Onania

Like many people with clitorises, I learnt quite late how they really look like. It's not just, as I'd been taught up until then, the little button above the entrance to my vagina. By the time I was 20, I knew just the tip of the iceberg. Although the anatomy of the clitoris had been dissected by the German anatomist Kobelt in 1844, precise descriptions of this organ subsequently disappeared, sometimes to the extent of completely removing the clitoris from school textbooks and medical anatomy books until very recently.

Although I grew up in a secular society that advocates pleasure-seeking at all costs, for a long time masturbating made me feel guilty. I also believed in the myth of clitoral or vaginal women and female frigidity. All these injunctions about female pleasure that have been around for centuries still have consequences today. Yet masturbation is a natural and, above all, liberating act. That's why I decided to do a visual project on clitoral masturbation, as an ode to onanism.

In the Old Testament, Onan is a character who, refusing to impregnate his dead brother's wife (as tradition demanded), preferred to ‘let his seed be lost in the earth’ (Gn 38, 9-10). From this act comes the term onanism, referring to the individual practice of masturbation.