Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by: Andrea ... - Feminish

penis signifies humanity. Though this reductio ad absurdum is thecentral male reality in psyche and in culture, male reductionism ismore absurdly expressed when men go one step further and reducethe penis itself to sperm en masse, or to the one divinely inspiredsperm that manages to fertilize an egg. Always in the vanguard, R.D. Laing, in his 1976 book The Facts of Life, expressed this samemale reductionism in an even more bizarre way: “One could remainin love with one’s placenta the rest of one’s life. ” 7 Laing expressesboth grief and rage over the loss of his (sic) placenta, * but thisanguish has not yet managed to surpass in cultural significance thesorrow of those who, from the castigators of Onan on, mourn lostsperm. In Eumenidesy Aeschylus insisted that all life originates insperm, that the male is the sole source of life and that therefore thesole power over life resides properly with him. The linguisticantecedents of the word penis include, in Old English and Old HighGerman, the meanings “offspring” and “fetus. ” In the last severalcenturies nothing has modified the male compulsion to keepreducing life to fragments of male physiology; then to make thefragments magical, sources of both power and menace. Thedimension of menace is especially important in enabling men tovalue bits and pieces of themselves. Sperm, for instance, is seen asan agent of death, the woman’s death, even when it is viewed as theoriginator of life, male life. Childbearing is glorified in part becausewomen die from it. As Martin Luther put it: “If a woman growsweary and at last dies from childbearing, it matters hot. Let heronly die from bearing; she is there to do it. ”8 O ur own belovedNorman Mailer, in The Prisoner of Sex, contemplated that “womenhad begun to withdraw respect from men about the time pregnancylost its danger. . . If [death] had once been a possibility real enoughfor them to look at their mate with eyes of love or eyes of hate butknow their man might yet be the agent of their death, conceive then* Antiabortion activists are energetically attempting to forge a medicaldefinition of the placenta as belonging to the fetus, not the mother; and awhole host of male-created therapies that explore trauma before birth givethe fetus a male social identity with its implicit male social suffering, malesocial alienation, and male social privilege.