Despite all the mumbling & grumbling, one's professional survival in the academic world depends more and more on getting published, so there's no alternative but to grab the bull by its horns when you have to. Seizing these precious few weeks unburdened by teaching commitments, I've been writing and re-writing a couple of papers and book reviews for (possible) publication.One of the texts I'm currently working on is a study of images of "female nature" in contemporary women performance and land artists. Ever the sceptic, I've been reading through, half amused and half irritated, a pile of books on different brands of feminism, variously committed to celebrating, dismissing, deconstructing, etc., the persistent association of "woman" with "nature". Having no vocation or patience whatsoever for the impenetrable (literally) theoretical elucubrations of sisterhoods of resented lesbians and tomboys, I decided to explore other less... erm... dense critical discourses, namely one that goes by the name of ecofeminism.
While I tend to empathize with some of their goals & tenets, I nearly always end up with a bout of indigestion when I bump into pearls of wisdom such as this one:
Can we understand mortal 'techne' as an overflowing of rich sap, an expressing of warmth and wonder, rather than phallocentrically as an active producing of "man-made" products, mentally directed and often violently erected? (Can we understand the phallus itself as soft and giving rather than hard and penetrating without losing the erection?)
Carol Bigwood, Earth Muse: Feminism, Nature and Art (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993), p. 187.
It's certainly laudable to do away with dichotomies, binary thinking, etc., but... soft without losing the erection, good ladies?... I think you're in serious need of a radical reality call, if not of a good anatomy lesson.
If this is where feminism is heading for (no pun intended!), then I'm so much happier with Paglia's stuffy old non-conformist feminism-with-brass-balls - which, by the way, has the perfect reply to what she intrepidly calls the "granola brigade" and their politically correct pieties:
I have intensely disliked the tendency of many feminists to want men to be remade in a kind of shy, sensitive form - to become, in essence, new kinds of women, contemporary eunuchs with a soft penis, which is less inconvenient to women. I think that this is not in the interests of the human race. We want a hard penis. We want masculine vigor. And I'm afraid that in order to get men macho again, we may have to endure a certain amount of instability in sexual relations. That is, there may have to be a kind of honorable truce between enemy camps.
So what would be my advice to the sexes at the end of the (20th) century? [arms akimbo in fierce, campy drag queen mode] I would say to men: get it up! And to women I would say: deal with it!
Camile Paglia, "The Penis Unsheathed", in Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (London: Viking, 1995), pp. 15-16.
Couldn't agree more, especially these days when you find yourself surrounded by this sinister, invading army of narcissistic metrosexual clones. Perfectly groomed and moisturized, alright, but sexy as ice cubes and boring to death, bah.
[Image: Kanamara Matsuri/Festival of the Steel Phallus, Kawasaki, Japan]
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