Here is a rough draft of my paper. you might like it.
My research into the complexities
surrounding the male experience has traversed the penis and its signification,
hegemonic and oxymoronic masculinity, muscular Christianity, colonialism, and
the various ways men and materials are entangled. I want to now look more
deeply into men’s phenomenological experience of the world in order to gain a
better understanding of misogyny.
Using
a phenomenological approach presented by interpreters of Merleau-Ponty’s important
work (Tilley 2004, Abram 1996, Priest 1998), I intend to review how masculinity
is found through the body’s engagement with our material world in order to see how
this element of masculinity creatively exists alongside our imaginary male
archetypes, ancient and contemporary. Archetypes and myths are an important
element in men’s stories, and I have no doubt that if one lines up in the
mind’s eye numerous ancient myths and material artifacts associated with men’s
lives, a kind of pattern will emerge that will generate a more comprehensive
view of male-female relations.
Of
course, this is all based on the assumption that, because male bodies are socialized
differently than female bodies, masculinity is an intrinsic part of men’s lives
(for another view, see Halberstam: 1998). Accepting this “categorical
assumption of masculinity” I will find that basic male experiences, such as
figure/ground, sky/earth, mouth/anus, dry/wet, and bird/snake, are always
already gendered, and are elementary structures of a shared, male experience.
We
must be careful though. The exploration of how basic bodily dyads (Tilley: 29),
aka “structural and substantive typological regularities” (Strang: 96) are
experienced throughout history provides an interesting entry point into the
study of gender and misogyny, however the
idea that we can deploy our imaginations to recreate a sensory experience of
sky/earth, hot/cold, or any other dyad is fictional because our capacity to
imagine is heavily influenced by the values and context of the moment in time
and place that we live (Smith: 124). Derrida (1988) concurs: ‘nothing exists
outside context’ (152). I think we need not take that subjectivist view
to the extreme because meaning is still grounded in the formal qualities of a material
substance, as well as in the sensuous, embodied relation between people and the
world, an invariant ontological ground and common basis for all feeling and all
knowing taking place through persons with similar bodies (Tilley: 29, Strang: 97).
In theory, the structures are universal (materially constructed) even if the
content is culturally constructed. We shall therefore take a both/and approach
here with Mealeau-Pontian phenomenology, because his approach transcends
traditional distinctions between subject and object (Tilley: 3, Priest: pp.
56-57).
Figure/Ground
We begin with the first phenomenological experience all
male bodies share, that of a figure on a background (Merleau-Ponty 1962:
4, Tilley: 13). The first figure to come into existence for a boy is not just a
single image; it is a synesthetic experience involving his entire sensorium
(Tilley: 14-16). In Gesture and Speech,
the great prehistorian, Leroi-Gourhan, looks at the birth of figure perception
(graphism, or what Thompson (1996) calls symbolization), and finds the
hand/face duality (1993: 187). The lack of facial hair would have emphasized
female faces, and according to some psychoanalysts, face and breast are fused
together, and ‘the eyes are the nipples of the face’ (Hilton 1995).
Associations occur not just from visual rhyming, but from all experience being
synesthetic. Therefore, the early stages of object-relations (and therefore
gender symbolization) is during the synesthetic experience of mother’s eyes/nipple
in mouth/milk filling hungry stomach. Her gaze ignites your sense of self/other
and being-in-the-world, the primal “fall” into the body. "During nursing
the breast-fed baby stares unwaveringly at his mother's face" (Spitz: 52).
Theology professor James Fowler says this primary relationship with our mother
becomes the foundational structure for our relationship with God, the great
Other (1995: 121). The phenomenology of breasts also played an important role
in Nazi boy fantasies, according to Klaus Theweleit (1990). “Women had to be
kept away from any work, including the work of raising children. Nursing
infants was considered disgraceful…Breasts had a sexual value from which any
other function might detract” (345).
Figure/ground
may not be the best words for these primary dual experiences because the
“ground,” or larger context for any phenomenon, is experienced more as a sky, or
unfocused atmosphere around an object.
Architect Juhani Pallasnaa, in Eyes
of the Skin (2012), says that the unfocused atmosphere is actually more
primary to the lived experience than the focused image (15). The two kinds of
awareness, figure and ground, are also likened to the two overlaid experiences
from the bilateral brain: the left sees objects, the right feels subjective
presence. According to Pallasnaa, this dual perception results in two kinds of
lived experiences: “Peripheral vision integrates us with space, while focused
vision pushes us out of the space making us mere spectators” (ibid: 15). There
is also medical evidence (i.e. hemianopia) that peripheral vision has a higher
priority than focused forms in our perceptual systems (Ehrenzweig: 273), and
this implies that atmospheric characteristics of bodily dyads, which lie
outside our focused attention, are grasped before any conscious observation of
details is made. Therefore, gender and body theorizing, already focused on the
figure, can expand into a peripheral, synesthetic ground; not into a wider, larger, social, global, ecological view, which is
categorically still a “figure” or object of awareness, but into the sky-like,
peripheral, atmospheric quality of the awareness and surrounding sensory experience
itself. We then have an astonishing capacity to perceive complex environmental entities
that were previously unnoticed (Pallasnaa: 16). Coming from another direction, James Aho says “We think
our [focused-figure] bodies with [unfocused-ground] society” (10).
Sky/Earth
The sky/earth distinction, marked
by a horizon line, comes after the more basic figure/ground distinction, and is
rooted in the upright postures of the body (Tilley: 5). The horizon line
becomes the limits of our horizontal vision of the earth and also serves to metaphorically
separate above from below, the visible and the invisible, the future and the
past, the happy and the sad (Tilley: 6, Lacoff and Johnson: 16). Therefore, any
attitude we have towards the future, for example, may be understood spatially
within the peripheral architecture of sky and space, whereas the past may be
connected to the focused, heavy earth below.
Feeling
into the subject from a different angle, sky and earth associate with the theme
“expansion and containment,” which (as ‘trapping’ and ‘liberation’) may be the
minimum content for all art and myth (
Ehrenzweig: 173). Up/down also has
metaphorical significance in a drooping posture which typically goes along with
sadness, sickness, and depression, and an erect posture, affiliated with
health, and a positive emotional state (Lakoff and Johnson: 15). Similarly,
consciousness tends to be equated with up and unconsciousness with down (ibid:
16-18). This basic, natural association will play a part in men’s
interpretation of the female body.
The
horizon line migrates onto our bodies as a belt-line, separating above from
below. Mary Douglas (1966) and Pierre Bourdieu (2010) describe how above/below
is further mirrored in a conceptual framework of public/private. For example,
Bourdieu writes: “[the male body] has its public parts -face, forehead, eyes,
moustache, mouth - noble organs of self presentation which concentrate social
identity, the point of honor, nil, which requires a man to face up to others
and look them in the eye; and its hidden or shameful private parts, which honor
requires a man to conceal” (2001: 17).
“Mouths are noble…they move in the brain’s courts. We set our genitals mating
down below like peasants…” (Updike, 435).
Within contemporary body theory (Lock
and Farquhar), this primordial orientation finds its way into “the vertical
axis” of the modern, postcolonial body, emphasized in the education of the
child. “As s/he grows up/is cleaned up, the lower bodily stratum is regulated
or denied, as far as possible by the correct posture (“stand up straight,”
“don’t squat,” “don’t kneel on all fours”-the postures of servants and
savages), and by the censoring of lower “bodily” references along with bodily
wastes. But while the low of the bourgeois body becomes unmentionable, we hear
an ever increasing garrulity of the city’s
low—the slum, the ragpicker, the prostitute, the sewer—the “dirt” which is
”down there.” In other words, the axis of the body is transcoded through the
axis of the city, and while the bodily low is “forgotten,” the city’s low
becomes a site of obsessive preoccupation, a preoccupation which is itself intimately
conceptualized in terms of discourses of the body” (Lock and Farquhar: 281). Suppression
becomes obsession.
Mouth/Anus
The human body recapitulates the
principle order of sky/earth not just as the general “above/below,” but also as
the specific differentiation of head and anogenital, or simply, mouth and anus. According to this
phenomenological line of thinking, a feedback loop is going on as qualities of
the sky and earth are introjected
into the mouth and anus while qualities of the mouth and anus are projected onto the sky and earth. As a
basic structure of all living bodies, mouth/anus also connect us to the Pikaia worms all vertebrates evolved
from (Alters: 563), and probably to the bacteria-like LUCA, our last universal common ancestor, from
which all life began (Egel: 295).
We
can confess, despite all squeamishness, that the mouth and anus are literally
connected, each being one end of a tube that runs through the body (Miller 96).
These endpoints are crucial, according to Miller (1997), in the conceptualization
of the disgusting (the vagina is also crucial to the extent that it gets
assimilated to both mouth and anus (19)) and so let us look a bit deeper into
their signification.
Both
ends are highly vulnerable to contamination and are highly dangerous
contaminators (Aho: 96). The mouth can be a source of disgust like the anus.
Not just vomit, but chewed food, mushed and slimy, may be harder to look at and
touch than feces because, in our minds, nothing is supposed to come out of the
mouth (Miller: 96). Likewise, things are never supposed to go into the anus,
and so the anus is a kind of temptation--it can be seen as the gateway to the
most private, to the most personal space of all. “It opens deeply into the male
body, and from it primal “possession” emerge (later, we learn to classify them
as waste and dirt)” (Krondorfer: 63).
Spectacularly,
the anus signifies the removal of all barriers of otherness (Krondorfer: 63,
Miller: 101). This is why Miller says that within the anus the foundations of
personhood are shaken (101). Maybe we know, on a gut level, that we humans are
"deuterostome," and begin life as a tiny anus, whereas our
invertebrate cousins begin as a mouth (Alters 2000: 511). Perhaps this causes a
sort of anus complex. Miller emphasizes that the significance of the anus is
also in part due to the sexual acts associated with it. “The anus is the
center, the eye, from which gender-bending possibility radiates. It is the
foundation of manhood” (Miller: 101). It is the foundation of womanhood as
well. Miller points out that if penetrating a man’s anus feminizes him, then
penetrating a woman’s shows that she is penetrable as a man, ”for his anus is a
figurative vagina, but her anus is an anus being used as if she were a he being
used as a she” (101). I am reminded of the closeted gay cowboy turning his wife
over during sex in the film Brokeback
Mountain (2005).
The
horizon line that separates sky and earth also brings sky and earth together. Likewise,
the mouth and anus, or more specifically, the oral and the genital connect
within the neurophysiology of our bodies. Yale Medical School neuroscientist
and leading brain scientist Paul D. Maclean elaborates: “In the organization of
the lower mammalian brain, […] nature apparently found it necessary to bend the
limbic lobe upon itself in order to afford the olfactory sense close
participation in both oral and anogenital functions…. In other words,
excitation in a region involved in oral mechanism readily spills over into
others concerned with genital function. This close relationship helps in
understanding the intimate interplay of behavior in the oral and sexual
spheres” (Maclean, 1962: 295, 296).
They
may be connected, but they are also completely separate, for the most shamed
and shunned area of the male body is the anus (Krondorfer, 63), not the mouth.
It also may be the most censored in the media (consider the outcry over
Mapplethorpe’s 1978 Self Portrait, (Abelove, 363)), and the
word ‘asshole’ carries with it a complex dynamical social context (Sutton,
2007). The human backside is also not sexually differentiated, so it can
confuse important gender and social boundaries (Bourdieu: 17). Besides that,
there is homophobic anxiety: the anus can be penetrated and subjected to sexual
pleasure and violation. “In a heterosexual culture, nothing seems farther
removed from spiritual significance than this part of the male anatomy”
(Krondorfer 64). Maybe this is why Kundera says, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, that “Shit is a more onerous
theological problem than is evil” (2004: 246). To contain these fears, men have
construed their bodies as closed, dry, and clean. The excreting body is not
theirs but belongs to women: open, dirty, and dangerous (Krondorer 63). Therefore, we can begin to
understand how head, mouth, and spirit are associated with men, whereas
the genitals, filth, and sexuality are associated with women.
The
mouth and anus are serious places in our world. The personal body, with its
orifices, is a recapitulation of not only the cosmic body of earth and sky, but
also the social body of us versus them. James Aho ably describes how individual
orifices stand for a group’s weak spots. The more defensive and exclusionary a
group is, the more pressure is placed on its members to police what goes into
out of their bodies. This includes simply exposing orifices (including eyes and
skin) in public space. (Aho 11). Aho argues, and I agree with him, that the
proper institutional context for understanding orifice regulation (and in this
case, the above/below, mouth/anus experience) is religion because orifices lie
at the center of momentous religious disputes. In The Orifice as Sacrificial Site: Culture, Organization, and the Body, Aho shows that the “originary
moments” of every major religion includes its characteristic “orifice signature”
(11), already laden with the general above/below duality associated with
sky/earth, air/water, dry/wet, male/female.
Not just
the mouth, but also the air it uses may be gendered, along with its resulting speech
(Abram 227). Derrida’s metanarrative recognizes how sound, speech, language,
God, and knowledge are all gendered male (1991: 31-33). Light, air, wind,
and sky connote the sacred, and
places
such as sacred mountains associated with clean air always tend to be privileged
culturally and emotionally while places situated down below tend to be
associated with darkness, moisture, filth, and death (Abram: 227, Tilley 2004:
6, Bourdieu: 3,
Lacoff
and Johnson: 15).
Earth
is not always pejorative; dirt is not just disorder and death (Douglas 1966, 6). Many traditions
cross-culturally hold that dirt is the material from which the first humans
were made (Boivin 2004: 5, Solnit: 152). Chthon (earth) and epichthnios (human)
are etymologically connected, as is humus (soil) and homo (man) in Latin. Adam
comes from the Hebrew word clod, meaning a clump of dirt, and the microcosm of
all dirt is linked to the whole globe within the word earth (Solnit 152). “Sex
is dirty because dirt is sexy.”
The mouth and the anus, like men and
women, are filthy and sacred at the same time. Aho’s “phenomenology of the
orifice,” recognizes genitals and their discharges as symbolic of chthonic forces,
real and imagined.
Aho also reminds us that these symbolic associations were not necessarily
created by men for men, but were also promoted by women to protect themselves.
They also came “from” the material world and from the formal qualities of the
substances themselves.
Genital
taboos are universal because the basic above/below experience is universal. The
moist anus is affiliated with the symbolic “below,” and aversion to that moist
quality is rooted in primal fear of death itself. Aho: “Out of terror of their
own mortality, human beings devise legends about body openings and invent
ceremonies to police their display and effusions….these tales and rites allow
humans to pretend that they transcend perishable matter; that they are essentially
immortal spiritual beings” (7).
Dry/Wet
“The air space above a piece of
land forms a totality with it, and the air moves accordingly. In summer, air
descends over the cool lakes and woods, and ascends over the warmer fields…”
(Schwenk: 105).
Sky and Earth logically relate
to light and dark, as light and dark touch the experience of day and night, hot
and cold, and dry and wet (Bourdieu 1990: pp 223-224). Therefore, from the
basic division above/below we can move swiftly into men’s experience of
dry/wet, or of air and water. One thing the pioneering water researcher, Theodor
Schwenk, quickly points out is that air moves largely in accord with the water,
not the other way around (102). This knowledge (conscious or peripheral) may
have created anxiety in woman-fearing men. “Every system of rivers,
every lake, every sea, is an organic totality with its own circulation, and to
each of these belongs the air space above it, to a great height” (105).
Another more
obvious reality about water (and woman) is that it is essential to all life
(Strang: 99). Water is also endlessly transmutable, moving readily from one
shape to another: from ice to stream to rain. Strang continues, “it has an
equally broad range of scales of existence: from droplet to ocean, trickle to
flood, cup to lake. The steam condensing on a kitchen window after a kettle has
been boiled performs the same cycle of movement and metamorphosis as the clouds
forming rain above the ocean, then precipitating down the mountainsides of the
nearest landmass. This process of transformation never ceases: water is always
undergoing change, movement and progress” (98).
Schwenk
goes as far as to mark water as the mediator between earth and sky, and also a
potent archetypal model for the flow of time itself (69). “There is such
unlimited movement in this sheath of water encompassing the earth that on a
global scale it can be regarded as an organ mediating between earth and cosmos,
integrating the earth into the course of cosmic events and enabling it to take
part in these events” (Schwenk: 68).
From
one perspective, because the female is associated with water, and because water
is spherical, sacred and life-giving, (all the fluids of the human body—saliva,
sweat, semen, and blood are sacred and mysterious substances (Thomson 19)) we
may conclude that women were, and still are, sacred and mysterious. However,
flowing fluids are also likened to male energy (See Robinson 2000: pp. 128-145).
Water is also the substance that flows out of the genitals, and can highlight
male dependency/vulnerability. We can see how the values associated with dry
and wet can get confused within the context of mouth and anus as well, because
the outsides of the mouth and anus must stay dry, whereas the insides must stay
wet. “The external squamous membrane around both openings must stay dry or it
erodes and the cells die, and the internal, mucous membrane must stay moist or
the cells die. It's a very interesting situation.”
Men
need women like men need water, and too much water (as in a deluge), or not
enough water (as in a drought), kills.
One of the most compelling sensory experiences of water is that of
immersion, which can be fearful and/or highly pleasurable (Strang: 100). When submerged, water acts in
opposition to the force of gravity, which always pulls downwards. Water holds
the body, pushing on it from all direction, lifting it up, higher towards the
sky (Schwenk: 71).
That
women are associated with water is a view supported by feminist anthropologist
Elaine Morgan who argues the wavy shape of the female body reflects a very
real, material relationship with water. Theweliet presents Morgan’s views in
considerable detail because “the insights they offer are indispensible for
anyone concerned with male-female relations and gender difference” (293). William
Thompson (1996) also leans heavily on Morgan’s narrative because her “clever
debunking of the macho school of anthropology is a welcome contribution to the
sociology of knowledge” (74). According to Morgan, the hominids venture off
into the savanna but are wiped out, and only the few who move to the seashore
survive to become the ancestors of the human race. Morgan explains it was by
becoming aquatic that humans lost their body hair, developed a layer of fat,
long hair on their heads, and switched from dorsal to frontal intercourse, a
revolution that required the lengthening of the male penis. Moreover, child
rearing in water required voluptuous breast and enlarged buttocks. Her story
shows the way sexual dimorphism has manifested itself in a process that was
both natural and social from the very beginning, so it fits well within our
both/and phenomenological narrative. “The ocean and the mother–child
relationship produced the female body, just as the male body acquired its
heavier musculature, strength, and speed through subsequent involvement in
hunting and warfare” (Theweleit: 294).
The
“waves” of the female body, then, come directly from the sea and from the
mother-child relationship (Theweleit: 291).
Morgan also tries to distinguish the peaceable, life-affirming, playful
traits that were acquired by humans (and can be seen in other aquatic mammals
like otters and dolphins), ascribing them for the most part to female proto-humans.
Men enter her story as the hunter, only temporarily dominating the scene,
bringing with him meat, male bonding, and warfare. Morgan ends her story with
these words: “All we need to do is hold our long arms out to him and say: ‘Come
on in. The water’s lovely.” (Morgan 1973, quoted in Theweleit: 292).
That
women’s bodies reflect properties of water is not too hard to believe. Many
unicellular water animals, for example, have incorporated the archetypal
spiraling movement of water into their shapes (Schwenk: 21). Schwenk even
suggests water is a kind of archetypal interface through which all life passes
into form: “Every living creature, in the act of bringing forth its visible
shape out of its archetypal idea, passes through a liquid phase” (20).
Psychoanalyst
Sandor Ferenczi also speculates on the connections between femaleness and
water, but looks back even further than Morgan, albeit perhaps not quite as far
as Schwenk, to the era in which life first evolved out of water. Ferenczi’s
says that before there were any living organisms on land, there was no
copulation involving penetration. Male-female penetrative sex later arose only
after the drying up on oceans forced aquatic animals onto the land. “Before
that there was no need for a womb to protect progeny since spawn could swim in
water” explains Theweleit. “Water dwellers had only a single “exit” for
everything, from excrement to sperm.” This narrative may be a performance of a
kind of male misogynistic fantasy: females were forced to submit to being
penetrated by penises and to being “turned into oceans.” “From then on, the
female intercourse served as a substitute for the lost aquatic existence”
(Theweleit: 292).
The
experience of dry and wet touches the foundational perceptual scheme above/below
because water travels downwards, and the driest places are always up high. So
we can see how natural processes such as rivers, oceans, and floods, are
associated with moisture and slime occurring in or upon the male body,
especially the orifices (Thelewiet: 409). Theleweit describes how the swamp
symbolizes the flowing, wet world associated with women; waters and swamps
(real and imagined) can absorb objects without changing in the process: after
an object sinks in, their surface becomes calm again. They are penetrable, “the impressionable medium par excellence” (Schwenk: 65), but can
also trap and destroy. “In other
words, they [swamps/waters] are remarkably alive; they can move autonomously,
fast or slow, however they wish” (Theweleit: 409). Their hybrid (i.e. impure)
condition, and their capacity for killing made them very well suited as
“displaced” designations for danger and the forbidden. This attribute of
leaving no traces of their activity, of closing up again after every action,
invites the presence of hidden things, things from secret realms, from the
domain of the dead, and since swamps became peaceful again afterwards, you
cannot tell how dangerous they are, so it is easy for them to be seen as
embodiments of deceptiveness; “A veil
of mist over the wet lowlands” (Theleweit: 409).
The
feminization of moisture and fluids is continually frustrating because men’s
bodies are filled with fluids. Nevertheless, “[a]t some point, his bodily
fluids must have been negativized to such an extent that they became the
physical manifestations of all that was terrifying…the swamps of the vagina,
with their slime and mire; the pap and slime of male semen; the film of sweat
that settles on the stomach, thighs, and in the anal crevice, and that turns
two pelvic regions into a subtropical landscape; the slimy stream of menstruation;
the damp spot wherever bodies touch…the sticky wetness of hair soaked in
sweat…the warm piss stream running down naked legs..” (Theweliet:
410-411).
So
the image of the male body is closed anatomically (dry and clean) and this
helps men become closed relationally (not dependent on others), detached like a
bird. As a self-sufficient universe, the closed male body is not part of a
network of relationships “but remains arrested in narcissistic awe” (Krondorfer
231), hence, it is not responsible to others. A body that is perceived as not
wet and excreting cannot relate to other wet and excreting bodies. It is no
accident that almost all tasks that have to do with bodily fluids the cleaning
of bodies are done by women: changing diapers, nursing the wounds of the sick,
wiping the anuses of the old, as well as working with fluids while cleaning
toilets, dishes, and clothes (Theweleit 409-410, Krondorfer 231). However, a
dry, closed body, warns Krondorfer, “isolates and imprisons man, and dries him
up spiritually” (232).
Bird/Snake
I want to take what we know about
above/below and dry/wet to interpret the popular iconography of bird and snake.
We should include animals into our phenomenological and archetypal landscape
informing gender identities because some of them, such as birds and snakes,
would have been widely experienced. Animals were also the first images humans
made, further evincing their significance. Seeing a subject from a different
view can change its shape: the
bird and the snake can open us to qualities of our own bodies that we missed
before.
We
can trace their iconography back to the sixth millennium B.C in central Europe
(Gimbutas 2007). The bird logically stands for the sky and is therefore male,
and the snake is a symbol for the ground and is therefore female, but it can
also stand for male resurrection (Bourdieu 1990: 275). Theweliet spots this
sexual symbolism of bird and snake when it appears in post-industrial Europe as
the falcon and the medusa. There are a few other phenomenological contexts
here: movement and stillness, soft and hard, air and stone. “Yet everything
points to the conclusion that it is man’s fear of reverting to something that
might prevent him from soaring off toward a new form of male domination, on the
high-flying “falcon” of his notion of the phallus. He is afraid of falling back
into a state of intermingling with the opposite sex—a state in which his own
power would dissipate. Falcons have an aversion to moist surroundings”
(Theleweit, 321-322). Rudolf zur Lippe, in volume two of
Mastery of Nature in Humans, shows how the opposition set up in the
falcon/medusa turns up in 16
th century French ballet. Lippe
emphasizes that dance roles requiring virtuosity and grand movements were
reserved for men, while the slow, ornamental parts were given to women.
Birds,
who can leave the world of Flesh and wing their way through the invisible, are
experienced by Aboriginal Australians as messengers of the unconscious, while
the Rainbow Snake, “who arcs upward across the sky and then dives back into the
earth” is felt to personify all the dangerous, and yet life-giving forces in
the land (Abram: 227). Thus birds evoke air/breath/spirit/mind, and snakes
evoke earth/water/matter/body. The famous birdman figure found in the caves at
the edge of history indicate that the human mind may have been experienced then
much like it is today: centered in the head and able to sore in an inward sky,
like a bird. Maybe we have always had flying dreams; Christian angels are also
depicted as bird-men. The bird-man iconography from prehistory reifies
consciousness as metaphorically likened to wind, breath, spirit, and birds (See
Thompson 1996: pp.110-113).
This interaction of bird and snake plays and
replays itself in other ancient themes: the chosen male hero battling the
feminine antagonist: “In the
history books of the Hebrew Bible, in Hesiod’s cosmogony, in the Rig Veda, in
the Babylonian Enuma elish, and in the Aztec codices, this usurpation is
mythically memorialized in the same way; namely, as the conquest of the Great
Mother (and her serpent consort) by a male hero: Yahweh, Zues, Indra, Marduk,
Huitzilopochtli. Theirs is the victory of culture over nature; and it is also
signified by the pronouncements of a male lawgiver: Hammurabi, Moses, Manu. In
the hands of this prophet, menstruation, birth, and sexuality are transformed
into unclean things, poisonous, contagious, and deadly” (Aho: 6, see also
Schlain 2002). Big, strong birds eat snakes, weak, little birds are eaten by
snakes.
Snakes are also impure in a Douglasian
logic because they should be in the water but are on land instead. We can use
Douglass’s dirt as “matter out of place” and Theweleit’s hybrid signifiers to
better understand the phenomenological snake. “Even worse are snakes which
propel themselves across the earth without any feet at all, and whose very
touch therefore contaminates. The same goes for bats, who reside in the air
like birds but have no feathers, and clams and crabs, who live in water but
have neither fins nor scales” (Aho: 17). The appropriateness of form following
function, as well as the higher vision of the bird is allocated to men, and the
hybrid condition of snakes is reserved for women.
Conclusion
What began as a search for the
mythic and material origins of misogyny led to theoretical outpourings of
phenomenology, materiality, gender entanglement, art and evolution. I found
that the body is one’s perspective on the world, and that the phenomenological
sky/earth, above/below, mouth/anus, dry/wet, bird/snake dualities are
everywhere, always already gendered, not just because of culture, but because
the lived experience of them touches a fundamental relationship we have to our
sexually differentiated bodies within a shared material world.
I found the
narrative again and again of western culture’s persistent effort to position women
(and feminine men) as the antithesis of the male body. Women are fluid; men are
not. They are dirty; we are not. In reality, however, the male
body, endowed with a mouth and anus, is almost as permeable and liquid as the
woman’s body, (except for menstruation, lactation, the fluids of childbirth, and
maybe the waves of their ancestral bodies).
Theorists
such as Tilley and Bourdieu argue that these basic, bodily experiences are, at
least partially, material, objective, and therefore universal. What is
universal may be called ‘transpersonal,’ or ‘archetypal,’ in the Jungian sense.
Our basic experiences are lifted from the objective world, and because they
become the substantive base from which all our thoughts and mythic narratives
appear, we can conclude there is a material landscape from which the mythic male
archetypes are lifted. Now, the reciprocity of archetypes and bodily dyads, imagination
and materiality, minds and bodies, implies that the mythic narratives are not
just poetic descriptions of a certain world, but material performances of one
as well. Suddenly, we are the archetypes breathing and dripping and looking at
themselves through the magic mirror of consciousness. We are the mythic forms
from cultural evolution discovering themselves through our human neurophysiology. We are
men and women, dry and wet, hard and soft, sky and earth mixing to make a world. The above/below
duality that all upright bodies experience correlates with male/female
archetypes not just due to historically situated cultural constructions, or simply
to patriarchal, intentional and conspiring motives, but also due to physiological, biological, social, and natural conditions. This realization
does not reify modern sex-role dualities and gender differences. On the contrary,
this phenomenological approach to gender helps us to better imagine how truly
gendered everything everywhere is, and by keeping an eye on these subtle
structures and associations coloring our lived, synesthetic experiences, we can
transcend them, hopefully reducing their resulting role in misogyny.
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