Much ado about nuttin'.
There's been a debate raging at Harvard University for almost the past month about the erection of a nine-foot tall snow phallus in Harvard Yard. Done as a prank by the Harvard men's crew team, the giant snow penis was knocked down by a feminist and her conservative Christian roommate later that night.
Both the crew team's sophomoric prank and the extreme reaction to it have caused debates on campus running the gamut from free speech rights to violence against women. "No one should be subject to an erect penis without ... consent," the would-be snow-castrator told The Crimson, Harvard's resident newsletter.
That seems like an extreme reaction. God forbid this woman ever travels to spots on the planet where yawning yonis and tumescent lingams are actually celebrated in festivals and religious events -- you know, places where cultural mores haven't been shaped by 400-years-dead puritans.
And as far as I'm concerned, if Ms. Keel had any sense of humor about the situation, she'd have simply knocked the giant phallus over to make it limp rather than blasting it apart in a fit of Cotton Mather-like fervor.
One women's studies expert compared the snow-penis to other symbols of male dominance like the Washington Monument and nuclear missiles. Give me a break. I'm reminded of Cole Sear, Haley Joel Osment's character from The Sixth Sense. "I see penises!"
You can review the whole sordid story itself by visiting The Crimson's Web site and searching for "Snow Phallus" yourself.
The Wall Street Journal's Brian Carney has a good perspective. All the highfalutin academic gibberish, he asserts, has gotten in the way of what's really at issue here.
"But Ms. Keel doesn't need exotic concepts like 'gendered violence' and phallocentricity to justify what she did. Old-fashioned ones like decency will do just fine. The trouble is, by rejecting traditional mores as so much bourgeois conventionalism (to borrow a phrase), Ms. Keel has left herself impotent in the face of real obscenity."
While it's clear that the original sculpture was done in poor taste, it's interesting to note that the crew team itself isn't overly upset with Keel's knocking it down. One team member's reaction to the resulting brouhaha is that "smart kids tend to overanalyze things," which pretty much sums up the situation.
Comments
Only in America does one become a victim within the batting of an eye, this more or less depending on what the eye's recently had to view.
While the phallus may have been in poor or questionable taste, one had to admit it was detailed to the nth degree and someone had really spent some time getting it down. Couldn't it have counted as modern art? Would the reaction have been the same if it had been a photorealistic vagina of sorts?
In terms of what kind of threat this thing provided to the campus or what aura of male dominance it supposedly exuded, ice and snow eventually melt, if not shrivel and collapse whereas the larger structure is concerned. The Washington Monument and nuclear arsenals are designed not to.
You have to love America in which mob violence would have us tear apart whomever called us a culture of victims, then sue whatever parties we could for damage to our hands, nails and fragile psyches.
Posted by: Chris Barylick | March 6, 2003 08:24 AM
It's one of those really stupid things where a bunch of people did something incredibly childish which clearly illustrated to the world that they, like all of the most primitive cultures in the world, worship nothing more than a big hard dick (and like those primitive cultures, erected an idol). Then, the sour-mouthed harpy had to increase the significance and weight of the incident a thousand fold by proclaiming it to be a great symbol of evil, thus deifying the shlong just as the tossers who made it (she cast it as devil instead of god, but she unwittingly played right along).
Do people around Harvard University ever take their minds off of cocks long enough to actually do any studying?
Posted by: Corey | March 6, 2003 10:01 AM
I read the letters from the two women and am sympathetic to them. They were pissed off and rather than go whining to the authorities, they demolished the snow phallus with a shovel.
Good for them, I sez, and more power to them for not organizing a petition drive or a sit-in to get the job done.
BTW, gents, they seemed less concerned with what in a different time might have been considered a silly fraternity prank than they were with the threatening behavior directed at them by the morons who were cavorting around Mr. Dick.
Remember, we are talking about an Ivy League campus, where bad behavior gets a wrist slap - especially when the wrist is connected to someone who's connected. If you take my point.
Posted by: Capecoder | March 6, 2003 09:56 PM