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marybellefrey's picture

Cixous

I think Cixous was voicing a part of the collective unconscious of woman.  I can't imagine how she could have done it better.  These things are archetypes and/or symbols; the only way to understand them is via the intuitive mind.  There are layers and layers -- for me she caught that very well.

Once many, many years ago my husband and I and a friend attended a steel band competition in Trinidad.  All the songs were ostensibly about a theme with very clever parallels to sex --- and maybe to the archetypes also, for all I know.  One song was about a cricket game, very well done.  When it ended with the line, "And the game was called for rain", we women in the audience went wild with laughter.  Three women within my view actually fell out of their seats onto the floor.  Our friend (a man!) turned to me and said, "That's when the woman..."  I interrupted him with, "I know,I know"  through my laughter.  So not all women have had their bodies repressed --- though few of us are as up-front about it as the Trinidadians. 

It is so easy to produce those extreme physiological reactions of the female body, men are so delighted with themselves when they do it, that one ends up feeling like a circus dog put through her paces.  At some point some of us stop and ask what this is all about.  Cixous says we have masturbated and written just enough to take the edge off.  So what happens if we don't stop there?  If we continue the game in the rain, so to speak?  The edge gets thicker and thicker and for all the 'thumpings' and 'whooshes of air' we cannot make our bodies do what a man's does so easily.  A woman's sexual energy is simply not like a man's.  I think men can be forgiven for putting women's sexuality into a male model --- though I might wish he would pay attention to ME.  But if I myself fail to pay attention to me and try to stuff my body and my soul into a male-patterned skin, who is to blame?

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I live on the side of a volcano and in sight of two more, one of which is active.  Last night I dreamed that the inactive one was exploding, not erupting, exploding, and that a nearby hill was fast growing into an even more violent volcano.  I think Cixous put me in touch with the archetypes!  

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