Phallocracy
I've done so many influenza microneutralization assays by now that I can do them on semi-autopilot and my mind drifts to random topics.
Today I was thinking about a course I took in college called Women in Classical Antiquity. The class was about 15% blur cases like me who were just taking it to fulfil graduation requirements, about 75% underclassmen girls with feminist pretensions, and about 10% actual Classics majors who were almost groaning in pain at the dumb things that everybody else said.
Apparently a lot of hardcore porn during ancient times was painted on these big bowls that look sort of like punch bowls for drinking wine. I don't remember what they were called. Also, back then "symposium" didn't mean an academic conference. It meant a party where guys would get massively drunk and screw girl whores, boy whores, and each other. These were depicted quite explicitly on the wine bowls.
Obviously the lay public doesn't get to see these in museums much.
One of the books we had to read was called "The Reign of the Phallus" by Eva Keuls. That is the real title. I'm not kidding. Obviously Athens wasn't a great place to live if you were a woman - if you were rich, you got married off at puberty and spent your life as someone's little housewife. If you were poor, you were likely someone's slave. There were statues and paintings of guys with huge cocks in places that modern civilization would never put them. But, this author insisted that Athens was SO pervaded by the thrusting, turgid, masculine principle that she called it a "phallocracy". I don't like it when people make up words for no good reason. Scientists have to make up words when they discover natural phenomena. I mean, you can't go around calling genes or species or minerals by some boring serial numbers forever. But, in the humanities people seem to just make up words arbitrarily for phenomena that some individual thinks is important. There's no consensus on whether this thing actually exists or not or is worthy of its own nomenclature. Each one of them lives on the little planet of "me".
Phallocracy just sounds plain silly. It conjures up a mental image of giant animated penises in Congress. Furthermore, it clouds communication. You shouldn't make up a word that nobody but you knows the meaning of when an alternative word or short phrase would do - for instance, in this case something like "male supremacy". I'm trying to think of a good one-word alternative, though.
I guess you could call it a dicktatorship.
By the way, another book we read for that class was Sarah Pomeroy's "Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves" which was much more sane and helpful if you want to know what life was like for women in ancient Greece.
posted by xenobiologista @ 01:17
3 Comments:
The problem with finding a word that defines something belonging to the realm of the social is that words are not fixed items, and neither is the social realm. You can't pin a phenomena and say "this is it, and this is the word to define it" -- my literature background makes me balk at such an absurdity. There is some fixity in language, but it can never be entirely definite. That's one of the reasons why hard sciences opt for Latin -- it's a dead language, and that's very helpful when you need fixity (the very fact that 'phallocracy' sounds silly to you is also the result of the problematics of language).
This isn't a weakness of the humanities, it's simply something that is a natural product when your object of study is the behaviour of human beings (fluid) and shaped or defined by language (also fluid). The biggest problem in sociology is that with every project you undetake, you need to go through a very rigorous process of defining your scope. Even something as easily taken for granted, say "modern" or "the middle class" hits grey areas. When did the modern period begin? Who are the middle class of Society A? etc.
"Phallocracy just sounds plain silly. It conjures up a mental image of giant animated penises in Congress."
I watch C-Span. This is in fact a remarkably accurate description.
"Phallocracy just sounds plain silly. It conjures up a mental image of giant animated penises in Congress."
I watch C-Span. This is in fact a remarkably accurate description.
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I work in Washington, DC. I eat lunch every other week at the US Supreme Court or the US Senate. I have met the very phalluses responsible for American government and I have no reason to disagree with Eric's description.
C-Span does not adequately portray the enormity of John McCain's giant animated penis... nor does it adequately portray Sarah Palin's. =(
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