slavery.

A modern way of cultivating vaginality is to draw the young clitoral woman to

coitus with the promise of reaching ‘something better’. This mechanism seems
deprived of patriarchal malice, but it

is not so: indeed, if the woman becomes vaginal leaving the state of
commendability into which man has placed her in order to make of her his
ventriloquist’s dummy, she is able to reveal to women that detachment in
sexuality is between having and not having an orgasm, and not in the different
quality of orgasm. Why does man, instead, not procure these multiple orgasms
that the clitoris could cause? This is a point almost ignored by male sexual
culture; and yet there is a true expansion and variation of female pleasure. To
those sustaining for the good of woman, the completeness of vaginal orgasm,
feminism responds that ‘something better’ stands instead in refurbishing
eroticism towards the encounter with a different partner and not in following the
mythological perfectibility of the couple – that which, moreover, man has always
practiced as an experience of male privilege, therefore alienated, forged from the
instrumentalisation and the blindness towards woman, and in the knowledge of
his vaginal companion to whom he has left the conviction of the insuperability
of his embrace.

The clitoral woman can be most cherished by man when she assimilates to a
whimsical, poetic woman who protracts and stimulates the flavour of a difficult
catch and of precious prey, but as soon as he discovers behind the appearances of
an unsuspect femininity the structure of an individual, he no longer supports the
reciprocity of consciousness and appreciation; he leaves, retires, ostracises; he is
comforted by a peaceful, maternal union.

The passage from copulation in a posterior position to a ventral position, basic to

the human race, is attributed by zoologists (D. Morris) to the female “that
succeeds to shift the interests of the male towards the frontal area” reproducing
in the swelling of the breasts and of the labia, sexual signals that they have
procured from (the buttocks and the vaginal labia) in the previous stage. This
passage creates a relationship between satisfaction and identity with a male
companion and develops the tactile sensations originating from the anterior part
of the body, and especially allows the female to stimulate the clitoris and the
pubic zone through rhythmic traction and the contact with the body of man, thus
initiating her physiogenic rise to pleasure and to orgasm. Now since the clitoris
is the equivalent to the penis, and to it is due orgasm during the coitus with the
human female, Morris advances the hypothesis that such a reaction, being
unique amongst the females of all primates,

“perhaps, in the evolutionary sense”, is a pseudomasculine reaction. According

to him, in ventral coitus has been a possible surrender to a form of
“masturbation” of the clitoris that has brought the human female to develop the
particular reactivity of this organ. Nevertheless, this organ has existed, why has
it not progressed parallel to that of the male as an organ of pleasure? Perhaps
because these two functions are both found in man, the procreative and the
orgasmic, while the particular needs of the procreative mechanism of the female
have provoked a dualism of functions that has been fatal to her because the
dominant male sex, being deprived, has imposed on her his model of the whole,
pleasure-procreation, that is, vaginal pleasure? In this case, in what sense would
he speak of the “pseudomasculine”? Even so, those who would want to maintain
a distinction of sexual structure between female and male in the vagina-penis
relation, positing the existence of the clitoris on another side, must resume the
course of history natural to the female of primates with her limited period of
sexual availability, during which, not knowing orgasm, she does not know
satiety nor the resolution of the sexual impulse. As soon as the human female
succeeds to orient the necessity of reproduction towards her tensions toward
pleasure and orgasm, she has already taken steps toward the end reached by man,
she who has already “borrowed” a manifestation appropriate to him. It is
exclusively in this wide and remote sense that one can speak of the
masculinisation of the female human. To draw back immediately from before her
ulterior evolutionary phase is too

late: thousands of years ago ancestors of our species have decided otherwise,
opting for frontal coitus and clitoral stimulation, namely for the reaching of
orgasm. It is still the zoologist who speaks of that which was made possible, at
the moment of the formation of a human organisation of couples, through “the
immense satisfaction that the human female brings to the sexual collaboration
with her male partner”. We find here confirmed, the hypothesis of the psychic
link of dependency and of gratification of the female in the rising of her
enjoyment, in the condition of patriarchal slavery.

The inappropriately so-called masculinising of the human female is not therefore

an event of today, but the evolutionary direction that appears in prehistory: it
does not itself contain anything which would lead it to be seen with the
contingent meaning used by psychoanalysis and psychology to define the clitoral
woman. Instead, it serves to disprove the patriarchal prejudice toward the clitoris
and to clear the field of resistance which, through identifying femininity as a
polarity counterposed to virility, the measure of the capacity or lack of woman’s
responding positively to coitus. The human coitus has been an initial stage in the
experience of pleasure, a stage of subjugation to the laws of power and of male
privilege; the affirmation of the clitoris as a sex organ in its own right is the
actual phase of the liberation of woman who discovers her identity in the course
of the species, in history and in pleasure.

Reading Reich, to us women, is head-spinning: “the clitoral genitalia is a

neurotic surrogate of a blocked genital excitation”. Why? Because “the total
orgasm in an orgonotic sense comprises, other than the climax, the successive
involuntary contractions”. Naturally. But that has made Reich believe that this
phenomenology would be the prerogative of the vaginal orgasm? Not only
scientific researchers in material, but above all the autocoscienza of women
concerning sex have confirmed that the clitoral orgasm – in those who have
known to affirm it and connect it without disassociations pertaining to the self as
an individual – has all the prerogatives of “total involuntary contractions” of the
organism and a result of “complete distension”. Reich, having recognised in the
phallic expression of man a fascist comportment and having explained it as the
effect of sexual repression, has involved the clitoris as the female organ
homologous with the penis, in his rejection of the “phallic-pornographic-clitoral
that has existed for six or ten thousand years”. But it is not that which he projects
via the penis, instead he places it more accurately to that of six to ten thousand
years ever being done in the female vagina, and once again, since then, he
throws away the clitoris.

And this ego of his speaks: “moving itself toward an orgonotic universal vaginal
functioning as a successive phase in phylogenesis”! Today feminism clarifies the
points of Reich that they themselves regard because, as a rising star from the
underground of psychoanalysts and for his self-sacrifice to the ideas in which he
has believed – glory reserved to men – he, like all patriarchal renovators, has
become an authority in whose name young and mature women are evaluated and
abused, with new arguments on a parameter as ancient as the world.

The patriarchal couple is the penis-vagina couple, husband and wife, father and
mother of the animal-procreative culture: their relationship has not been
determined on the basis of the functioning of sex organs, but on the basis of
procreation to which the female sex has been subordinated. The vaginal woman
is the outcome of this culture: she is the woman of the patriarch and the seat of
every maternal myth, the slave woman who hands down the chain of subjugation
from which male domination had been rendered permanent during any historical
change. The unprecedented event of the world is not the male sexual revolution,
that is, the disinhibition that

brings a renewed prestige to coitus in the heterosexual couple, the group, the
community, or in the universal orgy; but the rupture of the penis-vagina sexual
model. In this unprecedented event stands the possible dissolution of insoluble
nodes created by patriarchal culture which has subjugated woman in the
sacredness of the superior-inferior emotive relationship.

Summer 1971

Carla Lonzi