Sexual experiences, rather than being neutral, are specifically male or female. Yet at present no conceptual framework exists for representing female sexual desire. This has resulted in frequent misrepresentations of female sexual experience. To correct this, a labial framework is proposed, not to replace or oppose a phallic framework, but to exist alongside it. The lips of the mouth and those of the genitals provide a felicitous doubling of sexuality and speech to represent female desire and sexual pleasure as labial. Phallic and labial rhythms are organized differently in sexual arousal and desire, since, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, "Man 'gets stiff,' but woman 'gets wet.'" The labial framework therefore represents female psychosexuality more in terms of "wetware" than of "hardware."
Illusions are not errors but erroneous beliefs motivated by wishful ideas and fantasies. To disillusion gender is to challenge the traditional Freudian construction that splits masculinity and femininity into agency versus passivity, the first with power, the second without. Disillusioning femininity as impotent frees up potency and power as generativity. Disillusioning masculinity as phallic and omnipotent opens the masculine subject to permeability and vulnerability. Illusions regarding the transgender include the idea that there are only two gender categories and the idea that gender identity is generated solely from an internal sense of self. The wish "to be seen as" or "to pass as" one gender or the other shows that social structures exceed the individual. At least for now, the disillusionment of gender with which we are left marks a tension between the internal sense of gender identity and the social structures of gender.
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