aaron
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Paglia on Penii (174 lines)
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Jun 18 23:23 UTC 1994 |
The Independent, Monday February 28, 1994, Page 18
"Why I Adore the Penis," by a radical lesbian feminist
Professor Camille Paglia, famous for her attacks on the politically
correct school of feminism, has now made a film in praise of the male
organ. She explains herself to Ruth Picardie
By Ruth Picardie
= Why make a film about the penis?
Women who can't deal with men, who can't deal with the penis, are just
immature, they're adolescent. I'm tired of it. I'm trying to bring a
whole new kind of sexual sophistication to feminism, to allow even
women who are openly lesbian, as I am with my lover, to say that we
regard the penis as hot. It's natural for any woman, lesbian or not, to
regard the penis as hot; your body naturally responds to that.
There's a puritanism in anglo-American feminism. It's all about
trivialising men, jeering at men, diminishing them, cutting them down.
People get mad at me. They say, 'It's not true, we're not phobic.' And
I say, 'Yes you are. You may have hot private lives with your husbands
or lovers, but when it comes to your stupid ideology, it's completely
sanitised.' My feminism is all about strong men, strong women. It's not
about strong women, castrated men.
I don't believe there is such a thing as pornography. There is nothing
degrading or humiliating about the open display of the genitals or of
any sex act whatever. Right now, I'm in this magazine called Playguy.
It's all about a video I made with this drag queen, Glenda Orgasm.
Fabulous. Page after page of the most beautiful boys, the most
beautiful penises. Gay men have such a sense of sexuality, such a sense
of eroticism. It is so depressing the lack of it among lesbians. The
kind of images they produce are just boring and banal.
There's a sensuality lacking from all feminist discourse. I am highly
aware of the excessive gentility, the white bread quality of a lot of
feminist discourse. That's what I'm attacking. The penis is perfect
because it makes people very uncomfortable. Deal with the penis. If you
can't deal with it, you are not pro-sex.
= But you personally don't respond to the penis?
Here's the problem. I grew up in the Fifties which was a highly
conformist era and I had, there's no doubt, a massive gender
dysfunction. My particular aggressive personality was completely out of
sync with what was expected of a young girl at that time. I thought I
was probably a boy. I was also attracted to women when I was very tiny.
Then when puberty hit, suddenly my body changed. Boom! I found myself
attracted to creatures I couldn't stand.
I still don't get along with men as erotic partners, but the point is
my body became attracted to male bodies. I've dated men, I just haven't
had relationships with them. My problem with men I guess would have to
be called a political problem. I can mate perfectly well with men on a
physical level; I'm very attracted on a physical level. But I don't
fall in love with them; I'm not involved with them emotionally. I'm one
of the strangest mutant creatures on the face of the earth.
I'm honest enough to admit that mother nature wants my body to mate
with men. I resisted it. To me, that's the rebellion of feminism. But
just because we don't want to be under the power of men, does not mean
that we have to continue to say penises are silly, penises are ugly.
We're trying to force anglo-American feminism to face images, without
all of this sermonising, this attempt to edit and censor. The best way
to do it is with a penis. Force the penis! The way men see sex is sex.
The penis is the ultimate symbol of real feminist liberation for the
21st century.
Followers of Michel Foucault argue that men and women are exactly the
same, we're tabula rasa, we're only gendered by society. That is
riduculous. There is an enormous difference. Your whole life is going
to be different if you have a thing hanging between your legs. It
doesn't mean that you're definitely going to be more powerful, or more
self-confident, but your whole attitude towards life is different.
I talk about this in Chapter One of Sexual Personae, how a penis is
like an extension, it's like your hand or your arm, it goes outward
from you. You are testing things, you probe. Men when they urinate have
this arc, they project outward, and they have to learn how to do it.
Adulthood is learning how to aim, to focus, to make an arc of
transcendance. Women merely water the ground they stand on.
The actual physicality, the unarguable concrete physicality of our sex
lives has got to be brought back to centre stage. The masses of people
on the earth would agree with me. I'm sick of a bunch of white
middle-class feminists sitting around saying it doesn't make any
difference at all that a person has this long finger of flesh between
their legs. They make me sick.
= What's your favourite representation of a penis?
The ancient Greeks felt that a large penis was a sign of animality, of
bestiality. A man was embarrassed to have a large penis and coveted a
small, shapely boy-like penis. For that reason, the Greek nudes always
have tiny penises. Also, having a long, pendulous penis in its real
size throws off the proportion. The great Greek classic sculptures are
always organised by the golden mean -- the proportion of the size of
the head to the rest of the body.
In the the medieval period you don't get the beautiful nude at all. If
there are any nudes at all it will be Adam and Eve -- ugly, crabbed,
the mortification of the flesh, the ugliness of the flesh -- in a
window. The Renaissance, beginning with Michelangelo's David, was
simply imitating the classical style.
That's a convention that goes throughout the 19th century, right up to
the photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe. A conventionally sized penis
looks very odd to us. It looks vulgar in a high art context because we
have been trained in this tradition of having it shrunk down.
You might have a satyr -- half goat, half human, a creature of the
woods -- with a big penis and an erection. He's usually pointing at
some nymph or some hermaphrodite. But it's always considered vulgar,
comic, pornographic, never part of the high art tradition. Part of the
comedy of Aristophanes is having figures on stage with gigantic
leather, sawdust-filled phalluses with which they would bat each other
over the heads. It was considered incredibly humorous.
The Western art tradition depends on contour: the sharp, sculptural
outline of the human body. When you have a very muscular body of a guy
who's been doing weight training, there's this thing hanging there,
this bag, this loose flesh. Even if he gets an erection, the balls
bounce around. It is the one area of unstructured fleshiness on the
male figure. The way they dealt with this as a visual problem was
simply to shrink it.
Mapplethorpe was probably the first to be able to get the actual image
of the penis at its true size into the high art context. I have to say
that his representation of the penis is my favourite, because he's not
lying, he's not trying to shrink them, to reduce them to the ''proper''
proportions.
Do you suffer from penis envy?
I agree with what Madonna says in that horrible book, Sex. She doesn't
have penis envy, she doesn't want a dick, she says: 'I already have a
dick in my brain.' I think I have power envy. A penis must be very
aggravating. You'd have to go around with it bouncing up and down all
day long.
What is your view of the Bobbitt case?
I've carried a knife for years. The implication is that if anyone
touches me I will stab them or cut it off. One of my most famous
pictures was two years ago in People magazine, where I posed with an
Italian switchblade knife. It's open and coming at the camera. There's
another picture of me posing with a sword in front of the Philadelphia
Museum of Art.
All of these images were to imply the Amazonism that I think is
necessary for the contemporary woman. Men have to start realising the
power women have in any given sexual encounter, the power to cut it
off. So I treat Lorena Bobbitt as a heroine.
At the same time, she committed a criminal act and I feel she should
have been convicted and gone to prison. It's absolutely ridiculous that
her husband was acquitted of assault charges and yet, at her trial,
they acted as if he were guilty. I don't accept this post-traumatic
syndrome that put her into an insane state when she cut it off.
To attack a person while they're sleeping is cowardly, that is tacky.
It makes me sick. Stabbing someone in the back is not fair play.
If she'd cut it off while he was attacking her, or while they were
fighting, I would have applauded it. I would have admired her if she
had said, 'Yes I did it, it was a blow for women, I'm guilty and I'm
going to prison.' If she'd stood up and taken responsibility for it.
Instead of saying 'Oh I was just a victim.'
By the way, Lorena Bobbitt is Latin. She's from South America. I'm
Italian. The same thing. Vendetta! Take the knife in your hands.
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aruba
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response 22 of 32:
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Apr 6 04:58 UTC 1995 |
Well, I've been trying for a couple of days to come up with a good
answer for y'all, but I haven't thought of anything earth-shattering. Most
of the (plentiful) all-male conversations I engage in are with the other
programmers in my group, who are indeed all male, and in fact all married.
One talks about what a pain his wife is, all the time (and they fight on
the phone a lot). There is hardly any talk about sports, oddly; I have in
the past found that talking about sports is one way that men who otherwise
have nothing in common can relate.
There is a lot of (boring, to me) talk about what neat computer
hardware is coming out soon. People occasionally tell drinking stories,
or stories about flaunting authority (like, taking apart a masterlock and
figuring out how it works, and then making a pass key that would open any
lock of the same type). I have one co-worker who seems to associate
everyone very closely with their car; I never know what he's talking about
because I rarely notice much about the kind of car a person drives.
One of my co-workers is facinated by any new developement he's read
about in physics or engineering. Unfortunately, he's a very blustery sort
of person and pretends to understand (and explain) a lot of things that he
doesn't truly grasp. In other words, he bullshits us a lot. (That bugs
me more than most people, since I used to be a math teacher. :))
We all refer to our programs as "he" a lot, which it occurred to me
might offend some women if any ever dropped in on our conversations. I
thought about making a conscious effort to call some programs "she", but
that was worse; it sounds like you're making some kind of statement (it's
not clear what) about gender difference, and program differences, when you
make some of them male and some of them female. I decided just to
associate the gender of a program with the gender of the programmer.
I think that one of the things which sets the all-male conversations I
have apart from mixed-company conversations is the complete lack of sexual
tension.
There are certainly jokes told, and off the cuff comments made, that
probably wouldn't be made in mixed company. The other day, we were
discussing the fact that someone in another department had come to America
from Sweden; one co-worker said, "Well, I can understand that, with taxes
being so high in Sweden", and another said, "Are you kidding me? Have you
*seen* the women in Sweden?!" That sort of thing prompts a general laugh.
There is more swearing, and more teasing, and more general disdain
expressed between men than between men and women, I think.
Other than the above, mostly what we talk about is work, and that
wouldn't be any different if some of us were female.
Disclaimer: The above are my experiences only, and I would be very
surprised if every other male on the planet didn't answer differently
than I.
So, it's only fair that I ask, what do women talk about when there are
no men around? :)
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