In the late 1960s and early 1970s there developed a small genre of tracks in which there featured more or less prominently sounds which were read as signifying female sexual pleasure. The problem of the representation of female sexual pleasure is complex. Much more than the representation of male sexual pleasure, it depends on the aural. Thus, there is a certain coincidental connection between music and the representation of female sexual pleasure. There were two tracks which were central to this genre and which will form the core of this essay. In 1969, Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, the infamous and highly regarded songwriter, released the Gainsbourg-composed ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’. In Britain, in spite of being banned from the BBC, the track climbed to number one in October of that year, having been played in the discos of Britain and France that did not yet exist in the United States (Echols Reference Echols2010, p. 159).Footnote 1 In spite of stories claiming that it reached an appropriate number 69 on the American Billboard chart, it actually did rather better, getting to number 58 in March 1970 even though it received very limited airplay. In 1975 Donna Summer released ‘Love To Love You’ in The Netherlands. After requests from Neil Bogart, the head of Casablanca Records in the United States, who wanted a 20-minute version, the now renamed ‘Love To Love You Baby’ was re-recorded and in its new length of 16:52 the track took up an entire side of the album with the same title. Over the years the track has been reedited and remixed in many ways. The single reached number four on the British chart and number two on the Billboard chart in the United States. Like ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’, ‘Love To Love You Baby’ was banned by the BBC. In the United States the single was banned on many stations and restricted to evening play on others. However, with the extended version played frequently in discos, the track got more publicity there than ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’, six years earlier before the disco revolution. As we shall see, ‘Love To Love You Baby’ was inspired by ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’ but, with a singer trained in gospel music, it made use of a tradition alien to the musical construction of ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’.
‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’ and ‘Love To Love You Baby’ stand at the popular ends of the genre, but they are by no means the only tracks that make use of sounds representing female sexual pleasure. ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’ had itself been recorded two years earlier by Gainsbourg with Brigitte Bardot taking the female role. In 1964 Bardot herself had released a track titled ‘Moi, je joue’ which ends with her making noises that may reasonably be interpreted as representing female sexual pleasure. In 1972, also inspired by ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’, Chakachas, a Belgian group made up of session musicians with a female singer of Cuban heritage, released ‘Jungle Fever’, which became an early disco hit making number 29 on the British chart and number eight on the Billboard chart. In 1973 Sylvia, who as one part of Mickey and Sylvia had had a number one hit in 1956 with the Bo Diddley-written ‘Love Is Strange’ and who, as Sylvia Robinson, owner of Sugar Hill Records, would play a crucial part in the early days of hip hop, released ‘Pillow Talk’, which reached number three on the Billboard pop chart and number one on the African American soul chart. There are other tracks which feature sounds representing female sexual pleasure which will appear throughout this essay. The ones listed here should be enough to demonstrate that the genre was not only well developed but also, in spite of the attempts by the guardians of morality in many countries to stifle the public expression of sounds representing female sexual pleasure, often of great popularity with listeners.
One of the arguments that I will be making is that there are actually two overlapping traditions of tracks in which female sexual pleasure is represented. ‘Moi, je joue’ and ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’ are both founded in the European, we can add white, emphasis on melody. In these tracks the representations of female sexual pleasure are improvised. In ‘Moi, je joue’ the sounds appear at the end as the singer takes leave of the melody and they become more excited as the track fades out. In ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’ the sounds are improvised during the verses and stop when the two singers sing their lines in the chorus. I will argue that it was not coincidental that both Gainsbourg's partners for his versions of ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’, Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin, were actors. Indeed, as we shall see, Donna Summer, while not an actor in the same sense, had appeared in the German production of Hair and, in her accounts of the making of the sexual pleasure track for ‘Love To Love You Baby’, has been clear that she was acting a role. In light of this, it is not surprising that, when the tracks that I have identified are covered by other artists, they almost always leave out the representations of female sexual pleasure; listen, for example, to pretty much any remake of ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’ except for Donna Summer's and most remakes of ‘Love To Love You Baby’, including that by No Doubt.
The other tradition is African American. This tradition is founded on the transmutation of the concerns of gospel music into secular material focused on relationships between women and men, and especially on love and sex. In this tradition the vocal techniques developed to express religious ecstasy were transposed into the means to express female sexual pleasure and, more specifically, the carnal ecstasy of orgasm. This aspect of the shift began with one of the tracks commonly identified as utilising gospel forms for secular purposes, Ray Charles’ ‘What’d I Say’, released in 1959. The African American Donna Summer, born Gaines, spent her early years in Mission Hill, an integrated, working-class area of Boston and subsequently in the more middle-class Brookline (Summer and Eliot Reference Summer and Eliot2003, chapter 1). Her grandfather was a minister and her father a church deacon. I will be arguing that Summer's gospel training, as well as her acting ability, were crucial to her representation of female sexual pleasure in ‘Love To Love You Baby’ and enabled her to use her voice like an instrument and complement the backing music with sounds that, while apparently expressing sexual pleasure, fitted in with the instrumental patterns developed by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte. In light of this, it is worth listening to Samantha Fox's remake of ‘Love To Love You Baby’, where the singer, lacking in Summer's gospel training and Summer's acting ability, fails utterly to match her improvised sounds of female sexual pleasure to the music and, as a consequence, produces a track that simply sounds awkward and embarrassing.
In this paper I want to explore why this genre evolved when it did. In their foundational work on female sexual pleasure in popular music and other aurally informed texts, ‘Aural sex: the female orgasm in popular sound’, John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis ask a less contextualising question: ‘[H]ow can we account for the meaning of the many works that include or, more often, center on the female voice simulating sexual bliss?’ (Corbett and Kapsalis Reference Corbett and Kapsalis1996, p. 102). Corbett and Kapsalis' key insight relates to the recognition that female sexual pleasure is denoted aurally. They suggest that, ‘recorded sex sounds are engaged in, on the one hand, the production of an erotics and, on the other, a strict maintenance of gender binarisms’ (Corbett and Kapsalis Reference Corbett and Kapsalis1996, p. 104).Footnote 2 I want to take this argument further and connect the genre with the discussions of female sexual pleasure that began with the post-WWII sexologists, starting with Alfred Kinsey's work, most especially that published in Reference Kinsey1953 as Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, and William Masters and Virginia Johnson's Human Sexual Response, published in Reference Masters and Johnson1966. These books formed the groundwork for a new recognition of female sexual pleasure and, especially, a transformation in the understanding of the female orgasm. This work became a key link between the so-called Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and the politicisation of the female body in discussions related to Second Wave feminism. Thus, for example, much of Shere Hite's The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, published in Reference Hite1976, is taken up with reportage on women's experience of orgasm.
It was not only in music that we find this conjunction between changing understandings of female sexual pleasure and the new audibility of that pleasure. In film, as Linda Williams (Reference Williams2008) discusses in Screening Sex, the late 1960s saw a new preoccupation with how female sexual pleasure might be represented visually. One pioneering film related to this topic was Roger Vadim's science-fiction comedy Barbarella (1968). As we shall see, not only is this a film concerned with female sexual pleasure, but there is a central scene where the villain, Durand Durand (often written Duran Duran), who gave his name to the late 1970s Glam Rock group, attempts to kill Barbarella, played by Jane Fonda, by pleasuring her to death in a machine on which he plays music. His failure signals the shift in understanding of the female orgasm from the idea that the adult female orgasm is vaginal and dependent on penile penetration to the idea that women have the ability to have multiple orgasms based in clitoral stimulation and limited only by their libido and their stamina, and the fundamental difference of this from the male orgasm understood in terms of a single climax followed by a refractory period when the male feels no desire. Barbarella was released in France in 1968, a year after Gainsbourg made his first recording of ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ with Bardot and a year before the version with Birkin.
The sexual revolution and the female orgasm
In Screening Sex, Williams argues that:
The sexual revolution in the sixties was inextricable from the larger goals of a pervasive counterculture of antiwar, antiracist, anticapitalist, and, eventually, antipatriarchal activity. With hindsight, however, we can discern a distinct thread of demographic, cultural and technological change that can be labelled the sexual revolution and that came to a climax in the late 1960s though reverberating through the next decade. This revolution overlapped with and was inextricable from the rise of feminism. (Williams Reference Williams2008, p. 8)
Perhaps the most important technological change was the development of the contraceptive pill for women. The first large-scale trials were carried out in 1956 in Puerto Rico where restrictions on the testing of new drugs were less rigorous than in the United States. In 1957 the Federal Drug Administration approved the medical use of the pill for women who suffered severe menstrual problems. Three years later, the pill was allowed to be prescribed as a contraceptive. By 1965 around 6.5 million American women were using the pill.Footnote 3 In Britain, it was first approved for contraceptive use in 1961, but only for married women. This ruling was in place until 1967 but was increasingly flouted. By 1969 around one million British women used the pill.Footnote 4 In France, contraception, including the pill, was legalised in 1967. Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Female had been published in French as Le Comportement sexuel de la femme in 1954. While not caused only by the introduction of the pill, there was a great change in attitudes towards sex outside marriage. Williams (Reference Williams2008, p. 9) notes that in 1969 ‘seven out of ten Americans were still opposed to premarital sex’. In 1973, ‘only 48 per cent of those surveyed were opposed to premarital sex’. As she writes: ‘Something had radically changed between 1969 and 1973’ (Williams Reference Williams2008, p. 9). This was also the period during which most of the more popular tracks featuring representations of female sexual pleasure were released.
While the pill gave women control over the consequences of their sexual practices, at some cost in terms of side effects, the changes in those sexual practices had different sources. The work of the sexologists was important not only in changing understandings of female sexual pleasure, but also in enabling female sexual pleasure to be talked about publicly. Human Sexual Response, written as an academic tome and in somewhat forbidding language, nevertheless sold 300,000 copies in hardback and 500,000 in paperback (Gerhard Reference Gerhard2000, p. 463). In 1970 Nat Lehrman, who worked as an editor for Playboy running the Forum letters section, wrote a popular version of Human Sexual Response with the endorsement of Masters and Johnson.Footnote 5Masters and Johnson Explained remained in print throughout the 1970s. The book had its fifth printing in 1981.
The distinction between clitoral and vaginal orgasm is traced back to Sigmund Freud. Jane Gerhard writes that: ‘Starting in 1905, the vagina had carried the double mission in expert discourse of naturalising heterosexuality and essentialising the erotic underpinnings of reproduction’ (Gerhard Reference Gerhard2000, p. 450). The Freudian idea was that the young girl starts out unconsciously ‘enjoying the clitoris as the centre of her fledgling libidinous pleasures’ and that this ‘immature’ experience is transferred during adolescence to her vagina (Gerhard Reference Gerhard2000, p. 453). This transfer signals the sexual maturity of the young woman and, at the same time, her adult dependence on the male's penis for her satisfaction. Gerhard discusses the importance of Helene Deutsch, a follower of Freud, who published The Psychology of Women in 1944. Deutsch wrote that: ‘In the ecstasy of the orgasm, the woman experiences herself as a helpless child abandoned to her love partner – a deep experience in which her ego becomes the child that she conceives in her fantasy and with which she will continue to identify herself when her fantasies come true’ (cited in Gerhard Reference Gerhard2000, pp. 455–6). This is, of course, the vaginal orgasm. In Deutsch's commentary we can see the fundamental link that she made between this kind of orgasm and reproduction. In addition, there is an implication that, like men, and indeed dependent on her male partner, women are only able to have one orgasm at a time. This understanding became the dominant ideology which the sexologists challenged.
When Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, his follow-up to Sexual Behavior in the Human Male published five years earlier in 1948, Americans were deeply shocked:
When the female volume was published, few Americans were prepared for Kinsey's finding that women were interested in sex for more than procreative purposes. Many were shocked by data suggesting that females were as capable of sexual response and orgasm as males. (Heidenry Reference Heidenry1997, p. 22)
One implication was that women were at least equally able to experience sexual pleasure as men. Gerhard suggests that: ‘Much of the shock that Sexual Behavior in the Human Female generated came from finding that women behaved sexually very much like men did. … Such behaviours flew in the face of years of expert accounts of women's disinterest in sexual matters’ (Gerhard Reference Gerhard2000, p. 462). More, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female began a transformation in the understanding of the female orgasm:
[T]he authors portrayed women as remarkably responsive. ‘The human female,’ they wrote in a now-famous quote, ‘frequently is not content with one orgasmic experience … If there is no psychosocial distraction to repress sexual tension, many well-adjusted women enjoy a minimum of three or four orgiastic experiences before they reach apparent satiation’. (Gerhard Reference Gerhard2000, p. 463)
Female sexual pleasure was being separated from procreation and was also being reconstructed as quite different from male sexual pleasure and, indeed, not dependent on the male anatomy.
Masters and Johnson took this understanding of female sexual pleasure further through their studies of the physiology of sex. They
demonstrated two major differences between the penis and the clitoris. The male organ ejaculated, and except in very rare cases – usually very young teenagers – was incapable of another orgasm without first undergoing a refractory period. But in some women, if stimulation was immediately resumed after orgasm, the clitoris could repeat the pleasure cycle over and over again; it had no refractory period. (Heidenry Reference Heidenry1997, p. 28)
This was Kinsey's point, but reaffirmed and radicalised by suggesting no limit, certainly not the paltry three or four orgasms quantified by Kinsey. John Heidenry argues that: ‘This reinvention of the female orgasm, on an almost Copernican scale, had several major ramifications.’ One is that ‘it established the erotic independence of women insofar as their sexual fulfilment was no longer modeled after that of the male’ (Heidenry Reference Heidenry1997, p. 29). Another was that ‘women were shown to be not only independent of men, but were capable of more and deeper orgasms than even the most potent of young men’ (Heidenry Reference Heidenry1997, p. 29). The sexologists began an utter transformation in the understanding of female sexual pleasure.
By the late 1960s the changing understandings of female sexual pleasure were being linked with feminist discussions. As Gerhard explains: ‘Within early feminism, the female orgasm came to stand in for women's sexual self-determination’ (Gerhard Reference Gerhard2000, p. 465). In a talk she gave in 1968 at the first national women's liberation conference, subsequently expanded and published in 1970 in the collection Notes from the Second Year, Ann Koedt built on the findings of Kinsey and of Masters and Johnson to make clear a political argument about male oppression founded on what she identified as the myth of the vaginal orgasm. As Jane Juffer describes it: ‘Koedt's essay connects the perpetuation of the greater importance of male sexual pleasure to endemic male supremacy’ (Juffer Reference Juffer1998, p. 79). Koedt was not alone in making this point. Gerhard writes that: ‘Koedt's attention to the female orgasm took place in tandem with other feminists who were similarly concerned with the status of female sexuality in a male dominated society’ (Gerhard Reference Gerhard2000, p. 466). She lists Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (Reference Friedan1963), Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (Reference Millett1970) and Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (Reference Firestone1970) as related texts.
Just as importantly, the publication of the work of the sexologists also began to make it possible to talk publically about female sexual pleasure, and the female orgasm. Here we can remember the remarkable sales of Masters and Johnson's Human Sexual Response. In Hot Stuff, her book about disco, Alice Echols identifies the 1970s as the decade when the female orgasm became a common topic of discussion:
The seventies were the decade of the Big O, the female orgasm. Millions of women whose relationship to their sexuality had been more vigilant than relaxed began, like Janice in [John Updike's 1971 novel] Rabbit Redux, to experience their bodies as playthings. Feminism was crucial to this shift, as it exposed the yawning gap between women's sexual desires and standard three-minute, missionary-position sex. … Suddenly there was no escaping the female orgasm. In addition to countless magazine articles devoted to ‘What Women Want’, bestselling books such as Shere Hite's The Hite Report, Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden, the self-help manual Our Bodies, Ourselves and Erica Jong's Fear of Flying explored female desire. (Echols Reference Echols2010, p. 78)
Without this new ability to talk about women's sexual pleasure, and the new understanding of it, it would have been impossible for the BBC to claim that ‘Love To Love You Baby’ included 23 orgasms in its 16:52 seconds when the broadcaster banned it (Lowery Reference Lowery2010). In the United States, signalling their acceptance of the new understanding of the female orgasm, Time thought the track contained ‘a marathon of 22 orgasms’ (Krumboltz Reference Krumboltz2012, para. 1). It might even have been impossible for Summer to have made the track without the new thinking of women's sexual pleasure as being technically limitless.
The aural quality of the female orgasm
The new public discussions of female sexual pleasure, and in particular the female orgasm, led to another problem. How could the female orgasm be represented, especially as the nature of the female orgasm had changed? Considering film, Williams tells us that:
In the late 1960s and early 1970s … when the representation of carnal knowledge in mainstream films was still new and when Hollywood was tentatively devising new tropes for ‘going all the way,’ female orgasm was either overlooked or assimilated to that of the male. The possibly different rhythms and temporalities of a woman's pleasure were simply not acknowledged. (Williams Reference Williams2008, p. 156)
What this suggests is that Hollywood filmmakers were still thinking of female sexual pleasure in the traditional terms of the vaginal orgasm. The first American film to confront the problem of female sexual pleasure was also the first film to cross over from pornography to mainstream cinema, Deep Throat. Released in 1972, the narrative basis of this film is Linda Lovelace's (the actor is credited as playing herself) inability to have an orgasm and the doctor's realisation that this is because her clitoris is in her throat. Consequently, fellatio is the only way Linda can achieve orgasm. As it happens, the film uses a funked-up version of Mickey and Sylvia's ‘Love Is Strange’ with new lyrics now focusing on fellatio as part of its soundtrack. Laurence O'Toole argues that:
The ‘problem’ of female sexual pleasure is central to Deep Throat and many other porn movies of its era. A problem in terms of dramatic structure that is in need of fixing, but also a problem in terms of the search for some kind of visible sign of a solution. The female orgasm cannot be certifiably visibly proved to have happened – at least not in any equivalent fashion to the male pop shot. (O'Toole Reference O'Toole1999, p. 74)
This claim about the male orgasm depends on the cultural assumption that male orgasm is evidenced in ejaculation. The difficulty with representing the female orgasm on film is that there is no equivalent female signifier to ejaculation. Williams takes this argument a step further:
Though more sober than this bogus doctor [in Deep Throat] the real sexologists were equally perplexed to find the female seat of pleasure so disconnected from the organs of reproduction. This was a conundrum for Hollywood. Where to locate and how to portray a woman's pleasure? Ever since the fall of the Hollywood Production Code the main way to know if a woman felt pleasure was to listen to her. (Williams Reference Williams2008, p. 156; see also Williams Reference Williams1989, pp. 122–3)
Women's pleasure was expressed through the noises that she makes. At the same time, again as Williams notes: ‘The cinematic representations of sex that became public in the late sixties and early seventies reflected revolutions in sexual attitudes and themselves shaped our very experience of sexual relations’ (Williams Reference Williams2008, p. 11). If women's sexual pleasure, including orgasms, is best expressed in sound, then, also, men and women come to understand when a woman is enjoying sex, and having an orgasm, through a conventional repertoire of noises in part made available in films. Celia Roberts and her colleagues make a similar point about everyday sexual relations. They make a distinction between men's work, and technique, and the reward for that work. They argue that,
although in recent times it has been stated that women's capacity for orgasm is at least multiple, their partners still cannot see what is going on. Thus, there is a demand for noisy and exaggerated display. (Roberts et al. Reference Roberts, Kippax and Waldby1995, p. 528)
They also make the point that ‘cultural representations of women's orgasm as overwhelmingly pleasurable and, therefore, loud, are common in women's popular magazines and pornography’ (Roberts et al. Reference Roberts, Kippax and Waldby1995, p. 528). Men, Roberts and her colleagues argue, based on interviews they conducted for their research, are mostly unable to tell when a woman is ‘really’ having an orgasm and when she is faking. I have put ‘really’ in quotation marks because, as Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott argue,
this talk of faking raises the question of the ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ orgasm. What we would suggest is that similar performances might accompany both. (Jackson and Scott Reference Jackson and Scott2001, p. 108)
The point here is that, if the aural presentation of female pleasure is to some extent a cultural construction, then it becomes impossible to tell which performances are expressions of orgasm and which are fakes. While the episode is much later than the era that I am writing about, the best example of this, and one used by both Williams and Roberts and her colleagues, is the scene in the 1989 film When Harry Met Sally in which Sally, played by Meg Ryan, fakes an orgasm in a New York delicatessen to demonstrate to Harry, played by Billy Crystal, that he cannot tell when a woman is authentically having an orgasm and when she is faking.
We now have an accumulation of reasons for the number of tracks including sounds of female sexual pleasure and orgasm in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is the time when the new understanding of women's pleasure became common. It was no longer thought of as dependent on men. Also, female sexual pleasure was now thought of as quite different from male sexual pleasure. Women were thought to be able to have many orgasms, possibly limited only by exhaustion and sexual satiation. The representation of women's sexual pleasure became an issue and the solution was found in noise; physical pleasure was expressed aurally though a more or less conventionalised repertoire of sounds. Thus, the aural qualities of popular music were an ideal site to experiment with the new noisy sounds of female sexual pleasure.
‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’; sex and death
So, it was not possible for an onlooker to be certain that a woman was having an orgasm or if she was faking. Women became performers. It is not surprising, then, that Gainsbourg preferred actors to provide the sounds of female pleasure in his versions of ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’. Sylvie Simmons, the author of an English language biography of Gainsbourg, tells this story of the recording of the Bardot version:
Late one night in the winter of 1967, Serge and Bardot went into a dimly lit Barclay studio in Paris and recorded Michel Colombier's arrangement of ‘Je t'aime … Moi Non Plus’ in an intimate two-hour session, the two singers squeezed into the same small, steamy glass booth. Very intimate, apparently: what engineer William Flageollet described as ‘heavy petting’. (Simmons Reference Simmons2002, p. 48)
Now, it is of course possible that Bardot was sexually stimulated and expressing that while the recording was taking place. As I have already mentioned, both her and Birkin's sighs and moans were improvised during the verses. Nevertheless, Bardot was an actor and she knew how to perform. She knew when to make noises associated with female sexual pleasure and when to be silent and return to the lyrics for the chorus. Gunter Sachs, Bardot's husband at the time, was so incensed when he heard the track that he demanded that it be withdrawn. It was obviously a very good performance. Birkin has explained that
[Serge] liked working with actresses, because he could tell them what to do – make them sing like he sang, very close to the microphone and whisper sensually. He found it far more interesting to make beautiful actresses sing than singers with beautiful voices. (Simmons Reference Simmons2002, p. 55)
Simmons writes that, as with the Bardot version:
The press, of course, speculated … that Serge and Jane had recorded a live sex session with a tape-recorder hidden under the bed. To which Serge said, ‘Thank goodness it wasn't otherwise I hope it would have been a long-playing record’. (Simmons Reference Simmons2002, p. 58)
His point was precisely that the track was a piece of music, a performance, and that if it had been actual sex the performance would have gone on longer. Summer's performance did end up being the length of a long-playing record but that, too, she assured interviewers many times, was a representation of female sexual pleasure.
There is another comparison that we can make here between the two tracks. As Gainsbourg indicates, ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ is dominated by the male singer. In ‘Love To Love You Baby’ there is no male voice. Summer sings, and makes noises representing female sexual pleasure, alone. Near the end of ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ the male voice whispers, ‘et je me retiens’ [‘and I hold back’], to which the female voice responds, ‘Non! Maintenant; viens’ [No! Come; now]. The male singer wants to continue the lovemaking represented in the song but the female wants a conclusion and asks him to come immediately. The track then fades out on the sounds of female sexual pleasure – possibly the woman's orgasm. Here, even though it is the woman who asks, as in the ideology of the vaginal orgasm it is the male's orgasm which determines the rhythm, and the limit, of the session. ‘Love To Love You Baby’ was recorded six years later, eight if we think of the Bardot original, and is structured very differently. Now, as we have noted Williams writing, we are on the other side of the major cultural shift in the understanding of the female orgasm. Here, we have much more of an impression of the new understanding of female sexual pleasure as being possibly limitless. Without a male presence, Summer could continue her representation of what is often read as multiple orgasms indefinitely. At the end of the 16:52 version of the track, the music fades out along with Summer's vocal repetitions of ‘ahhh, love to love you baby’, with her sighs and moans continuing in the background.
Certainly, it would seem that the Birkin version was recorded more clinically than the Bardot version:
‘We made it,’ said Jane, ‘very boringly in the studio in Marble Arch, both of us in sort of telephone cabins. When you recorded in those days you only had one or two takes anyway. He also put his hand up – because he was very afraid I was going to go on with the heavy breathing two seconds longer than I should and miss the high note – which was very, very high, an octave higher than in the Bardot recording, because Serge thought that was more perverse, like a little choirboy – so he was waving at me like a madman from his cabin.’Footnote 6 (Simmons Reference Simmons2002, p. 58)
However, because of the ambiguities around the aural expression of female sexual pleasure, the media and listeners more generally continued to speculate on the verisimilitude of Birkin's performance. We can also note here Gainsbourg's acknowledgement of the limiting of the female sexual pleasure noises to the verses, and his choreographing of this.
The story goes that, after a date which ended in failure (what kind of failure is unspecified), Bardot asked Gainsbourg to write her a love song ‘as a penance’ (Simmons Reference Simmons2002, p. 48). Gainsbourg took some instrumental music that he had written for a film, Les Coeurs Verts, released the previous year, and added lyrics. Like the date which was its pretext, the song has an ambivalence about it. Gainsbourg recounted that the title was based on something Salvador Dalí had said: ‘Picasso is Spanish – me too. Picasso is a genius – me too. Picasso is a communist – me neither (moi non plus)’ (Simmons Reference Simmons2002, p. 57). It is unclear what the song's title is meant to mean. Does it suggest that while one partner is in love, the other isn't? Or, does it mean, perhaps, that the other partner is unable to express his love? Perhaps this was Gainsbourg's way of commenting on the failed date and trying to say that, in spite of it, he did love Bardot and, because of this, was unable to communicate his love in an appropriate manner. Gainsbourg's solution seems to have been to act out his anxieties in the song, in a song indeed which was itself transgressive. In Erotism, published in French 10 years before Gainsbourg wrote ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’, George Bataille wrote about eroticism that: ‘Unless the taboo is observed with fear it lacks the counterpoise of desire which gives it its deepest significance’ (Bataille Reference Bataille1986, p. 37). It is this fear which underlies ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ and which is played out in the recorded track. Consider the situation: Gainsbourg, the Jew who as a child had had to wear the yellow star during WWII and who was considered notoriously ugly, in love with, and indeed having sex with, a blonde woman considered the most beautiful and sensual in France, who was herself married to a German millionaire playboy and industrialist whose father had associated with leading members of the Nazi party.Footnote 7 While Bardot moans in pleasure, Gainsbourg expresses his fearful, taboo, and overwhelming, desire.
Reminiscing, Gainsbourg said that the version of ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ with Birkin was better. The version with Bardot
was ‘sublime’, he told [his French interlocutor Bruno] Bayon, but at the same time ‘it was too … hot, whereas with Jane and me it was total technique. It's like fucking: if you fuck hot, you fuck badly, if you fuck technique, you fuck better.’ With Bardot he said ‘it was a horrifying kind of copulation, which was, I believe, too much’. (Simmons Reference Simmons2002, p. 58)
In Erotism, Bataille also remarks that:
If love exists at all it is, like death, a swift movement of loss within us, quickly slipping into tragedy and stopping only with death. For the truth is that between death and the reeling, heady motion of the little death the distance is hardly noticeable. (Bataille Reference Bataille1986, p. 239)
Here, the little death, ‘la petite mort’, is orgasm. It is a French term popularised by Bataille and now sometimes attributed to him. While used for both sexes, since the renovation of the understanding of the female orgasm it is better applied to the male experience as it takes part of its meaning from that refractory time after ejaculation when there is a cessation of desire in the man. In his classic discussion of the sublime published in 1753, Edmund Burke linked it with death. Burke argued that the experience of the sublime was fundamentally connected ‘with some degree of horror’. Here we need to remember Gainsbourg's description of sex with Bardot as ‘horrifying’. Burke goes on to write that:
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror be endued with greatness of dimensions or not. (Burke Reference Burke2008, note 1)
It is death, both the little death and the great death, signalled by Gainsbourg's understanding of the Bardot version as sublime which, for him, haunts this version of ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’.
Barbarella also links orgasm and death. Set in a far-off future, the film tells the story of Barbarella's search for Durand Durand, a scientist who has invented a weapon called a Positronic Ray. Barbarella's misadventures include her having physical sex with the Catchman and an angel named Pygor. As humans don't have penetrative sex any more this is a new experience for her, and one that she clearly enjoys. It turns out that Durand Durand now works for the Great Tyrant. He places Barbarella in his Exsexive Machine which is designed to pleasure women to death. The Exsexive Machine is a kind of synthesiser, although it looks, and plays, like an organ (the pun was most likely intended). Durand Durand plays music on it and, as he reaches a crescendo, so does the woman in the machine. However, no matter how hard Durand Durand plays, no matter how many crescendos he creates, Barbarella does not die. Rather, her enjoyment only increases. Here, as in ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’, we have noises of female sexual pleasure linked with music. In the end, it is the machine that is destroyed and Durand Durand cries:
‘I don't believe it! Wretched, wretched girl! What have you done to my Exsexive Machine?! You've undone it! You've undone me! Look! The energy cables are shrinking! You've turned them into faggots! You've burned out the Exsexive Machine! You've blown all its fuses!’
In this new sexual world, Barbarella's ability to have a limitless number of orgasms outstrips the machine's apparent excessiveness and the cables of the male machine wither. Its energy is depleted and the machine is finished. Barbarella's multiple little deaths only end in a final death for the male Exsexive Machine. The film might be read as a commentary on the sexual politics of ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’. By the time the Birkin version was released, there had already been a significant shift in the popular understanding of female sexual desire.
‘Love To Love You Baby’ and the American context
Like Birkin, Summer was always equally clear that her performance of sexual pleasure was an act. In an interview for the July 1979 issue of Penthouse with Elliott Mintz, she states: ‘“Love To Love You Baby” was approached as an acting piece’ (Mintz Reference Mintz1979). In a 1976 interview with Jim Esposito, Summer goes into more detail:
So I went into the studio with nothing in my hands except for this one line, ‘Love to love you.’ I listened to the song a few times and tried to scream it, shout it, yell it – everything, anything possible but to sing it the way it is sung. It was a little bit too personal. I really tried to do it another way. There were a lot of people in the studio and I just couldn't get the song out. I just couldn't imagine myself groaning in front of all these people. It was just too personal. So Giorgio threw everyone out. (Esposito Reference Esposito1976)
Summer is here talking about the first recorded version of the track, the single released in The Netherlands. We need to place Summer's resistance here in context. The story she tells earlier in the same interview is that she had been sitting in the record company office in Munich when Moroder had come in and remarked that ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ had been rereleased in England and was selling again. Indeed, on its 1974 release ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ reached number 31 on the UK chart. Not as high as in 1969 but much of its shock value had been lost and, as we have seen, the sexual world was quite different. Summer tells us that her response to Moroder's comment was: ‘Oh, really? Well, why should we buy someone else's “Je t'aime … moi non plus”? Why don't we make our own?’ (Esposito Reference Esposito1976). So, when she arrived at the studio, what she was presented with could not have been a complete surprise. Rather, her resistance was more likely a combination of embarrassment and her Christian sensitivity to the public expression of sexual matters. After the studio was cleared, Summer tried again:
So I just closed my eyes, listened to the music, and sang it the way it came out – in that general direction. The soft voice. Once I found out how I had to sing it, it wasn't a problem anymore. But I never listened to it afterward. It was just too personal. Like who wants to listen to themselves groaning? (Esposito Reference Esposito1976)
Summer is here conflating the singing of the lyrics with her making of the noises expressing sexual pleasure. For her the two elements go together. Each is a different aspect of the same emotional, and here musical, expression. In the Mintz interview Summer goes into more detail about what she was thinking:
I imagined [what] it [would] be like for a man seeing his wife for the first time, or for a woman seeing a man for the first time. I've been in that situation. There wasn't anything to say. I was in ecstasy without even being touched. I was breathing heavy just from the thought that my dream was right there, in front of me. Ecstasy comes in many forms; it's not just physical. (Mintz Reference Mintz1979)
The pertinent remark here is that ecstasy comes in many forms. It may well be that Summer is thinking here of religious ecstasy, the expression of ecstasy that she learnt as a gospel singer in the church choir when she was growing up in Boston.
Summer's track arrived at the right time in the United States. In 1974 Major Harris's ‘Love Won't Let Me Wait’ and the Leon Ware/Quincy Jones ‘Body Heat’, released as a single the following year, each included a woman making sounds of sexual pleasure in the background mix. These usages might well have been influenced by ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’. They do not relate to the secularisation of the gospel tradition. Mark Anthony Neal argues that these tracks work as a reinforcement of African American patriarchy:
The celebration of black male sexual prowess had been a seminal activity within black popular culture since the release of Melvin Van Peebles' Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song in 1971, though in the context of Gaye's ‘Since I had You’ and Harris's ‘Love Won't Let Me Wait,’ both of which feature background singers parroting female orgasms, patriarchal constructs of struggle and survival were premised on the sexual objectification of women. (Neal Reference Neal1999, p. 122)
Contrary to this, Neal argues that in ‘Love To Love You Baby’, ‘Summer, as representative of black women, is transformed from sexual object into sexual subject’ (Neal Reference Neal1999, p. 122). The same could also be said of Sylvia's ‘Pillow Talk’. Sylvia Robinson wrote this track in the hope of persuading Al Green to record it. However, Green's religious convictions meant that he refused. Recording it herself as Sylvia, Robinson kept to her original lyrics which make her the person wanting sex and asking her partner to ‘just put that stop sign down’. Released in early 1973, it includes the moans and sighs that characteristically signify female sexual pleasure as well as whispered sweet nothings in Spanish. It is likely that Sylvia was also inspired by ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’. Later in 1973 she released her own version of this song with Rafael Pagán in the Gainsbourg role. The lyrics, in French, English and Spanish, have been revised to make the track a more straightforward love song with Sylvia and Ralfi whispering versions of ‘I love you’ across the three languages along with some rather unconvincing sighs from Sylvia and a rather more successful performance from Ralfi. The track only reached number 39 on the African American music chart and 99 on the pop chart. This may be because Gainsbourg's music does not lend itself to funky revamping and only sounds slow and tedious in this version – or it may be because Sylvia's expressions of sexual pleasure were not convincing.
‘What'd I Say’ and its influence in France
At this point we need to examine the connections between the expression of religious ecstasy and the expression of orgasmic ecstasy. Ray Charles improvised ‘What'd I Say’ at a gig in Brownsville, near Pittsburgh, in December 1958. He had finished all his material with 15 minutes left to play and the punters were up and raring to let loose. He told his band to follow his lead and the Cookies, his backing singers who subsequently became the Raeletts, to repeat what he said after him, setting up a classic call and response structure. As Mike Evans writes in his biography of Charles:
Soon Ray ran out of words and started to moan. The ladies moaned back. The call and response began to crescendo of its own accord, until it sounded like a man and a woman losing themselves in love-making. Somehow they brought it to a close, the people went nuts, and everybody collapsed exhausted. (Lydon Reference Lydon2004, p. 133)
Charles started to play the new song at each gig and realised that he was onto something. It was recorded in February 1959. On the single the call and response section does not appear until over half way through the 6:30 second track; split into two it was on the b-side of the single. Then:
Ray starts again, this time singing a long ‘Unnnnh’ to which the ladies respond, ‘Unnnnh.’ Then a long ‘Ohhhhh’ from Ray, and a long ‘Ohhhhh’ response from the ladies, then faster and faster … the grunts each time become more edged with sexual pleasure until Ray is screaming, the ladies moaning, and the band rocking. Out of the ecstatic tumult come exhortations to ‘Shake that thing,’ and then the general agreement, ‘Don't it make you feel all right!’ (Lydon Reference Lydon2004, pp. 157–8)
In terms of sexual politics, the women here are always responding to the man; Charles is guiding their single orgasm. There were earlier blues tracks sung by women which included what Corbett and Kapsalis describe as ‘sex sounds’, such as Luella Miller's ‘Rattle Snake Groan’ (1927) and Victoria Spivey's ‘Moanin’ The Blues' (1934) (Corbett and Kapsalis Reference Corbett and Kapsalis1996, p. 105). However, Charles’ ‘What'd I Say’ is the first commercially released track aimed at a mass, black and white, audience in which sexual pleasure is performed at length, and by both sexes. When it was released, radio stations expressed reservations about playing it and Atlantic, the record company, had Tom Dowd, the producer, do some bowdlerisation on the lyrics: ‘Dowd took out a few “Shake that things,” and substituted girls in prim blue dresses doing the Madison for red-dressed gals doing “the boogie all night long”’ (Lydon Reference Lydon2004, p. 164). In the end the track made number one on the black Rhythm & Blues chart and number six on the Billboard pop chart. Ranked number six on the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs of All Time: ‘Charles’ grunt-’n’-groan exchanges with the Raeletts were the closest you could get to the sound of orgasm on Top Forty radio during the Eisenhower era’ (Rolling Stone 2004). The track converts gospel's religious ecstasy into a performance of orgasmic ecstasy.
If we are looking for inspiration for Gainsbourg's ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’, one answer may be Charles's ‘What'd I Say’.Footnote 8 The track was released in France. More significantly, Charles played at the 1961 Antibes jazz festival. The festival was broadcast on RTF (Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française), the public television channel, over nine programmes. Charles returned to Europe in October of the same year and played gigs in Zurich, Lyon, and three nights of performances at the Palais des Sports in Paris. One or more of these was taped for radio broadcast by RTF. The Ray Charles Video Museum website explains that:
These two series of gigs definitively established Charles’ fame in France, where he not only became the #1 bestselling jazz artist for many years to come, but also a seasonal phenomenon, who would be warmly welcomed to the country's biggest venues and festivals almost every year for the next 40 years, through the years consistently covered by French radio and TV, and reaching a fame and status that matched the appreciation for the most famous local chanteurs. (Ray Charles Video Museum 2011)
There is a video of Charles playing ‘What'd I Say’ at the Antibes festival and he no doubt included the very popular song in the other concerts that he played. Charles took to closing every show he played with the track.
Three years after Charles’ visit, Bardot recorded ‘Moi, je joue’. Written by two well-established composers, Gérard Bourgeois and Jean-Max Rivière, the lyrics tell a narrative of Bardot addressing a man with whom she wants to ‘play’. She succeeds because she tells him ‘J'ai gagné’ [I have won] and then ‘Vous êtes mon jouet’ [You are my toy]. At the conclusion of the track she sings that ‘Je t'aimerai plus fort’ [I will love you harder], which then becomes an injunction to the man: ‘Oh oui plus fort’ [Oh yes, harder] which she repeats. As she does so Bardot begins to make sounds that can be identified as female sexual pleasure. We can now understand what game Bardot wanted to play with her male toy. Sofia Coppola used the track in a commercial for Miss Dior Chérie L'Eau fragrance in 2008. One commentator remarks that: ‘The Coppola commercial ends with Bardot's ‘“oh! Oui, oui,” omitting her orgasmic cry. Sofia, how could you?’ (Sciolino Reference Sciolino2009). The answer is most likely that Coppola was anxious that even in 2008 there might be problems getting television stations in the United States to play a commercial in which Bardot makes the sounds of female sexual pleasure. There is a further complexity in the track. The lyrics use ‘jouer’, meaning to play, but this could be misheard as ‘jouir’, meaning to come, as in to have an orgasm. At least one woman on the web makes this connection (The Vagenda 2012). Now, again, we cannot know if Bourgeois and Rivière had heard the Charles track but it might have suggested to them to write a song that expresses the female orgasm within the European tradition founded on melody and using double entendre resolving at the end in the aural depiction of female sexual pleasure. It is highly likely that Gainsbourg would have been familiar with Charles’ track. There can be no doubt that Gainsbourg would have known a track by his lover that had been very popular in France three years before he wrote ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’.
‘Love To Love You Baby’ and gospel
In his discussion of ‘What'd I Say’, Nelson George argues that: ‘By breaking down the division between pulpit and bandstand, recharging blues concerns with transcendental fervor, unashamedly linking the spiritual and the sexual, Charles made pleasure (physical satisfaction) and joy (divine enlightenment) seem the same thing’ (George Reference George1989, p. 70). In 1973 Isaac Hayes released his pioneering album of lubricious tracks and titled it Joy, signifying the link with religious ecstasy. What Charles did was take his gospel training and, like other rhythm and blues artists such as Sam Cooke, reuse it for secular popular music. Summer is part of this tradition. Andrew Legg has put together a taxonomy of musical gestures in gospel. He refers to Pearl Williams-Jones' listing of vocal techniques: moans, grunts, wails, shouts, gliding pitches and song speech (Legg Reference Legg2010, p. 105). These gestures form the basis for the expression of sexual pleasure performed by Summer. What Summer does not use is the shout/scream. Legg tells us that: ‘The “scream” in gospel is an expression of exuberant joy, passion, emphatic acclamation or declaration’ (Legg Reference Legg2010, p. 105). Echols, among others, describes ‘Love To Love You Baby’ as soft-core – Echols identifies Summer's ‘soft-core moaning’ (Echols Reference Echols2010, p. 79). Soft-core and hard-core are terms used in visual pornography. Hard-core refers to material that shows the erect penis and penetration of an orifice. The aural equivalence of the difference between soft-core and hard-core would seem to be the noise level. Moaning is generally soft-core; shouting and screaming would be hard-core.
In the culturally constructed aspect of the female orgasm, shouting and screaming signify a more intense level of pleasure. For all the fascination that ‘Love To Love You Baby’ caused, it remained soft-core. This is one reason why it is difficult to enumerate the number of possible orgasms performed in the long version. We can add that ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’, for all its scandalous imagery of female sexual pleasure, is also soft-core. Simmons describes the track as ‘the musical equivalent of a Vaseline-smeared Emmanuelle movie’ (Simmons Reference Simmons2002, p. 58). The French Emmanuelle films, the first of which was released in 1974, were mainstream soft-core, and in Britain even softer core after the censors had demanded cuts. In neither version of ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ is there anything approaching a shout or scream. The sighs and moans remain quite decorous. The same is also true of that first representation of female sexual pleasure in film, Barbarella's experience in the Exsexive Machine – which might be read as suggesting, regressively, that women require penetration for a full orgasm.
In gospel, music's use of vocal gestures is subtly integrated into the flow of the music. The voice becomes an instrument expressing emotion through the range of noises that it makes. This is true of Summer's vocalisations in ‘Love To Love You Baby’. Robert Fink connects disco, and in particular ‘Love To Love You Baby’, with the avant-garde minimalism of composers like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass. Fink writes about Summer's ‘virtuoso control of musical erotics’ (Fink Reference Fink2005, p. 30). He provides a detailed musicological examination of the long version of ‘Love To Love You Baby’ and sums it up by writing that Summer's ‘simulation of the sounds of intercourse was a virtuoso piece of studio stagecraft’ (Fink Reference Fink2005, p. 59). This control was underpinned by Summer's gospel training.
When it was first released as a single in a version between three and four minutes long, ‘Love To Love You Baby’ failed to sell well. Moroder had sent a tape to Neil Bogart at Casablanca Records in New York to see if he might be interested in releasing the record in the United States. The story goes that Bogart was having a party and played the track for people to dance to. When it finished they demanded that he play it again, and again (Casablanca Records 2006). Bogart thought that if he could get a long version then it would become popular in discos. He contacted Moroder and asked him for a 20-minute version, the length of an album side. It is this version which fascinates people. The first and last sections of the 16:52 seconds are remixed versions of the single. The central nine minutes or so are new. The subsequent success of ‘Love To Love You Baby’ is based on the long version even though it was the single version that climbed the chart. When people count what they hear as orgasms in the track it is the long version that they use.
Talking about the long version of ‘Love To Love You Baby’, Summer explains that: ‘It was easier to do the second time. The words evolved. I just pictured a situation in my mind and sang from it as if I were in that situation. It was like acting out a part in my mind. I just fantasised on whatever it was that I was thinking about at the time – which I really can't even remember’ (Esposito Reference Esposito1976). This time was no doubt easier because Summer was more prepared to accept that she had to perform female sexual pleasure. She is also being circumspect. Elsewhere we discover that,
she imagined herself as an actress (namely Marilyn Monroe) playing the part of someone in sexual ecstasy. The studio lights were dimmed so that Summer was more or less in complete darkness as she lay on the floor. (Singerling Reference Singerling2012)
This is how Summer recorded the female sexual pleasure noises in the new nine minutes, laying down her Monroe-founded vision of sexual pleasure. Summer, then, does not imagine herself experiencing sexual pleasure, let alone experience it for the recording. Rather, she imagines herself to be the blonde actor who is often regarded as having been the epitome of sexual allure in the late 1950s, Marilyn Monroe. In France, in the late 1950s Bardot had a similar reputation (see Holmes Reference Holmes, Gaffney and Holmes2011). More, Summer did not imagine herself as Monroe experiencing sexual pleasure but as Monroe acting the experience of sexual pleasure. At no point in this chain is there any claim to there being an actual sexual experience. What we have is Summer's idea of what Monroe would have sounded like performing sexual pleasure; that is, the representation of sexual pleasure on the long version of ‘Love To Love You Baby’ is Summer's idea of what the woman who was thought by many, perhaps we should add men, to be the most sensual woman in America would have sounded like experiencing sexual pleasure. What we have, then, is anything but ‘real’. It is a woman's fantasy of female sexual pleasure. And, while the woman having this fantasy is African American, the woman she is fantasising was white. One effect of this is to distance Summer from the part she is acting, thus alleviating some of the guilt she felt as a Christian. There is a racial politics here also. African American women are portrayed in the American media as being hypersexual (Manatu Reference Manatu2002, p. 93). Summer counters this, albeit unconsciously, by thinking of herself as the most hypersexualised white woman in then-recent history.
The idea of jouissance offers one way of thinking about the erotics of ‘Love To Love You Baby’. Jouissance can be understood as the mythic counterpoint to la petite mort. Broadly speaking, it can be translated as bliss and is linked with the experience of orgasm. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan offered the most elaborated formulation of jouissance in the 1960s and 1970s. While much of his relevant work focused on phallic jouissance, jouissance which related to male orgasm, it was his understanding of female jouissance which many theorists found most fascinating. In the Seminar XX, from 1972–1973, Lacan comments that: ‘Naturally, you are all going to be convinced that I believe in God. I believe in the jouissance of woman, in so far as it is extra (en plus)’ (in Braunstein Reference Braunstein and Rabaté2003, p. 112). For Lacan, female jouissance had a mystical quality. In a post-Freudian psychoanalytics founded on structure and language the supplementary quality that Lacan attributed to female jouissance placed it beyond everyday understanding – beyond, outside of, language. It is, perhaps, not too surprising that Lacan should evolve such a concept at the time when society's understanding of the female orgasm was undergoing the fundamental change I have outlined. The supplementarity that Lacan identifies in female jouissance can be read as expressing the new appreciation of the female orgasm as independent of penetration and, indeed, independent of any male contribution. The vaginal orgasm has been transformed into something else, a transcendental experience. Nevertheless, Lacanian theory has no appreciation of the possibility of multiple, or limitless, orgasms. In this regard Lacan seems to have remained a Freudian. In part because of this, at the same time, for critics using Lacanian theory, the detail of the female orgasm itself got lost in a recognition of the possibility of woman's endless pleasure – jouissance without the death identified with closure found in the male ejaculation and refractory period.Footnote 9
Fink has elaborated how this argument could be, and has been, utilised in discussions of minimalist music and disco: ‘Antiteleological music, the music of jouissance, is the music of the drive’ and quoting Renata Salecl, ‘whose “ultimate aim is simply to reproduce itself as drive, to return to its circular path, to continue its path to and from the goal”’ (Fink Reference Fink2005, p. 38). However, as Fink goes on to note: ‘Evidently “Love To Love You Baby” impressed hearers not as an abandonment of the climax, but as an abandonment to an almost superhuman multiplicity of climaxes’ (Fink Reference Fink2005, p. 42). The problem, as I have already discussed, is that the soft-core moans and sighs of ‘Love To Love You Baby’ can be read both as unconsummated female desire and, in a different register, as (almost) continuous orgasm. The point is that in terms of representation it doesn't matter – which is why, seeking reassurance, the male now so often asks his partner if she came, in spite of her performance. The Lacanian understanding of female orgasm as transcendental jouissance and the repetitive form of ‘Love To Love You Baby’ are both products of the discursive transformation in the social experience of female sexual pleasure and, more specifically, the female orgasm.
In the last 20 years or so there have been a number of tracks which utilise sounds of female sexual pleasure. These include Lil' Louis' ‘French Kiss’ (1989) which topped the Billboard dance chart, K5's ‘Passion’ (1996), DJ Visage's ‘Geil’ (1998) and Ottomix's ‘Raggasex’ (2004). In these dance tracks the sounds of female sexual pleasure are set against the repetitive beats. In Generation Ecstasy Simon Reynolds comments that it was Summer's 1977 release ‘I Feel Love’ that was the real revolution:
Constructed almost entirely out of synthesised sounds, ‘I Feel Love’ had no verse or chorus laid out in advance. Summer improvised her gaseous, euro-mystic vocals over Moroder and Bellotte's gridlike juggernaut of percussive pulses and clockwork clicks. The result, at once pornotopian and curiously unbodied, was acid house and trance techno avant la lettre. (Reynolds Reference Reynolds1998, p. 25)
Fink describes the track as ‘icy Eurodisco funk’ and suggests that it ‘stands as a self-conscious prediction of the future of repetitive music’ (Fink Reference Fink2005, pp. 60–61). These later tracks cover similar territory. Whether sampled straight or cut up, the moans and sighs of female sexual pleasure play against, and are sometimes absorbed into, the techno beats. Corbett and Kapsalis argue that the cut-up use of female sex sounds sampled as loops or as repetition constructs ‘these women's voices [as] hyperrepresentations of female sexuality [and] as out-of-control and excessive’ (Corbett and Kapsalis Reference Corbett and Kapsalis1996, p. 106). At the same time, the sounds of human female pleasure soften the overall automated experience of the track while reinforcing the sense of technological repetition.
‘Love To Love You Baby’ was transitional. Influenced by the repetitive pulsing beat of Kaftwerk's 22’43’’ synthesiser-based ‘Autobahn’, released on the album of the same name the previous year, Moroder and Bellotte constructed a track in which Summer's voice acted as an instrument utilising the sounds of female sexual pleasure. While it was inspired by Birkin and Gainsbourg's ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’, and also used sounds of female sexual pleasure, ‘Love To Love You Baby’ was constructed very differently. Indeed, where ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ has a verse/chorus structure like a traditional pop song, ‘Love To Love You Baby’ breaks this down in a movement towards what Moroder, Bellotte and Summer would create with ‘I Feel Love’. From this perspective, ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ seems almost old-fashioned. Founded in a luscious, somewhat dirge-like melody, it is, Gainsbourg said, a love song (Simmons Reference Simmons2002, p. 49). It is, in this sense, human in a way that many later tracks that use sounds of female sexual pleasure are not. Where ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ works in the discourse of a female sexual pleasure dependent on the male, ‘Love To Love You Baby’ suggests the new possibility of endless female sexual pleasure and that without the need for a male partner.
