>>1716056ing her one, through her desire for a child-penis, preferably a boy, through access to the cultural values still reserved by right to males alone and therefore always masculine, and so on. Woman lives her own desire only as the expectation that she may at last come to possess an equivalent of the male organ.
Yet all this appears quite foreign to her own pleasure, unless it remains within the dominant phallic economy. Thus, for example, woman's autoeroticism is very different from man's. In order to touch himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a woman's body, language . . . And this self-caressing requires at least a minimum of activity. As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before there is any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman "touches herself' all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed oftwo lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two
but not divisible into one(s)-that caress each other.
This autoerotIcIsm is disrupted by a violent break-in: the brutal separation of the two lips by a violating penis, an intru sion that distracts and deflects the woman from this "self-ca ressing" she needs if she is not to incur the disappearance of her own pleasure in sexual relations.
