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

of the lost gravity of the a c t . . . ” 9 Mailer here is not lamenting theadvent of female-controlled contraception, though he does lamentit; he is mourning Semmelweis’s discovery of the cause of theepidemics of puerperal fever that killed masses of childbearingwomen, including Mary Wollstonecraft.T he obsessive belief that the penis/sperm, once lodged inthe woman, is a male fetus, together with the erotic dimensionof the penis/sperm as agent of female death, accounts in large partfor the continuing male commitment to forced female pregnancy.T he vagina/womb, as Erik Erikson articulated, is perceived by themale as em pty space that must be filled by a penis or a child (maleuntil proven otherwise, in which case devalued), which is the penisrealized— or the woman herself is em pty, that is, a nonentity,worthless.Force—the violence of the male confirming his masculinity— isseen as the essential purpose of the penis, its animating principle asit were, just as sperm ideally impregnates the woman either withoutreference to or against her will. T he penis must embody theviolence of the male in order for him to be male. Violence is male;the male is the penis; violence is the penis or the sperm ejaculatedfrom it. W hat the penis can do it must do forcibly for a man to be aman. T he reduction of human erotic potential to “sex, ” defined asthe force of the penis visited on an unwilling woman, is thegoverning sexual scenario in male-supremacist society. HavelockEllis, considered a feminist by scholars in the male tradition, seesthe penis as properly and intrinsically suggesting a whip and thewhip as a logical and inevitable expression of the penis:We must regard the whip as a natural symbol for the penis.One of the most frequent ways in which the idea of coitus firstfaintly glimmers before an infantile mind—and it is a glimmerwhich, from an evolutionary standpoint, is biologically correct—is as a display of force, of aggression, of somethingresembling cruelty. W hipping is the most obvious form inwhich to the young mind this idea might be embodied. T hepenis is the only organ of the body which in any degreeresembles a w hip. 10