Cunt Power

One of the chief mechanisms in the suppression of female humanity is the obliteration of female sexuality. Historically the process can be traced in the change in the iconography of women. In the Middle Ages women were characterised as lustful, allies of the devil weaning men from God and noble intellectual pursuits; womanhatred had a virtue which is lacking from more recent forms of stereotyping in that it allowed the women energy, diabolical energy but energy nevertheless. The rise of the protestant commercial classes brought with it a change in the characterisation of women: they became chaste guardians of their husbands’ honour, emblems of prestige and possession. The historical process can be observed in microcosm in the growing up of every female child. From an unknown quantity as an infant human being, she passes trough a sexual phase, which the Freudians describe as masculine; her pre-adolescent sexuality is explained as an infantile stage of penis envy, which ought, if due process is observed, dwindle into the passivity of the mature woman. From subject, she declines into object, and her status as toy for man’s delectation is indefatigably illustrated in the popular imagery of sexual intercourse, the missionary position, big boobs, suspender belts, and all the paraphernalia of pornography.

In order that woman might become sex objects rather than sexual people, sex itself was devalued. instead of extending through all forms of communication into “the highest pinnacle of the human spirit” (Nietzsche) it became “a momentary itch” (Amis). Woman lost spirit and were made flesh. Desire was localised in the male genital, the visible doodle, the tag of flesh that could become as hard as a fist. The interpretation of souls and bodies became the pummelling of one lump of meat by a harder lump of meat. Sexuality became as masculine a virtue as packing a good left. No-one thought to object that in the sexual battle the bigger and stronger picked upon the smaller and weaker. Women like asses were made to bear. If the softer flesh was further tenderised by pummelling, the tremulous dangling thing in which the male located his sex was safe from any threat, except the anxiety which was the unavoidable result of having invested male sexuality in a lump of meat in the first place. In his efforts to allay his anxiety that his tassie might not turn into a fist when required, that it might be smaller than the man-next-door’s, the male forbade comparison to his woman. From her he extracted fidelity. Fast vehicles, bombs, male bonding were called into service to allay his persistent phallic anxiety. Women lost interest in all of it, the competitive sports, the war game, the games of darts with the boys.

The female genital organ, in keeping with the desexualisation of her whole energy and the obliteration of her desire, became a mere hole, troops for the use of. Receptivity which is no more passive an act than eating, became synonymous with passivity. In their anxiety to suppress suspect receptivity in themselves, men developed aberrations in the regulation of their eating habits, became unable to regulate their digestion, compulsive about food; their bellies and bowles ulcerated. If gentleness was like feminine passivity, activity had to distinguish itself by becoming aggression. The world was conquered, knowledge was raped, virgin countries were exploited. The only becoming attitude for the masculine hand was a fist, and the only position in love or war was on top.

In order that the pork sword might be seen to rule the world unchallenged, women obligingly hid their sex, at first with a hand and a glance of simulated alarm as the goddess of love rose glistening from the waves. The devices for minimising the organs of femalness became more sophisticated; women began to wear knickers, then to deodorise their genitals, douche them, shave them, pluck them. Modesty rotted their innocence. They learned to prize smallness, inaccessibility. Their rich juices were discouraged from flowing. The clitoris, which no stretch of imagination could make part of any mere hole, was ignored and forgotten. Women were to have no more understanding of sex than a Bechstein has of Beethoven. They wished no more than to be played upon by a master, to be his favourite instrument upon which he might father masterpieces.

Girls of a more “primitive” age have sung the praises of their “deep fringed purse” and mocked the man who tried to plump them. They could boast of the fury of their venery and the comfort of their lust but the permissive women of our pillsafe age can only allow the Hell’s Angels to prove their valour by not vomiting when they suck menstrual blood from them, or wank the boys who walk them to the bus-stop, or let them have a fuck without too much palaver. The relaxation of sexual taboos has not even been a reform, let alone a revolution. Revolutionary women may join Women’s Liberation Groups anu curse and scream and fight the cops, but did you ever hear of one of them marching the public street with her skirt high crying “Can you dig it? Cunt is beautiful!” The walled garden of Eden was CUNT. The mandorla of the beatified saints was CUNT. The mystical rose is CUNT. The Ark of Gold, the Gate of Heaven. Cunt is a channel drawing all towards it. Cunt is knowledge. Knowledge is receptivity, which is activity. Cunt is the symbol of erotic science, the necessary corrective of the maniacal conquest of technology. Skirts must be lifted, knickers (which women have only worn for a century) must come off forever. It is time to dig CUNT and women must dig it first.

To dig it is to know it. To know it is to feel it, the clitoris so complicated and so clever, as thrilly as a high tension wire. In its nest within a nest like the word within a word. The bud in its calyx in the vales where the big lips cleave way from the slopes of the mount of venus. This is carnal knowledge.

It is absurd that women can only name their sex by the terms of phony objectivity, the scientific terms which seek to push away the reality of the thing by talking about it in foreign tongues, clitoris, labia majora and minora, the glands of Bartholin for God’s sake! The only other terms they may employ have been deformed by centuries of sadistic male use. You CUNT, gash, slit, crack, slot ... Women have no names of their own for what is most surely their own. It ought to be possible to establish a woman’s vocabulary of cunt, prideful, affectionate, accurate and bold.

But it is not enough to know what it is called. Women must know above all other people what it is. Feeling it with the fingers serves to accomplish much, but more must be known, of its prettiness, its varying expressions, of how it smells and how it tastes, so that women’s magazines cannot frighten us into believing that what lies between our legs is rotting meat. There is no substitute for confrontation: women must become expert in their own complexities and, because there is no knowledge without standards of comparison, the cunts of others. It is no more true that all cunts are the same when you get down on them than it is that all cats are grey in or out of the dark.

Of course it is not true either that cunt is honey-pot, jelly roll, sugar pie, or a wooded garden or any of the other euphemisms which seek to extol it in terms of something else. It is more wonderful than candy or baby food, more extraordinary than caviare; we will have to learn to describe it, not in terms of what it is not like, but in genuine comparisons. One eighteenth century anatomist, seeking a way of describing the elegance of the cervix, said simply that it was like the mouth of a tench fish, or the head of a new born puppy.

To know cunt, it is also necessary to know how it works, and what it can do. While Masters and Johnson have done much to dispel absurd presumptions about cunt, they could not be better than their subjects and there is no reason why we should believe that what American middle class women taped to electrodes could do, is all that could have been done. Tahitian girls can draw the penis irresistibly and keep it firm and eager for a whole night. Ladies doing exercises to correct urethral incontinence found that their new muscle power increased their enjoyment of sex. Some heroine of folk-lore have caught pennies with their cunts and picked up bottle tops from a table. Vaginal insensitivity may be the status quo of the Sexual Research Labs; that too is not an absolute. Women can devise simple exercises which will help them to isolate the musculature of the vagina, the clitoris and the labia by masturbating with no hands.

When little girls are eventually told about their organs, they are told only about reproduction, with grim, shiny diagrams which leave out the clitoris, present the vagina as a slack tube, and make no mention of lubrication, female erection, and above all, none of pleasure, of how to give it or how to get it. It is not surprising that such a great number of women never find out what is in it. The tremblings which greeted the showing of sex films in school would become an earthquake if schools began to teach the arts and reflexes of pleasure. Since they cannot transmit pleasure in any of their academic fields, in poetry or music, we may safely assume that sex will be less fun when it is taught in school than it was before. It is up to mothers to introduce their little ones to something which they themselves might have come to know too late. Knowledge of carnality must be visceral, not academic.

To know cunt is to love it and to love it is to care for it.