The Myth of The Vaginal System of Pleasure
Exorcising the PenileFreud’s Phallic-Phantasm with Anna Prats and The Clitoral Woman
While enjoying read-only Twitter, I was catching up on the transcendental tweets that radical Thinker and lesbian Anna Prats has recently graced the ether with. For the uninitiated/Americanized GC, Anna Prats is a contemporary radical feminist theorist that produces content from Spain and is recognized as a TERF badass in various Spanish-speaking feminist networks. Una genia traductora de publicaciones radicales, Dworkinista lucida, y separatista obstinada. A genius translator of radical publications, a lucid Dworkinist, and a stalwart separatist. Anna is also a keen terminologist and wordsmith, and a compass for anyone wanting to acquire a word arsenal against Spanish-speaking gender militants. A brilliant TERF in every sense, I tell ‘ya. If you wanted to dive into this brilliant young mind, I recommend you start with this super humble early production:
So recently while on and not on Twitter, I came upon un tuit interesante.
What Anna is saying is, “Every day there is one (of them) that feels the need to say how wonderful penetration is. If it was that wonderful, there wouldn’t be an excess of fembots neuroprogrammed by masculine propaganda to act against it and against everyone (women). It seems to me that there are many that need mister-ectomies, or a medium to conduct a penectomy of the phallo fantasm”.
Prats will not be nudged by the pile-up of dissent received from mostly heterosexual radical feminists who feel it’s a wee bit of a stretch, even from Prats who is a self-described political lesbian transparent on having found herself same-sex attracted after discovering Feminism. The topic had me in my feels and so I continued to read through the dissenting majority of tweets livid with Prats for saying that penetration is a patriarchal tool for the continued oppression of women. Someone went scouring for old receipts, as they do, and further aggravated the Rads by fully unearthing this wriggly quagmire from Prat’s Bog of Inconvenient Truths for Serious Feminists. Prats, you see, was only dutifully sitting on this question of all questions, feeling out the phallophilic climate in this new frontier for Radical Feminism, trying her best to forecast when and if The Rads were finally ready to confront the odious monster, because the science has definitely been there and ready for this conversation. In the earlier tweet, Prats was asking for a reasonable analysis, “Our orgasm is clitoral. Women that maintain sexual relations with men: why do you keep practicing coitus if we obtain pleasure without it?”
This is a valid question and one that I’ve contemplated as the lesbian friend to plenty of primarily hetero-oriented women from whom I’ve had to listen to complaints about unfulfilling sex with male partners. The shit that straight women say has been yet another avenue of knowledge and experience of the intimate nature of men from my own communities. When I looked closer and saw their grievances for myself, the treatment was already familiar to what I have experienced of the male “role models” of my upbringing. Men with generationally-wired abusive tendencies, sociopathically-driven compulsions, and even young aged men showing increasingly problematic paraphilic behavior from the female-exploitative fetish media they consume under the noses of girlfriends and wives. Standard modus operandi on crack. Sad to reckon with, but there is always some misogynist behavior or another present in these sexually-neglectful male partners, it is a common denominator, some weird fetishization of women and/or womanhood nearly always in the backdrop. Recognizing an abuser gives you an instinctual same-flavored uneasy feeling and it did me from the friendships with these straight-thinking women whose men were putting them through some seriously perverse shit, with kids in the picture. Knowing this particular type of sexual disharmony was being mitigated between the couple and understanding that sexual frustration is a potent catalyst for violent men is friendship-ending unsolicited advice no woman wants to hear. It was an extremely difficult reservation to bring up because of my petty fear of being the “lesbian friend man-hater”, so I didn’t. With one woman, I kept quiet until I just ghosted them both from the overload of details of his sordid new lifestyle and from fear of being in close proximity to such a creep-o. I wish I could have taken my girlfriends with me as I escaped these misogynist hotspots but I couldn’t because I couldn’t even give her an explanation for it. This cycle of ‘his sexual deviance’ and ‘her phallic obeisance’ can manifest as a real problem for all within a certain radius, best to clear out.
I’ve heard and seen how unjustly abusive bros can be to women’s psychological and physical wellness, of younger people as well. My subject groups of mostly straight white/Latina friends have opened up with stories of domestic violence and psychological trauma sustained when in close proximity to males, and the more physically intimate the relationship is the more internal damage is sustained. If there is a child present, most especially if it is another man’s creation, these boyfriends will assert dominance over that child in traumatic ways, too. Dudes misbehave even with the most adoring phallophile, eventually, and in some hellish way! Yet I, not a goldstar lesbian but not touched, played, nor fuqued with a dood to that extent in the last 25 years, fall back with a loss of neither rhyme nor reason that would help these phallo-programmed women. I can only low-key wild to myself a ‘you need to go lesbo, girl! It’s not you, it’s him! Get your child away from this bs!’. Low-key, ‘cause he scary and the straight phallophilic woman will tell her man on lesbian me with the quickness, make no mistake!
A lesbian and default separatist like me feels a bit lost here in this sordid heterosexualized schema, the male/female dynamic is a different planet to me where the inhabitants display constant conflict and, ‘though one is significantly larger than the other, there is a wicked unfair power struggle, there always has been between these women and the men they keep loving despite the battle scars. By no stretch am I an expert on this pairing, again different planets, I’m only a collector of performance grievances from traumatized women that love men and share their bodies with them. I once very politely asked a seemingly able friend from my Thursday night karaoke group why she used a disabled placard on her car, just curiosity, and yes I am nosy sometimes but I was devastated to discover that sometimes male partners can seriously damage women internally with what this woman was brushing off as “just rough” coitus for most of the 15-year marriage. She became physically limited to some extent after undergoing multiple surgeries needed to mitigate the pain and discomfort that she still lives with. While I can’t relate to that particular hell, I also can’t help but wonder if sanctioning the Vagina, and cutting it off from male use and abuse might be what heals the troubled home and this entire world. I’m talking about withdrawing from social/physical relations with a person and entire sex class as a protest and punishment: boycott!. I’m talking chastity belt realness, too, cause you know these crazy doods…
A clear and present danger manifesting repeatedly in all societies is the sexually warped man of the internet, the new Freudian Type from the old. Lamentable that there is still this (men)tality out there that needs our constant vigilance and reporting on, but this nuisance is alive and well and at the root of this erotic inequality between women and men in the hetero meat market warped by the workings of the gahdamned internet. I’m zeroing in on the sexually ignorant and intellectually lazy doods who will believe and uphold the myth of penetration-exclusive orgasms because it is convenient for them to do so, for his Couch (men)tality, despite how neglectful, irresponsible, and untrue it is. Here I thought we’d long since graduated from Freud’s bonafide creepy uncle brand of toxic masculinity that framed young girls as future ‘unreceptive’ broken women if they explored their clitorises. The Sexual Freud has been fossilized theory, defunct, but there are men who embody his crusty views on the female sex in their hyping-up, their mechanization of their normally flaccid member by swearing that a bit of thrusting from it, a bit of filling, and the very act of ejaculating is what it takes to make a woman belt out a capitulated aria. I doubt this dood-(men)tality does not care enough to work up to front-row seating to hear her at her most intense, her most savage. There are tiers of pleasure to the female orgasm, fellas.
Going into my stash of stories and personal experiences, I don’t believe the majority of men are the Clitophile tramps they claim to be, nor do I believe that even in my most generous vision of a sexually liberated future men will be the ones to see us there, either. Sorry, hetero sis. For all of the dagger-waving that Prats is getting from the “straight-minded” radical feminists of her sphere, she is not wrong in her assertion of the ineffectiveness of coitus for bringing female orgasm. The myth of the penetration-dependent female orgasm got thoroughly squashed during the first extensive Masters & Johnson study on human sexuality during the 1960s. Coitus/ intercourse/ penetration is the act that elicits orgasmic pleasure in men while stimulation of the clitoris, whether there is penetrative sex involved or not, is critical for orgasmic pleasure in women. What’s more, there are so few touch-sensitive nerve receptors inside the vagina that even the elusive G-Spot is mostly a fairytale, too (it was renamed C-Spot for reasons you might be google-curious about).
The empirical data on our clit-critical orgasm was firmly cemented by the late 90s with the discovery of the vestibular glands, or crura, hanging bulbs that extended the size and the reach of the exposed clitoris. These glands on both sides of the front wall of the vulva finally explained why some women were able to simultaneously engage in penetration and build up to orgasm. There is no doubt of the power and potency of our beautiful clitoris, it is literally the equivalent of the touch-sensitive male penis-head, only more sensitive, delightfully compact, prettier, and with a quicker recharge. This piece from one of the best readings I performed on a collage stage for Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues explains the clitty best:
“The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure. The clitoris is simply a bundle of nerves: 8,000 nerve fibers, to be precise. That’s a higher concentration of nerve fibers than is found anywhere else in the male or female body, including the fingertips, lips, and tongue, and it is twice, twice, twice the number in the penis. Who needs a hand gun when you’ve got a semi-automatic?”
from “Woman: An Intimate Geography,” by Natalie Angier
Being a body-attuned lesbian and obvious expert in vulvar needs, I often wonder if men are really as selfish and clit-lazy out in the wild as straight women say, or are these self-described superior beings who “built the entirety of the world” truly this daunted by the Clitoral Female’s tiny nub with its bigger-than-yours energy? Prats was considering this and more in one of her early videos in 2020 titled “Does Vaginal Orgasm Exist? The Clitoral Woman”.
In a translated nutshell, Prats is done with women that loyally maintain the myth of the vaginal orgasm because she holds that penetration is a practice that sustains male social dominance and compromises the sexual power dynamics between men and women in the bedroom (where male dominance is exerted and the woman willingly “conquered”, “nailed”). The Dworkinian concept of Intercourse as an Institution and the rage potency at its root. Coitus is essential for its reproductive purpose, of course, but because it has no climactic value for women, Prats wants us to imagine a feminist future in which pleasure/orgasm is prioritized over non-reproductive penetrative trysts with obtuse males who typically don’t want to suck us off anyway. Poor-performing males who, let’s be real, might be left feeling defunct themselves at having to stroke our tiny pricks long enough that we might enjoy and benefit from it.
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