This sex which is not one

I feel it's appropriate that the first post here be titled the same as the book (and the blog). Reason being, the book's bewildering title now makes sense.

Irigaray argues that female sexuality has been defined based on masculine parameters. The clitoris is a “little penis” pleasant to masturbate as long as there is no castration anxiety for the “boy-child”, and the vagina an envelope for the penis. In this sense the female erogenous zones are reduced to nothing more than a “clitoris-sex” which can not compete with the male sex organ, or a “hole-envelope that serves to sheathe and massage the penis.” When looked at in this context women are nothing more than a prop for males to fulfill their sexual fantasies, and though women may take pleasure in this act it is a “masochistic prostitution” to the desire which is not woman’s. Irigaray states that women’s desires have been suppressed and even forgotten with history, and one would have to dig deep down to an archaic civilization to fully understand women’s sexuality.

Women’s sexual organ, which has been reduced to no sexual organ at all, is actually more than one sexual organ in Irigaray’s view. Women can receive pleasure from many things – vaginal and clitoral caress fondling of the breasts, touching the vulva, spreading the two lips, stroking the posterior wall of the vagina, brushing against the mouth of the uterus, etc. Many of these are things our culture associate with normative sexuality. Irigaray argues that women’s sexuality actually goes beyond this: a “woman has sex organs more or less everywhere.” And this last fact explains the title of the book.