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                                  -10-
   

any shore, other destined to loll on her deflated airbed, wondering what went wrong.

Young waves, only recently shaped by the wind, have a steep, peaked shape when well out at sea. not all the women in history have been humble and subservient to such an extent. from far out on the horizon you can see them forming whitecaps as they come in... The differentiation between the simple inevitable pleasure of men and the tricky responses of women is not altogether valid...The incidents in the life of a wave are many...the implication that there is a statistically ideal fuck which will always result in satisfaction if the right procedures are followed is depressing and misleading. For the one essential quality of a wave is that it moves; anything that retards or stops its motion dooms it to dissolution or death. There is no substitute for excitement; not all the massage in the world insure satisfaction, for it is a matter of psychosexual release.

An island has no parallel in young female groups. The growing girl, standing beneath the base of the cliff, limited usually to the school situation, conscious of 'that powerful marine gnawing' by which her coasts are eaten away, only after repeated trials has confidence to pursue our investigations. More than once doubting to pursue our investigations More than once doubting the protection of our rocky shield, her strong desires become dissipated in passive fantasies. In this critical period, in that part of the mine where but nine feet of rock stand between us and the ocean, the heavy roll of the larger boulders, the ceaseless grinding of the pebbles, the fierce thundering of the billows, with the cackling and boiling as they rebound, a girl is expected to begin her dealings with men. When a girl fails to manipulate her sexual situation, one of her present engineers writes, she is required to adopt the proper feminine passivity and continue her own repression by herself. In these palmy days of the permissive society the situation has placed a tempest in its most appalling form too vividly before me ever to be forgotten. And yet owe some of the most beautiful and interesting shoreline scenery to the phenomenon of girls agreeing to massage boys to orgasm. Any Saturday afternoon in a provincial English town one may see the sculpturing effect of moving water. Caves are almost literally blasted out of the market value of a sex object. The ominous withdrawal of the sea from its normal stand is ironically the conditioning for the intense polymorphous genital activity which characterizes male puberty. Eventually a hole is torn through the roof of the cave, while their connection with sexuality is effectively underplayed or obscured. 

                                                            --LUCY LIPPARD