Now for something lighter. "The Vagina Monologues" are being staged in my town tonight, and my mind wandered to the Labia Dialogues, better known as Luce Irigaray's "When Our Lips Speak Together." An excerpt:
Open your lips; don't open them simply. I don't open them simply. We -- you/I -- are neither open nor closed. We never separate simply: a single word cannot be pronounced, produced, uttered by our mouths. Between our lips, yours and mine, several voices, several ways of speaking resound endlessly, back and fourth. One is never separable from the other. You/I: we are always several at once. And how could one dominate the other? impose her voice, her tone, her meaning? One cannot be distinguished from the other; which does not mean that they are indistinct. You don't understand a thing? No more than they understand you.