Our society has made penetration the norm. It is the alpha and omega of heterosexual sex, often to the detriment of female pleasure. What if we changed the way we talk and think about sex? That's good, there is a word for it: "circlusion".
While still a few years ago, the preliminary-penetration-ejaculation scheme governed the act and that the catch-all term “foreplay” was used to designate everything that preceded the inevitable penetration, the holy grail of heterosexual intercourse. , today, the cards seem to be reshuffled. Sexualities change, open up, diversify. Now is the time to fully reconsider the whole idea of intercourse, and to get out of penetration. Let's be clear: this is not about demonizing penetration, which is pleasurable for many, or replacing one standard with another. Because it is not so much this that is the problem, but rather the vision and the definition that we have of it. With penetration also comes the idea of one person dominating another. That one is active and the other passive. This is why the German artist and theorist Bini Adamczak had the idea of a new word in 2016: "circlusion".
What is circlusion?
This neologism derived from the Latin "circum" (around) and "clure" (to close) means to encompass, to wrap something on top of it during sexual intercourse. A vagina encircles a penis, a sextoy, fingers… It is intended to be the equal counterpart of penetration. In heterosexual intercourse, the cisgender man penetrates and the cisgender woman encircles! In his work Beyond penetration (ed. Le Nouvel Attila) published in 2019, the novelist and essayist Martin Page invited this term to be updated, just like the journalist Victoire Tuaillon in the essay The balls on the table (ed. Binge Audio), adapted from the eponymous podcast, the same year. It is the turn of the journalist expert in sexuality Maïa Mazaurette to plead again in her favor in her new book released in January 2021, The vulva, the penis and the vibrator (ed. de La Martinière), which presents itself as a dictionary of sex. Why this interest? Because the word circlusion redistributes the cards of sexuality by placing the person penetrated at the center of the sexual act. She becomes the subject and actress of his pleasure and his desire. “The word circlusion allows us to speak of sex in another way. This word is necessary because this sad fix on penetration still dominates in the hetero-normative imagination and – as if that were not enough – also dominates in the queer imagination. You can see it in mainstream porn but also in post-porn or BDSM porn. Almost without exception, the dildo and the penis serve as a practical sign of power ”, explains feminist Bini Adamczak in an article on the GLAD website! Journal on language, gender and sexualities.
Rethinking sex
Penetration is considered a form of domination. Already, in 1987, the theorist Andrea Dworkin dedicated a chapter of her essay Coits (ed. Syllepse), translated into French in 2019, on this theme. "It is remarkable that man is not seen as the being who is possessed in coitus, even if it is he (his penis) who is buried in another human being, and his penis is surrounded by muscles. powerful who contract like a clenched fist and relax with force against the tender thing, always so vulnerable as rigid as it is ”, she writes. Behind this word circlusion, there is also the need to stop considering the vagina as an orifice, as a “hole”, as Maïa Mazaurette reminds us in her work Come out of the hole, lift your head (ed. Anne Carrière). The vagina is an organ made up of muscles and thousands of nerve endings, which contract, which control the advance of the foreign body, in short, which is active.
Behind this linguistic battle, there is a political project, it is the fight against patriarchy
While this may seem trivial, we tend to forget how much language structures our thinking and our vision. For Martin Page, "It is by moving representations that we change the world". Questioned by Aufeminin, he affirms that "The vocabulary can help bring into existence new realities that are there but do not yet have a voice. We need new words like inclusion and there are also words that we can get rid of as foreplay, since foreplay is sex ". To speak of circlusion is to reject relations of domination and stereotypes within the couple. “Behind this linguistic battle, there is a political project, it is the fight against patriarchy. Words are political, they presage and accompany a change in the world ”, emphasizes the writer. " I don’t know if that word will take, as it’s a total reversal of the vast majority of heterosexual relationships. But he's there, and that's a sign that things are slowly moving ", admits the writer. When we see how the debate on inclusive writing is raging, will the term inclusion succeed in our vocabulary? We will conclude with this argument of Bini Adamczak: “ The word circlusion is easy to learn and easy to apply. I circled, you circled, he is circled. And above all, it is much more practical than penetration. The word penetration has four syllables, circlusion has only three. So its introduction is very much in the interests of economics. We save precious time that we can then invest in the fuck. "