No, we girls read it different, the orgasm that is. Here is a marshy spot. Here, where it is moist and damp, both warm and wet, we quake; a delirious place apart, around which terrible stories have grown, the old myths of danger, so that we have been told to keep it zipped, to entice here is evil, to risk the stench of witchcraft, and either mad (hysteric) or sick, or both together if they can make it stick. (See the London Review of Books 8 Feb 2007 Page 13; advertisement by the Harvard University Press for The Case of the Female Orgasm, by Elisabeth A. Lloyd).
- ‘Keep the fuck shut up!’ is the motto of disgust we have been given, a warning to keep quiet, and several of us have come before the Inquisitor. (Harvard University Press allow Amazon to give you a peep inside Elisabeth Lloyd’s cool and measured – ‘Do not entice! Do not disgust!’ – text in the publication: Chapter 2, The Basics of Female Orgasm). My sister Gaspara as I have told you before was not quiet and from the mal de mare died young; some would say, both male and female voices speaking now, a fate deserved, along the lines – ‘She had it coming, to have let herself go with that man like that, well, what do you expect?’.
And I Cassandra, permitting Gaspara’s poems to speak through the city presses of old Venegia, transgress in print the rules and customs of our age, and here and here, neither wholly truth nor wholly falsehood, with these our "made-up pleasures" - letters sent between our imagined community – Posts.
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