Carolee Schneeman's
Fuses
“Why not posit here that the fact that everything that is analyzable is sexual does not mean that everything that is sexual is accessible to analysis.” –Jacques Lacan
I’m entering dangerous territory, with a blog cheekily called The Nibbler, in moving from innuendo to dealing direct. But I can’t ignore this news item that has me absolutely perplexed and irate:
This article claims that, "Researchers at King’s College London claim there is no evidence for the existence of the G-spot – supposedly a cluster of internal nerve endings – beyond a woman’s imagination."
Is this really where we are in the progression of feminism? Something that some, but not all, women physically feel is declared as officially not existing, as being in their imaginations, because some men can’t find it? And this is to protect the women! From not feeling bad.
This is insanity. You know what else is insanity? When Doris Lessing recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature, some of the response to her literary career (my own included) was focused on one passage she had written, in her masterpiece The Golden Notebook, on vaginal orgasms:
"As time went on, he began to use mechanical means. (I look at the word mechanical — a man wouldn’t use it.) Paul began to rely on manipulating her externally, on giving Ella clitoral orgasms. Very exciting. Yet there was always a part of her that resented it. Because she felt that the fact he wanted to, was an expression of his instinctive desire not to commit himself to her. She felt that without knowing it or being conscious of it (though perhaps he was conscious of it) he was afraid of the emotion. A vaginal orgasm is emotion and nothing else, felt as emotion and expressed in sensations that are indistinguishable from emotion. The vaginal orgasm is a dissolving in a vague, dark generalized sensation like being swirled in a warm whirlpool. There are several different sorts of clitoral orgasms, and they are more powerful (that is a male word) than the vaginal orgasm. There can be a thousand thrills, sensations, etc., but there is only one real female orgasm"
She calls it a "real orgasm” and that’s problematic, but it’s the best description of the difference between these two types that I know of. In fact, this 1962 description is one of the only literary descriptions of this differentiation that I know of; this is part of the insanity. [Simone de Beauvoir also wrote well on this, what she called “a complete orgasm”, an experience she didn’t have until she was 39, and not with Sartre. Soon afterwards she transitioned from being know as an existentialist philosopher, who had independence by living as a man could but was called La Grande Sartreuse, and instead came into her own fame as a feminist philosopher with the publication of The Second Sex.] The deeper insanity was that while some women wrote about this passage of Lessing’s as being uniquely accurate, other women attacked it, not for undermining the clitoral orgasm, but for even declaring that a vaginal orgasm exists! How could she? How quaint and fifties and pre-feminist of her, wrote some commentators. Masters and Johnson had already proven that the only orgasm is the clitoral orgasm; how lucky that it’s our most phallic familiar spot, and the easiest to not lose sight of.
Women have three kinds of orgasms. At least! Three distinct tones that can be played in succession or in harmony.
Why is so much of men's sexuality so foundational to our value systems, to such an extent that we don't even notice, yet still so much of women's sexuality is debatable and susceptible to trends? Or just ignored.
This is important; the roots of sexism are in the fear of the power and the unknown, and the unknowability, of sex.
This is also important because by not being aware of our own sensations fully, we are also not aware of our forms. Standard narratives that are a linear buildup towards a climax are based, quite obviously, on the structure of sex. But what is less established, for the very reasons stated above, is that this is a male experience that women are also sympathetic to but not limited to. What would a narrative form that allowed for the competing, overlapping, choral voices of a woman’s experience look like? What would a "vague sensation of only emotion" look like in filmic images? Or how could one film the above mentioned de Beauvoir breakthrough of “profound self-abandonment” in which she describes her body as "a hymn, a flame.” Experimental film goes there often, but narrative features--which are, again, often structured on a male experience of action and climax and resolution--rarely do.
Two of the most interesting examples I know of authentic female narratives in feature films are both about women struggling to assert their own identities within, or outside of, or transcendent of, male sexual experiences. In Bette Gordon’s Variety, her heroine finds her own voice through a voyeuristic and playful ownership of the stories she overhears in the porno theater where she sells tickets. In Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Jeanne’s “mysterious” and sudden shift occurs when, according to Akerman, she has an orgasm and it is intolerable to her.
The article that introduced this topic has me very concerned that what is complex about a woman's experience, and unfathomably but not unexplainably different from a man's, can be so easily invalidated. There are so few narrative feature film forms that are authentic to the experience of women. And when they are found, they might be declared, like the G-spot, as not existing officially.
