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I’LL SHOW YOU MINE

Our Magnificent Sex Organs

Throughout history, the human genitals have been feared, worshiped, mutilated, ignored, and admired. There are many historical examples of male phalluses and female vulvas being honored as symbols of fertility. Pre-Columbian statues showed a baby’s head emerging from a vagina. Huge penises still stand in Japanese temples. Ancient India held both male and female sex organs in high esteem and sexuality was seen as a spiritual practice in the Tantra religion. Older cultures based on goddess worship and pagan rituals that were not part of recorded history also revered the human sex organs. The nude body and genitals of both women and men have been the subject of art from as far back as the Stone Age. However, none of these relics depicted the clitoris—none.

In ancient Greece, artists carved exquisite male statues with penises, but when it came to women’s genitals, they were represented with a triangular shape or draped with a cloth. During the Italian Renaissance, artists painted sensuous nudes using religious themes from the Bible. One of the later popes had all of Michelangelo’s male genitals covered with leaves or loincloths, and many Greek statues had their genitals broken off. As Christianity continued to denounce all bodily pleasures, the human sex organs became a source of shame, from which many of us still suffer to this day.

In spite of organized religion’s efforts to control people and their sexual urges, we now have a billion-dollar adult industry pumping out images of women and men’s genitals in videos and magazines. From the early eight-millimeter stag movies to the sixties split beaver magazines, there was always a variety of genital styles and body types. Today, the adult industry’s standard image of sexual desirability favors a thin female body with big tits, long legs, and neatly shaved pussies with small inner lips. Women are getting breast implants and snipping off those lovely long butterfly labia to conform to this current ideal. Most of the male actors have muscular bodies and large dicks. The sex industry is no different from the advertising and fashion industries which present a stereotype of beauty that few of us can attain.

MINE

When I first looked at my sex organ with a mirror, I must have been around ten years old. Without a name or any images for the inner labia, I was horrified when I saw two awful dangling chicken wattles that didn’t even match. The one on the right side was a lot longer than the one on the left. Clearly I’d stretched them from playing with myself too much. Rather than give up this solitary pleasure, from that day on I started masturbating with my finger on the left side to see if I could even them up, but they stayed the same. Until I was thirty-five, I honestly believed I was genitally deformed from the innocent act of childhood masturbation.

THE EXTERNAL MALE AND FEMALE GENITALIA. Here we see the similarities between the outer parts of the male and female sex organs. The external genitals of both sexes arise at a common site and during the first seven weeks of life they are undifferentiated. The clitoral glans enlarges to become the glans penis. The shaft of the clitoris elongates to become the shaft of the penis. The outer lips turn into the male scrotum. Viva la similarities as well as the differences.

It wasn’t until I saw pictures of other women’s genitals in girlie magazines that I began to realize the huge variety of shapes, colors, textures, and forms of female genitals that included short, medium, and long inner lips. My sex life was so totally transformed by that one experience that I would eventually create genital imagery and teach thousands of other women that we are all different and beautiful works of art.

After setting up an evening of photographing a group of my friends’ vulvas in the seventies, I traveled around the country with a carousel of female genital slides, showing them to women and mixed groups at colleges as well as feminist gatherings. Audiences everywhere would become completely silent with their mouths hanging open while I talked lovingly about Valentine Cunts. Showing one slide after another, I compared the different genital styles to periods of architecture like Gothic, Renaissance, Art Deco, and Swedish Modern. Although I acted very matter-of-fact, I was shaking with fear inside, fully aware that I was showing forbidden images. A few people present might have seen a photo or looked at a woman’s genitals, but most were viewing this image for the first time.

After I stopped showing the slides, I continued to sit alongside countless women pointing out the exquisite design of their vulvas in my Bodysex groups. As a result of taking one of my workshops and feeling good about their genitals, women have told me that they put a small photo of their vulva in a locket to wear around their necks. Others have taken portraits of their pussies and made them into valentines for a lover. A few women reclaimed their genitals by wearing gold or silver rings in one or both inner lips. I had a portrait of my cunt carved into a jade pendent that I wore on a silver chain around my neck for years. In the nineties, to celebrate twenty-five years of female genital appreciation, I produced the videotape Viva la Vulva, which shows a group of ten women trimming and shaving their pubic hair in preparation for pussy portraits.

Since I began my cunt crusade in the seventies, an abundance of genital art and images have appeared. Yet each new generation of women start out with genital shame. To get beyond the procreation image of heterosexuality and factor in genital pride and sexual pleasure, mothers have to stop telling their children that boys have a penis and girls have a vagina. Instead, our children need to be told that boys have a penis and girls have a clitoris. When a boy touches his penis or a girl touches her clitoris in a special way, both of them will feel nice tingly sensations. Later, when children get a bit older, they also need to be told that a boy’s penis will ejaculate white semen and a girl’s vagina will pass red blood—before it actually happens. It isn’t fair that many children end up traumatized by these totally natural occurrences that should be cause for celebration.

In 1981 a group of women self-helpers in L.A. finally gave us a description of the entire clitoris in A New View of a Woman’s Body. Ten women who were part of the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers conducted the research. Originally published by Simon & Schuster, the book seemed to vanish after a year. Many years later, the book reappeared, and this time it was distributed by the Women’s Health Centers themselves. Rebecca Chalker, a member of the original collective, is now part of my women’s sexual study group. We are all in the field of sex and meet every month to discuss a variety of topics and share sex information. Rebecca’s latest book is titled The Clitoral Truth.

In every workshop I ran, I always pointed out the shaft, glans, and hood of the clitoris, presenting a limited view. Thanks to the illustrations in A New View, I finally understood what defines the clitoris in its entirety. That tiny little pearl peeking out from under the hood is not the whole story. The internal structure of the clitoris is made up of the legs, bulbs, and urethral sponge. These interior parts are erectile tissue that becomes engorged with blood during sexual arousal—the same process that causes a penis to become erect. Without this basic knowledge, its no wonder so many women believe their sex organ is their vagina. A woman’s erectile tissue occupies nearly the same amount of space as a man’s, except most of ours are inside our bodies.

The shaft of the clitoris divides into two parts that spread out like a wishbone called the crura, or the legs of the clitoris. These two anchoring wingtips of erectile tissue are about three inches long. Starting from where the shaft and the legs meet, and continuing down underneath the inner lips, there are two bundles of erectile tissue called the bulbs of the clitoris. The whole clitoris is the glans, hood, shaft, legs, and vestibular bulbs—these organs are there solely for sexual pleasure. In A New View, the women include the inner lips, the urethral sponge, and the perineal sponge as parts of the clitoris because they engorge during sexual arousal, contributing to women’s sexual pleasure.

It’s not just the poor and uneducated who are sexually ignorant. A letter from a forty-seven-year-old Ph.D. school psychologist said she is from a repressed family of four sisters. They had all spent most of their energies being “A” students in life’s endeavors. Unfortunately, she has to give all four of them a D- for knowledge and appreciation of themselves. In the past four months, she finally discovered that rubbing her clitoris feels good! Although she is “developmentally delayed sexually” she is defiantly enjoying these new discoveries, both with herself and her husband. She sent one of her sisters a copy of my book and a small battery-operated vibrator for her birthday to begin a new era for her family of women.

Another letter, this one from a twenty-one-year-old college student who performed in The Vagina Monologues at school, said that after having sex with three different men who failed to give her an orgasm, she didn’t know where to start. She was sorry to hear I no longer ran “vagina workshops.” That’s been my criticism about the Monologues all along—the play doesn’t sexually inform women but rather perpetuates the myth that the vagina is a woman’s sex organ. No wonder women continue to think they should be able to have an orgasm from intercourse alone.

The first time I saw The Vagina Monologues was off-Broadway, where I heard a charming young woman named Eve Ensler talk about my work with a distorted view of what I’d been doing for twenty-five years. She called it “The Vagina Workshop” and said there was actually a woman who ran these groups. She described the workshops’ participants looking at their “vaginas” with a hand mirror trying to find their “G-spots.” The entire monologue grossly misrepresented my workshops. Although Eve is a playwright and entitled to use poetic license, I had to confront her about not mentioning the word “clitoris” in describing my groups. As a matter of fact, the word “clitoris” was never mentioned during her entire original play. Later, in her dressing room, I said my workshops had been carefully designed to help women find the real source of their sexual stimulation—the clitoris. To her credit, Ensler later added “clitoris.”

In February 1998, The Vagina Monologues joined forces with the Ms. Foundation with a benefit performance celebrating V-Day. By February 2001, they had corporate sponsorship and filled Madison Square Garden for another fund-raiser. The women reading the monologues were culled from the biggest names in screen and television. Both nights made it clear that the format of the original play had dramatically changed. We were brought to a delirious high during the first half only to be plunged down, drowning in a sea filled with the horrors of violence against women. We were told about the vast numbers of women being raped, tortured, and genitally mutilated in Africa, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. V no longer stood for vagina, it stood for violence.

Sex and violence, never sex and pleasure. Talking about sexual pleasure would be too frivolous, inappropriate, and politically incorrect. And who is to blame for all the sexual violence against women? According to V-Day feminists it is still the patriarchy. Does that mean daddy, our brothers, and our husbands? Is it the pope or God? Dare I be so bold as to say the source of violence against women comes from fundamentalists in all the major religions—Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims?

CROSS SECTION OF THE MALE GENITALS. Although it is usually assumed that men have a far greater volume of erectile tissue than women, who have only a small, pea-like clit, when we compare the amount of erectile tissue in men and women it is actually similar. The shaded areas show the erectile tissue of the penis: The penile glans, the (corps) corpus cavernosum, and the corpus spongeosum. The prostate gland also swells during sexual excitement. The testicles are where the sperm cells are manufactured. When the sperm matures, it passes from the testicle to the epididymis and into the vas deferens. On the way to ejaculation, the sperm are mixed with fluids from the seminal vesicles, prostate gland, and Cowper’s gland to create semen. This mixture protects the billions of sperm as they travel inside a naturally acidic vagina heading for the fertile egg.

CROSS SECTION OF THE FEMALE GENITALS. The shaded areas show the erectile tissue in the female: The glans of the clitoris and the clitoral shaft, the legs of the clitoris, the vestibular bulb, and the urethral and perineal sponges all become engorged during sexual arousal. The inner and outer lips become fuller and deepen in color with sexual excitement. The eggs are matured in the ovaries. In the middle of a woman’s menstrual cycle, an egg travels down the fallopian tube into the uterus, waiting to be fertilized by a sperm cell for up to four days. Unless pregnancy occurs, the uterus bleeds out the lining (endometrium) every month to repeat the cycle again until a woman reaches menopause.

After writing a critical review of the Monologues, which had become another sacred cow, I was told by one of the organizers that I suffered from the “Queen Bee Syndrome.” One writer accused me of being jealous of Eve’s success. It’s my belief that all art is open to criticism in a democracy. It’s no secret that I’m pissed off at all the matriarchal feminists who are every bit as authoritarian as any patriarchy when it comes to women embracing sexual pleasure. The original play was humorous and charming and women left feeling happy to be women, but the V-Day version had me agreeing with Camille Paglia when she wrote: “With her obsession with male evil and her claimed history of physical abuse and mental breakdowns, Ensler is the new Andrea Dworkin, minus Medusan hair and rumpled farm overalls.”

My friend Penny Arcade is a performance artist with a political awareness similar to George Carlin’s. At one point she tells her audience, “I hope you’re not here to see The Vagina Monologues, because my vagina does not speak, nor does it have a favorite color, nor does it wear a funny hat.” She says younger women howl with laughter, but the older set doesn’t see that the sexual content of the Monologues is just so much fluff.

Right here at home, everyone gets a piece of our pussies, but they rarely belong to the woman herself. First, our genitals belong to our mothers, who bathe us and change our diapers when we are infants. Then they are controlled by whatever religion is practiced in the home, usually with a mild or strong message about not touching ourselves “down there.” Next we fall into romantic love and our first boyfriend explores our genitals before we even know anything about the form or function of our own sex organ. Later, we give them to the man we marry and finally hand them over to a gynecologist/obstetrician, where the cycle starts all over again for the next generation of women.

Here’s an example of a woman from the Genital Art Forum on my website who has claimed her own sex organ:

I prefer the word “cunt” because it sounds strong, even a little fierce. It’s like that ancient Celtic female symbol often carved of stone showing a woman spreading her labia wide enough to take in the whole world. That’s how I feel when my clit gets a hard on. I can actually grab it with the tips of my fingers and move it up and down like a tiny penis. I feel more affectionate toward my labia these days. When they puff up they look like stage curtains drawing apart to present the opening act of the evening: “Please welcome Miss-s-s-s-s Clitty!” In my youth I was obsessed with the fact that my long labia never resembled any of those uniform airbrushed slits I’d seen in men’s magazines. Where were their inner lips? Did they tuck them inside? Eventually I saw more images of cunts that revealed an amazing diversity. They are as different from one another as an iris is from a rose from an orchid.

YOURS

Far too many men are overly concerned with the size of their dicks instead of focusing on mastering sexual skills to become great lovers. Although it has been said, “It’s not the size of the fish but the motion of the ocean,” I believe penis size matters to a degree. For those women and men who prefer a large penis, there’s no reason to make them feel badly about their sexual preference. However, according to the thousands of women I’ve talked with, most of them are more interested in what surrounds the penis—the whole man. Getting fucked by a giant, rock-hard cock that shoots a huge load of semen is a man’s fantasy of male sexual prowess, not a woman’s.

While some experts claim a vagina is a collapsed space that will accommodate any size penis, I disagree. My own vaginal barrel is around six inches deep, so I have a problem if a man’s penis is too big. Then I know it can hurt and I’m unable to relax and move freely. Small doesn’t matter that much because even a finger inside my vagina feels good with the right rhythm and movement. Besides, like most women, I can’t come from penis/vagina sex, so I’m more interested in what’s happening to my clit.

Some penises I have enjoyed with clit stim over the years are: a five-and-one-half inch, curved, lavender-colored, uncut cock; a big, thick, black dick that was a whopping nine inches, which meant I had to negotiate the last couple of inches; a five-inch, short but very fat, circumcised Jewish dick; a nice six-and-a-half-inch Dutch dick with an enormous vein running down the shaft; and Eric’s seven-inch peter that currently has me “dick addicted.” He actually thought his penis was on the small size from watching porn, but it’s a bit too big to do deep penetration unless I’m in a high state of arousal. Men need to stop comparing their dick size to those of porn actors who are chosen almost solely because they have huge cocks. And who is choosing those large dicks? Other men, of course. My friend Richard Pacheco is the only porn star I know of with an average-size penis, and he has retired from the business.

Not long ago I went to a website that promised to increase the size of a man’s penis, but never said how to other than through some form of exercise. Listen to your aunt Betty. I wasn’t about to pay for their information; besides, I already knew the exercise would most likely be regular masturbation. As yet, science has not developed a successful way to enlarge a penis. The vacuum pumps will increase penis size temporarily. Similar to masturbation, pumping up your dick is an exercise that expands the corpus cavernosum and spongiosum so they can take in more blood, which is what causes an erection. It’s the “use it or lose it” principle.

The best way to exercise your penis is to masturbate to orgasm frequently. Be sure to use massage oil, especially if you are circumcised. In the process, you can also train yourself to have come control, which is more important to women than dick size. Men also need to tune into their pelvic floor muscle. A friend of mine who acted in porn showed me the strength of his PC muscle. When I put my finger inside his buttyhole it was caught in a viselike grip. He explained most guys in porn develop a strong PC muscle to help them get it up and keep it up. Every time you masturbate to orgasm, you are pumping blood into your penis and using the surrounding muscles.

Penis worship is alive and well in the gay men’s community, but heterosexual men also worship penis size. They just don’t do it openly. They tease each other about having small dicks and that generates a lot of unnecessary sexual insecurity in men who are already uneasy about sexuality. Here is an example from a twenty-three-year-old man:

My penis is just five inches long. I have never had intercourse. I would like to try it but I’m worried about the length of my penis. I’m afraid the girl will complain that it is too short since my friends tell me it is. Sometime I feel embarrassed showing my penis when I get naked in the gym to shower. Betty, is it important to have a long penis? Is my penis length normal? Does every girl and woman out there prefer a long penis and is there any way I can make mine longer?

The average-size penis is said to be between five and a half and six inches. So according to statistics, he’s short by only half an inch. But he might have a five-inch fat sausage that many women would love. Due to popular request, sex shops started stocking short, fat dildos for their women clients. Instead of worrying about penis size, he would do well to educate himself about female sexuality. The biggest dick in the world will not stimulate a woman’s clitoris. When I hear from a man who has an even smaller penis (in the three- to four-inch category erect) I advise him to pretend his tongue has taken up jogging and get a reputation for giving great head instead of feeling sorry for himself. He can become a world-class cunt sucker who will have women standing in line waiting to be next.

The Kama Sutra and Native Americans compared both male and female genitals to different animals: deer, elephant, horse, dog, etc. A small dog dick in an elephant vagina would be lost in space. Perhaps in a more sexually sophisticated society, women and men would have a chance to compare genital sizes like they try on shoes. I’ve always suspected the fairy tale of Cinderella with the prince running around looking for a foot to fit a shoe was symbolism for finding a vagina to fit his dick.

The comedian George Carlin got it right when he talked about why Americans consistently declare war and bomb “brown people.” It’s based on “dick fear.” He then goes on to talk about how the whole missile program is the result of dick fear. Americans have to make sure they have the biggest dicks with the biggest bang for the buck. We laugh at this, but I have long believed that fewer men would need to shoot missiles and guns if they could shoot a little come from their hard cocks for fun. There’s an old saying in the army that the only difference between a man’s rifle and his penis is that one is for fighting and the other is for fun. But how many men are actually having fun with their penises?

The sensitive parts on most men’s penises are the rim of the glans and the little V-shaped area underneath the glans that I call the male clitoris. The urethral opening also has sensitivity. I’ve known men who have enjoyed a stream of water hitting their little pee hole in the shower to get turned on. One friend of mine actually inserts a sterilized and lubricated rod inside his urethra because he enjoys the sensation, and an older friend uses surgically wrapped thin plastic tubes to keep his urinary tract open. His doctor taught him how to do it.

Some men like to have their prostate gland massaged with a finger during oral or manual sex but prostate massage is rarely an end in itself. Most guys still want the head and shaft of their dick involved in order to blow out a great orgasm. When your girlfriend is adding prostate stimulation with a finger inside your anus to heighten manual or oral sex, tell her what feels best. Having her relying on your feedback is better than having her look for a specific place like your P-spot, which can be intimidating.

All the different male animals, including humans, have a built-in drive to copulate. Depending upon your point of view, God, Mother Nature, or human evolution set it up like this to ensure the continuation of our species. This desire, obsession, or force driving you to come inside a pussy is how men have been hardwired. So relax. You are not a sex fiend because you think about sex every few minutes or so. You are just a healthy guy pumping a lot of testosterone trying to fulfill your biological purpose—procreation. As long as you can get it up, put it in, and ejaculate you have made God, Mother Nature, or human evolution happy. However, the woman you get pregnant will either be delighted or furious with you.

Women’s hardwiring tells us to get some kind of commitment before we let you put it in—an engagement ring or better yet, a marriage contract. You just want to come but we have the burden of caring for a child throughout the prime of our lifetime and sometimes later as grandmothers. My advice to all single men is to masturbate right before you go out to take the edge off that raging bull between your legs. If she wants to have sex with you, masturbating earlier in the evening will help you last longer.

Honoring both the male and female phalluses equally would begin to heal a world out of balance. We spend trillions of dollars going into outer space, yet we spend very little exploring the inner space of our own sexual anatomy. Americans could easily provide an adequate sex education for our children that would include information about the magnificent male and female phalluses—his penis and her clitoris. We could replace the shame most adults feel about their genitals with the acceptance and wonder I remember having as a child when we innocently played “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” It’s time for humankind to return to its senses, to enjoy the basic pleasures of being alive in healthy bodies without the fig leaf, black dot, or digital squares covering our sex organs. After all, they are responsible for creating the next generation as well as giving us an enormous amount of pleasure.