The Weaponized Phallus (and five easy-to-remember steps)
[Also published at huffingtonpost. Comments there recieve a very large audience.]
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Here is a thought exercise. Think of all the euphemisms used to describe the distinctly male external appendage, or eroticized acts from the male point of view, that call to mind conquest, war, or violence.
Examples: I’d like to hit that (“hit” as act of aggression, “that” as objectification). He shot his load (gun metaphor). I knocked the bottom out of that pussy (penis as an instrument to wreck a “thing,” woman reduced to an instrumental body part). Bob added her to his list of conquests (self-explanatory). He made her (“he” is the subject, she is the object to be taken).
Porn advertising uses very warlike metaphors, if anyone is interested in what the market says about what men find popular in the arena of sex-commodified.
Now flip the exercise. Think of all the euphemisms to describe war and aggression that are sexualized.
Examples: We’re going to pop it to the enemy. Our forces will penetrate here. He made that guy his bitch. Abu Ghraib.
Anyone who thinks for a moment can come up with her own list. Or just listen to other people, television, the radio…
These figures of speech are so common that we have the tendency to overlook, and even repeat them, never stopping to think how these figures of speech devalue women, or how they construct male sexuality as conquest and violence.
Anyone who has not seen the Media Education Foundation film Wrestling with Manhood is hereby strongly encouraged to see it, and to use it as a collective teaching tool about how masculinity is constructed as violence, and how immensely popular is its misogynistic core. It shows the frothing audiences as theatrical wrestling events cheer at macho posturing, which included the feminization of enemies, at the brutality of the “fights,” but with the most disturbingly enthusiasm, at the staged and real abuse of women during these intensely popular public “entertainment” events.
Here is the problem I am having with the weaponized phallus, a problem of a more limited scale than men’s deeply enculturated hatred of all things female, especially the female body (which they see as a thing to be conquered, defiled, humiliated… taken). It’s that fact that so-called “progressive” men (people really should look up the sordid history of that modifier), those who claim to stand for justice and against domination and exploitation, engage in the self-same, woman-hating, weaponized-phallus trash-talk as right-wing men.
And here is a small step I am proposing to left-wing men. Stop that. Stop it right now, and never do it again.
Here is a short list, with explanation, that I’d like you to stop:
(1) Stop using gendered language thoughtlessly. There is a politics to language, and it is not just being “PC.” That term was invented by right-wingers to fight back against things like women’s studies, African American studies, and other non-white, non-male, non-imperial challenges to a racist, Eurocentric, and patriarchal canon. When you use male nouns and pronouns to describe human, you are reinforcing the idea and practice that makes male the norm. Calling the species homo sapien “Man” is a problem. Calling land and ships and other things “she” and “her,” that men are seen to control, is a problem… because it assigns the controlling role to males. Saying that “it is colder than a witch’s tit” is a sexist turn of phrase. Using the term “balls” to describe courage, and making courage a male characteristic, is a problem. Calling people who lack courage or strength “pussies” is a devaluation, as well as objectification, of women.
(2) Stop saying things that are homophobic, and stop tolerating homophobia. Homophobia, as Suzanne Pharr once pointed out, is a weapon of patriarchy. When you make jokes about prison rape, that is homophobic, as well as buying into a notion of rape as legitimate tool for social control, and masculinity constructed as sexual revenge. The ideological basis for men’s control over women is what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality.” Policing people based on the masculine-feminine binary is policing a binary of domination and subjugation.
(3) Stop saying clueless shit about sex that makes sex an unmitigated good (in reaction to the theocratic right’s squeamishness about sex). It might sound liberated if you are still trying to shock you aging parents, but it erases women’s experience of sex as often obligatory, manipulative, humiliating, and even frightening — one of the practices in a system where they are on the wrong end of social power. A recent article by Joe Garifoli in the San Francisco Chronicle, called “Anti-war couple conceive new way to generate peace,” is a perfect example.
Living on their houseboat off the Marin County coast, anti-war activists Donna Sheehan and her partner, Paul Reffel, concocted a way for the world to communally create a lot of peaceful vibes.
They want everyone to have an orgasm on the same day.
They go on to say, “If you’re experiencing pleasure, you’re not engaging in aggressive, destructive behavior.”
Really? Does that mean, asks my friend De, that the rape of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim, in which three men apparently had their peacemaking orgasms, contributed to world peace?
Don’t say dumb shit like this. It betrays your own cocooned privilege, and not just become some Haitian peasant woman might be more worried about the food that’s not in her belly than her daily orgasm, but because sex has been experienced as violence by millions of women… imposed by men who took physical pleasure from their violence.
(4) Stop reinforcing the devaluation of women by measuring them by some media-concocted version of what they are supposed to look like. This is a tough one, because we het-men (and even gay men) have been trained very early and very thoroughly to cast the pornographic gaze on women first… judging her “fuckability” (think about that term before we inquire about anything else). This is a form of oppression, and until we make an intentional effort to stop that, everything we say about relieving oppression is hypocrisy. If we say we are for justice, and we say we are against oppression, and we judge women this way, we are frauds… and we deserve to have no one listen to us, ever.
(5) Stop thinking it is okay to attack the “enemy’s women” based on their gender. When you make a sexual remark to put down Anne Coulter or Condi Rice, or crack on them about their appearance, you are attacking them based on their status as women… which implicitly attacks all women. That shit is not cool. It doesn’t make you a more effective progressive (or whatever). It makes you an oh-too-typical male misogynist. You are still engaging in sexualized revenge.
This just scratches the surface, but I don’t want to overwhelm anyone. If you want to add one more step, start calling others out when they do this stuff, too.
Time to de-weaponize the phallus; let it revert to the humble pollination device it was designed to be. You’d be surprised at the implications.
Albert:
The nature of comments regarding Nancy Pelosi, the incoming new Speaker, show the widespread reluctance to take her leadership qualities seriously.
21 November 2006, 6:46 pmHow difficult it is for many to take her seriously.
Do many people really think that her lack of a “penetrating” organ dooms her to failure?
Personally I’m excited by the prospect that she may be able to rein in the “Errant Decider”, after all the manly, decorated and macho warriors have failed.
What a interesting story that would be!
Anne Xiety:
The comments at huffington are disgusting.
21 November 2006, 6:57 pmNil:
#4 is the hardest one for me. All the other ones are easy.
21 November 2006, 7:07 pmPony:
I thought they were hilarious. I’d wager most of the respondents think themselves skilled speakers of the English language, and probably have a university degree or two to boot. Oy.
“Its good to recognize and acknowledge the implications of language. But in bed, I want a warrior, not a wimp.”
21 November 2006, 8:43 pmJames M:
Nils – Number 4 is indeed hard. On the Vets’ Gulf March I noted the frequent use (by Stan and others) of the terms “brother” and “sister” in reference to people we marched with and met. It turns out, in my experience, to be a handy sort of ideo-linguistic magic trick for breaking the “fuckability-gauge” spell. If you make an effort to see all women first as “sisters” in a sense, some interesting effects tend to arise in the psyche. A lot of programmed behaviors and thought patterns start to break down, temporarily at least. Seems reasonable that with some persistence, that kind of consciousness could become a permanent attainment. The programming, though, is indeed insidious and it requires a lot of personal vigilance to keep from backsliding.
21 November 2006, 9:33 pmRic:
Thanks for this. It is a great reminder. As a committed liberal and a het-mail, I am guilty of some of these, and I need to stop.
21 November 2006, 10:51 pmpeggy:
Stan, you are going about this in entirely the wrong way. When you want someone to not do something, the best way to get them to keep doing it is to tell them not to do it. Like, when I lost a tooth, my father used to tease me by telling me, “Do NOT think about the word hippopotamus!” Which I wasn’t thinking about before, but after said not to think about it, how could I *not* think about it?
There are many ways of thinking about the penis that are not weaponized, and those are the ways we must list and think about.
The penis is a tender pink bud, the most feminine part of a man (I learned this in India).
Lollypop.
Fluffy the Magic Squirrel.
Honeybee.
Jesus.
Sweet thang (this one is not gender-specific).
The old fella.
The little boy.
The transcendant signified.
Willie.
Et cetera.
22 November 2006, 12:52 amalison:
the little engine that could
22 November 2006, 2:31 amalison:
hmmm
22 November 2006, 2:35 ampeggy:
??
22 November 2006, 2:35 amseb:
HuffPo is another example of why I don’t go outside the confines of more specific blogs.
Here’s a trend I’m noticing: Someone brings up patriarchy, some people will say “it’s not this way.” And when someone brings up battling patriarchy, those same people, more or less, will say “but it’s always been this way!”
Or get caught in a loop about the exact meaning of “political correctness” (Yolanda Carrington had linked an essay about it on her blog, but I’m unsure of linking a blog their way… probably end up providing more fodder anyway)
Or say that you’re policing their morality, which seems to exempt the fact that their morality is in the shitter regarding women. They are entirely avoiding the content of the article, after all.
Or resorting to evolution, exempting them from their own will, like this is all beyond their control.
And finally, saying it’s impossible because it’s not pure. I don’t think many people here expect purity, though.
A plethora of straw men and hideous ignorance. And some good things too.
I kind of agree with peggy, though. Reverse psycology! Who knows, it might work! It’s pretty glib, but imagine the responses if the content was:
1) Use gendered language constantly! Damn political correctness!
2) Be homophobic! Treat all men who aren’t manly men like they’re girls! Prison rape is funny!
3) Sex is an unmitigated good! Engage in pleasure-seeking debauchery!
4) Women are supposed to look like the women on television! Stare at them! Judge them entirely by how they look!
5) Anne Coulter and Condi Rice deserve all these times 10! Stereotype away!
Most people are GOOD, but they turn ugly when confronted with their privilege. It might make them sit in a corner for a couple hours. “What have I been doing?!”. It’s like preaching to the choir, but the pastor is a satanist! Or maybe it’s just puerile…
22 November 2006, 11:49 amPony:
Odd how no matter what a penis is called, it’s flattery and endearment. Words for the vagina (more correctly the vulva, we don’t even get the proper name right) are derogatory.
22 November 2006, 11:57 amElaina:
I got censored on huffpo!
I probly broke some namecalling rule or something. But I find it interesting that a man’s right to freely speak about wanting to oppress and exploit ann coulter, or a liberal woman’s right to tell stan to give it up, he’s attacking nature are protected.
Apparently I got no right to point out that they’re all just quaking over losing male-centered privilege…and that they’re a bunch of idiot yahoos.
Oh well. That’s why I’ve got my own blog.
22 November 2006, 11:58 amjay taber:
Have you seen the movie War and Peace made in Bombay?
22 November 2006, 12:01 pmLauren:
I completely agree with your post! Great thinking!
The names we use for sexuality and sexual organs fascinate me. We can go further than the violence thing and think how often food or small animals are used to describe women and our parts:
chick
babe
vixen
fox
pussy
dish
22 November 2006, 1:33 pmcupcake
muffin
honeypot
Anne Xiety:
‘The penis is a tender pink bud, the most feminine part of a man’
But..well..what does that mean, ‘feminine’ part?
What does it mean that something feminine is also tender? Is a clitoris the most ‘masculine’ part of a woman, then?
Because that would involve using gender roles, and the gender roles set up ‘women’ and ‘men’ as being ‘natural’ opposites, which is just a bad scene in general.
Pony, on second thought, yeah, they are kind of funny. They are just so pathetic and gross, it is really rather sad that they think in such ways.
22 November 2006, 2:02 pmseb:
interesting etymology: “vagina” is latin for sheath/scabbard, although it wasn’t used to refer to genitalia in those times, and it wasn’t used medically until the 1600s. “penis” is latin for “tail”. “vulva” is “wrapper” in latin.
Online Etymology Dictionary. Good site.
22 November 2006, 3:19 pmpeggy:
Sorry my post above was not so well-received. I guess i was just trying to say that there are other ways of thinking about the penis than as a weapon. Plenty of other ways. If there no other ways, there would be no point in fighting phallocentrism in all its ugliness and brutality. Not every man thinks of his penis as a weapon, and not all heterosex is brutal. I know men who use the simple word “thing” to refer to both their “thing” and their female lover’s “thing” – affectionately. It is not a new convention, nor is it confined to the English language.
And yeah, I know negative psychology is kinda dumb. But i didn’t mean that exactly. I meant that, having educated people in the wrong of certain language, it might help to redirect their attention to other kinds of language, that are appealing.
22 November 2006, 4:11 pmseb:
Peggy, I think our insecurities just collided a bit
. I was referring to my post when I said “puerile” (when I could’ve said dumb, but I was trying to give myself extra credit with a bigger word). I added the bangs everywhere for effect.
My post was just the opposite of what Stan had said. I wonder if it would make others wonder. I don’t know if I have the skill for that though.
(insecure boilerplate: I apologize if you weren’t referring to me.)
22 November 2006, 7:25 pmStan:
Apparently, there are some commercial blogs that cyber-harvet news stories related to their products.
This one, called smallpenis-dot-com has set its harvest-bots on the web and picked up Weaponized Phallus.
Little holiday humor.
23 November 2006, 8:53 amNil:
I dunno, one of the problems with the kind of sarcasm/irony that seb employs is that I think it hides the difficulty of this task, and makes it easier to pretend one isn’t culpable.
“Women are supposed to look like the women on television! Stare at them! Judge them entirely by how they look!”
Well, sure, I don’t think that. Gee, you’d have to be an idiot to think that. Not like ME. Not like us GOOD men.
It’s not a media-concocted idea of attractiveness I have a problem with, neccesarily. It’s simply avoiding judging every woman I meet by ‘fuckability’ as a first impression. I think the vast majority of straight men in our society do this, not just the ‘bad’ ones.
Recognizing the difficulty of avoiding this is no EXCUSE for doing it. But exagerating it to the point of absurdity—makes it too easy for too many of us to ignore the fact that we do it, instead of taking responsibility for stopping.
So this post has made me think a bit. It’s still not entirely clear to me how to escape this trap, but I’m going to try not to ‘forget’ that it IS in fact oppressive behavior and essentially pathological behavior (Stan’s later post about the problematic nature of the concept of pathology not withstanding). James M’s post is interesting. To me, all the others of Stan’s points are fairly easy, they come more or less easy. It always astounds me to see presumably progressive people attacking the “enemy’s women” in gendered ways. I wonder if for others, getting away from this seems as much an attack on their fundamental identity as getting away from first impression attractiveness judging seems to me. Hm.
27 November 2006, 10:02 pmDeAnander:
Sorry folks to post another seriously horrible downer (and some rather graphic detail) but I think it is relevant…
child Sexual Abuse in Africa
while we are talking of weaponised phalloi, let’s not forget the literal, as well as the metaphorical, meaning and potential consquences of using the phallus as a weapon… to sodomise a child for example:
this is injury, damage. possibly permanent disability: because some jerk wanted a “free” orgasm and raped his niece. or should I say “allegedly”? for he has recanted his confession and now claims the girl was lying — and where have we heard that before?
if he had used some other weapon rather than his own body to do this damage, would the case have been handled in this way? who knows. my point? I guess, to remember that when we talk about using the penis as a weapon we are not speaking metaphorically. both girls and women can be, and are, physically damaged and wounded by violent rape, in addition to the insult to their personhood, self-respect and dignity.
the article cited here mentions that the rape of girl children has not been taken very seriously in Africa (any more than it is in any patriarchal culture unless the girl’s father is a high-status male), until recently when the prevalence of AIDS means that the rape may be an automatic death sentence. and nit for the perp.
anyway. not just a meme. a meme with real consequences in the real world. if there were a VA for the victims of the Penis War its hospitals would (also) be full and its counselors overworked.
1 December 2006, 8:21 pm