Before I met Valentine a.k.a. Fluida Wolf, all I knew about her were 3 adjectives repeatedly used by the people who had described her to me: super beautiful, super lovely, super nice.
Now I’m the one using them to talk about her.
As usual, I’M the Ph and I broke into her life showing up at her doorstep to introduce ourselves and propose the interview in person. I well remember our first chat: I felt like a rookie while she spat out words like postporn, pornterrorism or transfeminism, so unusual in my coated en rose world.
Despite my questioning looks and our incursion, she gave us the green light to interview her naked.
If you google her name, you actually bump into terms that sound quite resounding, menacing and intimidating. All those words speak nothing but the language of freedom: the freedom to express, to choose, to experience a liberated sexuality, free of all cultural/social/religious restraint.
Those words need linguistic power to penetrate the mental layer of preconceptions, stigmas, stereotypes that fill the daily conversation around sex and pleasure, and to break through the gender/class/racial barriers by proposing a more egalitarian and less stereotypical model of sexuality.
With the smile on her face, the activism running through her veins and the typical open-mindedness of those who experience the world and people with no prejudice, Valentine aka Fluida Wolf fights for the free movement of everybody’s pleasure and for the realisation of a sexual awakening.
She’s known for touring Italy and Europe with her workshop Ejaculation Workshop for Cvnts, aimed to make women feel more confident and aware of their own body and sexuality.
Beyond that, she translated books like Fica Potens by Diana J. Torres (Pornterrorist) or The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women by Tristan Taormino, that are key for the sexual liberation.
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Who’s Valentine aka Fluida Wolf?
Primarily, it’s me in my performative, drag bitch version, with a love for the trash, a feminist position and a sex-positive, body positive, pro-sex interpretation of feminism. I care about sexuality and I try to break down taboos, fight the mainstream sexual imagery, get rid of all the myths and stigmas around sexuality, and propose new sexual imagery.
Googling your name, people find words like postporn or transfeminism that probably they never heard of before. Can you tell the context they belong to and how you interpret them?
Like everything I do, I start from myself, but I’m not alone, I follow a personal path that I share with other people.
I define myself a feminist in the sense that I believe in the freedom of all persons on a global scale from a transfeminist perspective that questions privilege. It is undeniable that I’m part of a privileged side of the world, the Euro-White part. I believe the real liberation can only happen through the alliance with all the people oppressed by capital. So, for example, alliance with migrants, the LGBTQ community. I also start from the class struggle, which is kind of my background.
Postporn is a phenomenon I knew in the form it took in Barcelona during the last decade, where you can find names like Beatriz Preciado, Diana Pornoterrorista, Maria Llopis, Post-Op, Slavina and many others I’m probably missing. It puts queer theory into practice. Above all, it fights the mainstream porn imagery, its sexist, macho, male-dominated perspective and the proposition of “norm-bodies”: there’s just a certain type of body that’s considered arousing; there are just some specific practices that get encouraged, disclosed, imposed.
It’s all about dismantling this perspective that permeates our society and our culture and proposing a new sexual awakening. It’s about unlearning everything we’ve been told about sexuality and desire and learning again, starting with ourselves and new contamination. It’s about generating new countless, infinite, unclassifiable sexual awakenings.
Sexual awakening: I love it! This thing of putting pro-sex before feminism, on the contrary… It’s probably the other kind of feminism that shouldn’t be called feminism.
Yeah, well, I used pro-sex even though it’s a term I don’t particularly like. I think there’s internal fighting within feminism, both historically and now. Today’s topics that spark discord regard prostitution, pornography, third-party reproduction [sometimes called “rent-a-womb”] and trans inclusion. There’s a rather lively debate going on. As Diana Torres says, I think that with all this debating and fighting among ourselves, we’re forgetting who the real enemy is and we’re losing strength.
When was Valentine aka Fluida Wolf born?
I can’t say it precisely, it’s been a slow, gradual path. I started late in asking some questions, probably when I arrived at the university, in Turin. I started participating in the activist movement but I felt that a part was still missing. Then I found out it was the one related to gender issues and militant antisexism. I felt lonely, especially when it came to some perspectives I had about sexuality, sexual imagery and its depiction. I was 21 back then, now I’m 34. I began looking for people to create something, interact and frequent gender and feminist collectives with, always in a mixed environment. For years I’ve been listening, attending festivals, building relations with people from different cities. I’ve travelled a lot, especially between Rome and Barcelona. I met interesting people who made me feel like I was not alone and I found myself in this climate, in the books I read. A book that was fundamental to me is Devenir perra by Itziar Ziga, where there’s a lot about the performative creation of a parodic femininity, almost trashy, that feeds of the capitalism’s debris to become an hyper-femininity. Together with other female militant translators, I translated this book, which is one of my favourites, for Golena Malatempora publishing company.
At some point, I started working closely with Diana Torres on the topic of female ejaculation, translating her workshop, collaborating with her in her tours and presentations. I started collaborating with Golena Malatempora to translate books born within the anarchist-punk-queer-postporn environment in Barcelona. Then I landed in what I considered my collective on gender issues, where I felt at home, that was called Sguardi sui Generis and I built with other people at the time of the university. People got to know me, I attended all the manifestations, the assemblies, and they started aking me to have some speeches.
I’ll be honest, the name Fluida Wolf was born of a practical need. I also like the world of education and teaching but in Italy, if you deal with sexuality you can be considered a good educator, because ‘who knows how you can possibly deviate kids’. In a time when everything you do is indexed and googlable, I picked a nickname that could represent me. On the one hand, I like it because it allows me to express a part of me. Fluida is for the fact that for years, I’ve been investigating how Occidental societies deal with body fluids and female ejaculation in particular. Wolf represents my lycanthropic side as feminist, woman, person. I’d date it back to 2012, 2013, at the time of my first workshops, in Palermo. That’s when I started to develop my own narrative – which actually is not just mine, because you can’t go anywhere or do anything alone – and to have my perspective on sexuality and gender issues that, apparently, could be relatable and interesting for many. I translated books and built collaborations with publishing companies to present some of their texts around Italy. I started holding my workshop, taking part in festivals, breaking into some friends’ performances, organizing debates. Then came the interviews.
This is my journey, which I still have to fully understand. When people ask me “how did you get into this?” I’m not quite able to answer because very natural and gradual. I never reach a destination, I don’t even know where I want to get at, I follow a path, I wander around and see what happens. I let myself be contaminated, I follow my enthusiasm, I go through phases.
In Italy, you’re considered one of the foremost experts on female ejaculation…
That says a lot!
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Let’s start with the basics: are squirting and female ejaculation the same thing?
Let’s deconstruct the “expert” category. I’m not an expert here, I just focused on some matters and started divulging them. I just find easy to talk about sexuality the same way as I can talk about what I ate yesterday. So I’d demythologize all of this. What I always say is that I start from my own body, from what people tell me, from my workshops and from some researches, especially the ones conducted by Diana Torres called Pornterrorist on ejaculation. I’m not a sexologist, I’m not an endocrinologist, I’m not a doctor.
I can say I prefer to talk about ejaculation. Some studies are talking about ejaculation and squirting as two different phenomena, but the researches they are based on are not that precise. We’re talking about an ability as hidden as bastard, and maybe we’ll never be able to understand it in full. I give you an example to explain my point of view. I opened my official Facebook page, Velentine aka Fluida Wolf, where I mainly receive messages from men asking me “can you teach me how to make my girlfriend squirt?”. I answer no because, first of all, you should talk with her and see if that’s really something she wants to try and she’s interested in. Right now, there’s a lot of pressure on women to be able to squirt, and if you don’t ejaculate it looks like you’re missing something. And if you do it, then you are some sort of vixen, you have an extreme sexuality, there’s something dark possessing you. Some feel like they are the chosen ones. I try to start with a clean slate. Everything is more simple than that: as women, we have a prostate too that, apparently, fills with liquid when we are aroused. And this liquid can be released, not necessarily during orgasm. Back to teaching the “technique”, there’s the “come hither” motion for stimulating the glandular, sponge-like tissue behind the pubic bone, which is probably responsible for the emission of fluid. That said, mine is a political, cultural, social discourse which aims to question why this part of our body, this phenomenon, has been silenced, cloaked, erased for years. How did the Occidental medicine and heteropatriarchal culture treat female body? I purposely use this expression, female body, women’s body, as a political, cultural category that’s been culturally and socially oppressed by the patriarchal system based on gender binarism where women are considered as such for their genitals and the studies took in consideration only the one referred to reproduction [the vagina]. Everything related to pleasure, like the clitoris, is minor. So I try to dismantle, to show how this mechanism works, so that we can take back, especially on a mental level, a part of our body that was unjustifiably silenced and cloaked.
As Diana says, it’s kind of a hacking, a reprogramming of our body. That’s what counts for me, taking back a part of ourselves. Then we can decide what to do with that.
Why did you decide to focus on female ejaculation?
There’s a reason. When I was 24/25 I used to read a blog called Fastidio.noblogs where you could find some unusual articles about sexuality and what were called paraphilias. You could also rate the level of discomfort the article had caused you from 1 to 5. One talked about Annie Sprinkle, who’s basically the postporn Goddess, the first one using this word to define her actions aimed at dismantling mainstream porn from the inside. She made the real squirting visible under a feminist, sex positive, body positive perspective when this terminology didn’t even exist. I read articles about squirting and the Skene’s glands – how the paraurethral glands were still called. I read them together with my then partner and some day he masturbated me in a different spot, perhaps conditioned by what we had read. At the beginning it was annoying, then maybe I liked it, then not, then yes. Eventually, I liked it, I told him to keep going. I had read one that said that the sign that the body was about to produce an ejaculation was the feeling similar to needing to pee, and I’d got it a billion times. It was also mentioned the fact that we usually tend to contract the body when we are close to orgasm, but we can try to release instead. That time I thought “ok, what the hell, this time instead of holding back this feeling of needing to pee I let it go and try not to control’ and there it was the first spurt. Then I felt I needed to better understand why nobody knew what was going on in our body, why no one was talking about it, why in porn I saw jets that Niagara Falls can’t even. Were they real? Were they fake? And above all: why were we – Occidental women – tending to contract when reaching the point of maximum arousal?
I didn’t think it was possible to culturally and socially manipulate orgasm, or that such a free phenomenon, this expression of spontaneous pleasure, could be affected by cultural superstructures capable of making me contract the muscles instead of loosening them. I’m not just talking about involuntary contractions but also about the voluntary ones. I had to know, but it was hard to find info until I came across the researches of Diana Torres the Pornterrorist during a lab on postporn held by Slavina in Turin. Later, When I met her in Rome during the Ladyfest festival in 2011, I realized she was moving forward with her research and I started collaborating with her.
How do the physical and psychological aspects fit together? Can they disconnect?
I started from a political and cultural point of view rather than physical or psychological. As Diana says, female pleasure has always been considered like a discreet, internal, non-exclusive, non-dirty, intimate pleasure. When you state that the so-called female pleasure can be dirty, explosive, can squirt, you’re affirming equal dignity for every pleasure after yours was overshadowed by male one. Ther should be no competition. But making the female pleasure visible in all its complexity – saying it can be non-intimate, non-discreet, non-exclusive – it’s something bold from a cultural, political, social point of view, something able to break down imagery, stereotypes, stigmas and taboos.
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Do women know that they can ejaculate? Some live most of their sex life without even having one orgasm, even after they go through pregnancies.
I think it’s still a priority to work on the orgasm rather than on the ejaculation discourse. It’s important to know that it’s a possibility, but it’s not necessarily connected to the orgasm, and it can be particularly pleasurable for some but others can be completely indifferent to it. If you don’t ejaculate, you’re not necessarily missing a sideral pleasure. But when it comes to orgasm, I think we all have the right to orgasm that’s been far too silenced. We’ve always been shown a very penetrative imagery in films, but there actually are tons of ways to explore ourselves and experience pleasure. There’s still work to do in this area. My personal discourse about the body exploration, about being the architects of our own knowledge through sharing, has a lot to do with pleasure and orgasm.
Is ejaculation the one we see in pornography?
It depends. Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not. There are expedients.
The recent sensationalising of ejaculation, made popular by pornography, has probably contributed to shed light on the phenomenon and the female sexuality. On the other hand, can it have generated psychological pressure on women to squirt?
Of course. Mainstream porn has surely always depicted it in a parodic way, causing frustration.
It can result in a fountain but also in a pool. It’s also true that you can train your muscles to ejaculate more powerfully, they say you can release up to one and a half litres of liquid. Our prostate tends to fill up quickly with fluid, that can be released in large quantities. So we actually have this ability, but it’s also true that squirting in mainstream porn is often faked with tricks. It’s ok if we want to take ideas from what we see, if we like it, but then we have to find out what really gives us pleasure. Regarding my workshops, I often wondered if I was contributing to this idea that it’s time we all start squirting, no matter what. The opening sentence of my workshops is always: the aim of this workshop is not to build an army of squirting soldiers. Its aim is to reclaim a body part that was cloaked for ages by the medicine – especially the Occidental one – for reasons that I explain during the workshop. First, we can reclaim it on a mental level, then we can decide if we want to do something with that or not. I had doubts because I say some things even if I know they might be wrong from a purely scientific point of view since we’re in uncharted waters. To me, it looks like the people supposed to be the expert in this field, who define themselves as knowledge owners, just spit out approximate opinions like “it’s just diluted urine”. Then you put all your efforts to look at the researches they refer to and you find out that the specimens are just a few and sometimes they don’t even know which one they picked exactly. Many people dealing with sexology who are not endocrinologist talk about glands. So I took a space where to talk about this matter but I always say that maybe one day we’ll have stats and studies that will refute everything. I’m actually interested in the part regarding our liberation or revenge for what has been hidden to us. Mine is a cultural and political point of view, I can try to do some studies but that’s not really my task. I can make assumptions based on what I study, read and see, but I may be as wrong as other people, who were supposed to have the knowledge. And I’m purposely referring to all the male owners of the knowledge of female pleasure. They have been wrong for years.
Look at the G-spot myth…
The G-spot myth, yes. A lot of these doctors, especially men, who studied our body, saw fit to stick their names on it: Skene’s glands, Bartholin’s glands, the G-spot from the surname Gräfenberg, the fallopian tubes. As Diana Torres says, it looks like there was an attempt to colonise our vagina, like there’s a gay sauna in our cunt. I like so much this expression.
How is the female ejaculation related to pleasure and orgasm? Does it coincide with a peak of pleasure?
It might, but it’s subjective. It might occur before, during, after. It can be very pleasurable on a physical level or just for the fact that you made it happen. For me, it’s a great pleasure but it’s more psychological than physical. Feeling this fluid that needs to escape is like a sort of liberation.
Exactly, I find it liberating. Let me remind that the ejaculation or squirting – sooner or later the experts will clarify whether they are different or not – doesn’t exclusively occur with direct stimulation of the prostate. Our prostate fills up with fluid anyway, so it can also be released through clitoral stimulation. If you go stimulate this inner spot it can be easier but it’s not necessarily that pleasant. It may sound banal but if someone asked me to choose between orgasm and ejaculation – it’s a silly game, I know, but it’s useful – I’d have no doubts: in 30 seconds I ask you to leave me with the orgasm. Discussing with other women who squirt, their answer was more or less the same.
You’re touring Europe with this workshop about ejaculation: what happens during it?
The workshop is divided into two parts. The first part is theoretical and open to everyone and includes a powerpoint based on the book Fica Potens by Diana J. Torres. It’s built on her workshop and results in a journey through female pleasure, about how it was studied and cloaked, what happens in other cultures, what people said about this phenomenon in other times and how people of other countries are currently talking about it. There’s a second part just for cunt owners, where I basically encourage to have a self-exploration so to identify and recognize our prostate, learn where it’s located, what it looks like and how to stimulate it. I bring latex gloves, lube, then I ask if someone wants a hand (biblically) and, if that’s the case, I help to find the spot. There’s a moment reserved for personal stories, thoughts, feedback and questions.
Are the attendees of the workshop a bit timorous?
It depends. It’s not easy, I understand that and I’m always deeply thankful for the trust people allow me and for the fact that they lay themselves bare in an unusual situation that’s gynaecological rather than arousing, sharing it with people they don’t know. Some say they were a bit worried at the beginning but that I somehow make them feel comfortable, even because I try to take the edge off by joking. I think it’s important to have a sort of playful approach to lighten the mood. I’m also the first to get naked as a kick-starter. But people are free to decide not to be completely naked, they can use a blanket. Everyone has to feel comfortable and also free to decide not to stay for the second part. We all have to be respectful of our feelings. I appreciate people who can say no, I don’t feel to do this so I don’t do it. It’s important.
Why do people come to your workshop? What do they expect to get from it?
I’ll be honest, I think people expect something a bit different from what I actually do, they expect to learn how to squirt or, if they already do it, to learn something more about what’s going on in their body. They probably don’t expect the theoretical part to be cultural, political, social, but I can see that’s what leaves them with the most. It was the same for me: I always try to share what I got if something had a huge impact on me. The feedback is always positive, like “thanks, you made me change the perspective on things”. So maybe you come with a different idea but if many people continue attending my workshops and leaving positive feedbacks, they probably get something from them.
Which are the questions that men and women ask the most during the theoretical part?
The male component is always numerically inferior, probably because of my feminist angle, even if I try to be inclusive with everything and everyone. Since I talk about prostate, someone asks me if there’s something in common with the male one. For instance, female prostatic ejaculation is very similar to the male one. The access to male prostate is direct, from behind, while to female prostate is from the front, because there’s a tissue between the rectum and the vagina. The questions by women regard the peeing because in Italy, over the past three years, most sexologists decided the ejaculate is basically diluted pee. I always fight against it, because it’s one thing to say that the fluid contains urea, it’s another to say it’s just pee. Not that there would be any problem it if was pee, but in the past years when women went to the doctor worried about what happened to them (and it was ejaculation), they were diagnosed with urinary incontinence.
The ignorance spread by the science with the capital S has caused many damages, sometimes surgically. So I try to shed some light, but the chemical composition is still a work in progress. Other questions are like yours, they ask if what they see in mainstream porn is real, if it’s related to orgasm and pleasure. There’s always the part about how to protect the mattress, so the use of covers and tarps. Some share their personal experience and tell me about something has happened to them, asking if it’s ejaculation.
Do you think women attend the workshop to learn how to squirt for themselves or for their partners?
I think there’s nothing wrong with realizing some fantasies, but only if that’s what we want to do. At this moment a lot of people are talking about squirting in the wrong way. That doesn’t mean I talk about it in the right way, because I might be wrong on several aspects and my approach is not scientific even if there’s a bit of anatomy, obviously. I think porn sites, magazine, the various tubes raised curiosity. But yes, a lot of men want to become experts in making their women squirt or think they’re experts.
You also talk about other things, like anal pleasure…
Yes, I talk a lot about anal pleasure which is also facing stigma, taboos and endless ignorance. There’s a lot to do. The myth of the pain is still strong. I started talking about it after I translated The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women by Tristan Taormino. Then I matched it with a workshop. As Tristan Taormino says, people still think that’s normal to feel some pain during anal sex. Actually, anal intercourse is not supposed to hurt. Maybe we are wrong in the approach, we don’t try to relax, to go step by step, slow, to use lube, that’s important… it still has to become our best friend and it should, because the anus has no natural lubrication. If it’s wet, it’s just sweat or mucous. The saliva is not enough, the tissue is extremely sensitive and thin, it gets quickly dry. And we have to use love, care, slowness.
They are no different from the issues with painful vaginal penetration.
But the tissue of the rectum is even more delicate and easily torn.
Sadly, I think many women surrender to vaginal pain during intercourse.
I think so, we’re born with this idea. When it comes to anal sex, I always think about the damage caused by mainstream porn where the typical scene shows this hetero couple: he comes with his penis standing up straight, she is reluctant at first, then she caves in to please him, he performs a breakthrough with no warm-up, then he finally cums and no one cares about her cumming or not. Actually, especially in porn, there’s a preparation of the anus, also through medicalization with syringes and dilatation. But you don’t see it. So it’s important to de-mythicize what mainstream porn shows. People are also scared that anal sex can cause rectal prolapse or discharges. Actually, it’s the opposite, if you take care of your anal sexuality, it can be a good exercise for the sphincters and their tone. Like anything, like with alimentation, if we are not respectful of our body, anything can happen.
Any future projects?
Now I’m taking a summer break and I prefer to attend workshops and events as a spectator. I’ve some projects for this fall. I’m currently translating a book which is a guide to anal sex for men, for Odoya publishing company. I’m interested in working on the male prostate and taking part in European independent pornography festivals and postpornography. I have other collaborations in progress as an actress in independent porn projects like Female touch by Morgana Meyer e Lucio Massa. I have got a small part but it’s a fun thing and I’d like to follow this path. I’ve some ideas about new workshops on the eco-sex. I always have something in my mind, it depends also on the proposals I get. I just need time now, even if I don’t know if I’m really taking it, but I stopped the workshops and festivals for some months.
We’re done.
I’ve been long-winded as usual. I’m sure I talked fast as always.
Is there something you would like to add?
I can’t think about anything more. Thanks, I liked the interview.
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How can you not love her??
Since we realised this interview, she got interviewed by the Italian magazine FQ Millennium for an issue about porn, and by Vice Italy for the series La prima volta (The first time); she took part in the Porn Film Festival Berlin holding her workshop Ejaculation Workshop for Cvnts and as an actress for the film project Female Ejaculation & other Mysteries of the Universe.
