emmanuel reynaud holy virility the social construction of masculinity

[The daddy and the rapist / 77]
Art offers some men the opportunity of moulding their feminine
archetypes while providing other men with the necessary
images to nourish their own fantasies. Sculpture and painting
have traditionally provided a fertile terrain for the expression of
dreams of the 'ideal woman' (and sometimes of nightmares of
'repugnant woman'). Museums are so cluttered with examples
that there is no need to go into detail here, classical statues can,
however, be mentioned, since they still preserve their role as an
aesthetic reference, even though they have been amputated, in
part or altogether. Heads, arms or legs are missing ―as if as
long as the breasts and hips are there, the rest of the woman is
irrelevant. Many painters, sculptors and photographers do not
always wait for time to take its toll, they simply eliminate the
parts of woman's body they themselves consider superfluous:
thus the vagina and breasts are often isolated, as if their
presence alone were enough to satisfy the creator and the
spectator.
In literature and the cinema, man has even more opportunity to
give free rein to his fantasies; he is not restricted to reproducing
fixed attitudes, and he can precisely describe the behaviour he
expects from a 'woman'. Women have a rough time of it, page
after page, image after image, and the story is always near
enough the same; after all conceivable adventures throughout
literature and the cinema, the destiny of women is invariably
death or submission, rape, prostitution or marriage.
In art, man expresses his dreams of appropriating women as
well as appropriating the women of his dreams; and he achieves
both in real life relationships with women all the better for
having created standards of beauty and behaviour. The artistic
approach reflects on all men who benefit from the social impact
of prescriptive images of 'woman' in the realisation of their
fantasies and the safeguarding of their interests. And the artist
is not alone in proposing female models. From the height of his
rostrum, the social scientist is also adept at providing canons:
conscientiously he reproduces the concept 'woman' and brings
it into line with his recent findings.
[78 / Holy virility]
This activity, which consists of providing at the same time a
basis and scientific justification for the appropriation of women
and for the division of human beings into sexes, went on
relatively unhampered until recently. Man could discuss at
leisure whether or not woman had a soul, claim that the division
of labour between the sexes was natural, or calmly elaborate
theories on female sexuality. But since the end of the sixties,
things have changed somewhat; the thinkers of the man class
have had their patch trodden on by feminist theoreticians. In
most cases they react with sarcasm, censorship or irony to this
danger which threatens their authority, not only in their
laboratories, but also in their dining rooms and beds.