2001 Conference
October
“McElvaine’s
speech was phenomenal! His wit and humor
made his audience laugh and helped us understand his message better.”
-
Kimiko Akita in Newsletter
of OSCLG,
Keynote Address
”ONLY WOMEN BLEED”
Insecure Masculinity, Language,
and
Civilization’s Discontents
Robert S. McElvaine
I
have here in my hand (or pocket) the weapon that can defeat Osama bin Laden and
Taliban – the one weapon that can strike terror in the hearts of the
terrorists.
It’s
a little item I picked up at Radio Shack.
They call it a “GENDER CHANGER.”
It’s really a SEX CHANGER, but some years ago the words sex and gender became intertwined and their meanings confused – and it
seems that it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s reluctance to say the word sex that started it all. That, however, is another story, one to which
I would return if time permitted, but it won
An
e-mail that circulated a week or so ago and which many of you may have seen
suggested that the solution to the bin Laden problem is to have him captured by
special forces, taken to a hospital at a secret location, and have a sex change
operation performed on him. Then she can be sent back to live as a woman
under the Taliban regime.
This would
certainly give new meaning to the concept of a "surgical strike."
We hear a
lot about how the problem with the men who rule
That
insecure masculinity is an important part of our religions should not be
surprising, because it is imbedded in almost all aspects of our culture –
including, most significantly, our language.
It is, I believe, a primary source of what Sigmund Freud referred to as
civilization’s discontents.
Freud was onto something in seeing sex at the base of our motivations and problems and civilization bringing on discontents, but I think he got the basis of the problem wrong. In fact, I think Alice Cooper was closer to the mark with his song title, “Only Women Bleed,” and some of that song’s lyrics, as I’ll explain in a minute.
One of the
main things on which I want to focus this evening is the power of metaphors to
shape and misshape behavior and history.
In the course of my talk, I’ll address the two metaphors that I believe have been the most powerful ones in
human history. To get at these
issues, let us turn back to the strange practices of the Taliban.
Why is it
that the Taliban insist on the complete separation of men and women? Why are women required to be fully veiled and
men required to have beards? Are such
attempts to make the sexes polar opposites something unique to the Islamic
tradition?
The last of
these questions is easily answered. The
insistence that the sexes are opposite is a phenomenon with which those of us
who have grown up in the Judeo-Christian tradition are very familiar. Indeed, it seems to be a common feature of most
cultures around the world.
Consider the Mosaic law’s declaration that “a woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 22:5), or St. Paul’s directive that women must be veiled because men are “the image and reflection of God; but woman is the refection of man” (Corinthians 11:7).
Then there is that wildly popular book with the absurd title, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. There seems to be some reason why people want to think of the sexes as totally different. The simplest explanation would be that the sexes are opposite.
But that is nonsense. There are important differences, on average, between the sexes – the once popular portion of the feminist catechism that said, “women and men are just the same except for different plumbing” is also wrong, although not quite so far wrong as the notion that women and men are from different planets. Differences between the sexes are not entirely cultural constructs. The key word in that sentence is entirely. It is culture that has constructed a massive edifice of polar opposition on the foundation of small average differences. The scientific evidence that there are genetic and hormone-based average differences in some behaviors and ways of thinking between the sexes has become so overwhelming in recent years that it can no longer be ignored. (The key word in that sentence is average.) Except in the obvious area of certain characteristics involved with reproduction and related functions, these differences are absolutely not absolute. (One of the key words in that sentence is except.) There are, as I see it, a series of continuums or spectrums for many different traits and characteristics, each with a male and female end. {SLIDE 1} On each of these, there will be more women toward the female end and more men toward the male end, but there is much overlap and the same individual might be more toward the female end in one characteristic and more toward the male end in another. Because of all this overlap, there is no justification for barring one sex from any particular occupation, but because of the average differences there is also no reason to expect that some occupations will be filled by equal numbers of men and women. (The key word in that sentence is some.)
The sexes are fundamentally similar, but not identical. Culture has magnified the differences that do exist (and conjured some other differences out of thin air). Women and men are not only from the same planet; we are members of the same species. Our genetic makeup is nearly identical. The actual degree of difference between the sexes would be better stated as: “MEN ARE FROM NEW YORK; WOMEN ARE FROM PHILADELPHIA.”
What many
men have attempted to do is deny the existence of
In
fact, though,
If
the differences between the sexes are relatively small, why has it been so
common for cultures to insist that the gender gap is as big as the
To find an answer, let’s turn back to the two thinkers I linked a few minutes ago, Sigmund Freud and Alice Cooper. Women were always mysterious to Freud, who called them “the dark Continent.” He was always plagued by the question “What do women want?” Although he never answered the question to his satisfaction, what he basically came up with was: “Women want a penis.”
Now I don’t think he was necessarily entirely wrong about this. The price of sexual division is that neither sex is complete and probably at some level most members of both sexes ask the question a credit card company used to: “Who says you can’t have it all?”
But Freud missed the bigger picture. The truth is that women can do almost everything that men can, albeit on average not as well in some areas. But women can do certain things that men simply cannot.
In 1926 psychoanalyst Karen Horney did to Freud what Engels had said Marx did to Hegel: found him standing on his head and set him upright. She argued that motherhood provides women with “a quite indisputable and by no means negligible physiological superiority.” When she began analyzing men after long experience analyzing women, Horney said, she got “a most surprising impression of the intensity of this envy of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, as well as of breasts and of the act of suckling.”
It is this
male inability to bear and nourish children that causes many men to feel
insecure. Because of this relative
incapacity, many men suffer, largely subconsciously, from what might be termed
“womb envy” and “breast envy.”
I have come
up with another way to put this underlying basis for male insecurity. I had made up the name for the disorder
before I realized that Alice Cooper had stated it succinctly in 1975. Although he didn’t mean quite the same thing,
the fundamental problem from which many men suffer is well stated as “Only
women bleed.”
I call the
psychological problem that this fact causes in many men THE NON-MENSTRUAL
SYNDROME.
Only women bleed
. . .
Down on your knees,
Beggin’ you, Please,
Come watch me bleed
. . .
Only women bleed
Only women bleed
Only women bleed
{GIVE
examples: circumcision at puberty, menstrual huts, couvade,
Sambia}
So, while making
the claim that women are “by nature” inferior, many men have actually harbored
a fear that women are, in certain respects, by nature superior. Such men seek to make women “by culture”
inferior and exclude them from certain roles:
In order to compensate for what men cannot do, they tell women that
they may not do other things.
Pregnancy,
birthing and nursing have always constituted a “no-man’s land.” In response to this circumstance, insecure
men have, throughout history and across cultures, set up a variety of
“no-woman’s lands”: war, politics, clergy, business, men’s clubs, and so
forth. On the institutions -- whether
located in a tree house or an exclusive skyscraper -- that they establish for
themselves, males put up signs, actual or implicit, with messages similar to
one in an old New York ale house: “McSorley’s, Where Men Are Men and Women Are Not Allowed.”
One of the best examples of the deep underlying reason for such exclusions is an American Catholic bishop’s revealing 1992 statement: “a woman priest is as impossible as for me to have a baby.” Exactly.
Gender Extending
Because they cannot compete with women’s capabilities in the crucial realms of reproduction and nourishing offspring, men generally seek to avoid a single standard of human behavior and achievement. The unstated fear of inferiority that many men have leads them to tend to exaggerate the difference between the sexes.
The less
similar “being a man” was made to seem to “being a woman,” the better the
prospects for men to feel that they were superior. This is why men have so
often been, not gender-benders, but gender-extenders. Men have generally sought to define male roles in terms
of opposition to what women do; “being a man” has usually been seen as being as
different as possible from “being a woman.”
What a woman is seemed clear; so what a man should be has most often
been seen as the opposite. Freud was on
the right track when he said that male identity is based on a boy’s separation
from his mother and identification with his father, but it is actually
motherhood itself (and hence “womanhood”), rather than their own mothers, that
threatens men, since motherhood is a power that they can never achieve. The “father” with which boys are called upon
to identify is a misconception of masculinity that is based on complete
opposition to femininity.
This
process greatly magnifies and intensifies the small genuine differences between
the sexes, often to the point where it transforms small divergences of degree
into huge disparities of kind, causing us to think in the very misleading terms
of “opposite sexes.”
Under this
way of thinking, woman is established
as the thesis and man is seen as its
antithesis: female is the standard,
and male is the negative of female:
{SLIDE 2}
From this
viewpoint, the name for man could be notawoman
or antiwoman.
Few people
like to think of themselves in negative terms, so if men could not compete with
women’s abilities in certain areas, they could establish opposing criteria,
under which they would be
superior. To make the negative notawoman positive, men had to turn woman into a negative. This would make man the negative of a negative, and so positive:
{SLIDE 3}
Men have in most cultures throughout most of history constructed a hyper-masculine ideal that rejects everything considered feminine and grossly exaggerates those characteristics that are in reality only somewhat more common in men than in women, turning the “macho” into the ultimate good and everything considered feminine into the definition of undesirable and inferior – particularly, of course, in men. Male initiation rites almost invariably teach boys “to value what is tough and to despise what is ‘feminine’ and tenderhearted.”
Probably
the most tragic consequence of the notawoman definition of manhood is that,
since womanliness is understood in terms of the capacity to give life,
manliness has often come to be seen as the capacity to give death – a
willingness to kill or be killed. If woman is defined as the “giver of life,”
seeing man as its antonym makes the
word mean “taker of life.” This
definition of being a man comes down (usually not consciously) to something
like: We may not be able to create life;
but surely we can risk and destroy it.
The definition of man in opposition to woman may not be universal, but it is evident in all parts of the world. Among the Ibo of Nigeria, for example, the word agbala means “woman,” but is also used to designate a man who has taken no titles – that is, one who has not proved his manhood by such a feat as bringing home the head of an enemy. This sort of “proof” of manhood makes clear its association with taking life.
The
Non-Menstrual Syndrome is intertwined with the woman/life, man/death dichotomy
of the notawoman conception of true manhood.
Menstrual blood shed from women’s bodies is a sign of their ability to
give life. In taking life, through
hunting or war, men shed blood of other animals or people (not infrequently
including their own), thus producing an apparent symmetry that confirms the
putative opposition in function between the sexes and, perhaps, eases the
effects of NMS. The “red badge of
courage” that young males have traditionally sought to attain by shedding blood
in battle with other animals or humans[i]
is their artificial substitute for the “red badge of womanhood” that young
females attain naturally through the onset of menstruation. “We didn’t say to ourselves,” Phillip Caputo
recalled of his group of Marines’ first firefight in
The
title of the Rambo movies is intriguing in this regard. First
Blood seems to be a reference to the onset of menstruation. But in
Another unfortunate result of men’s attempt to turn their deficiency into something positive was to define maternity as a handicap. Karen Horney pointed out how this “sour grapes” (or should we say “sour eggs” and “sour milk”?) attitude towards motherhood is expressed in male argument: “in reality women do simply desire the penis; when all is said and done motherhood is only a burden . . . and men may be glad that they do not have to bear it.”
This argument was given religious sanction in the Book of Genesis. {SLIDE 4 - Birth of Eve} First, an attempt to reverse womb envy is made by the assertion that the first woman was born by way of a caesarean section performed by a male God on a man. Just how important this story has been in the subordination of women throughout most of history is evident in the fact that the word woman means “out of man.” Even though every man and woman we have ever seen was in fact born “out of woman” the word we use to designate women is based on the literally incredible story of a man giving birth to a woman.
(AN ASIDE: Many people in recent years have complained about what they sometimes call “feminist Newspeak,” which they say distorts the meaning of words. What they fail to realize is that very long ago there emerged what was then a “masculinist Newspeak,” but now is the very Oldspeak that is considered proper language. The word woman is a prime example of the ancient masculinist Newspeak.)
Then, womb envy is stood on its head in Chapter 3, when the blessing of the power to give birth is redefined as a curse. God tells the woman that her punishment for the sin of eating from the Tree of Knowledge is that he “will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.” The Fall of Man has been transmuted into the Fall of Woman.
While the fear of male biological inferiority and the resulting tendency to insist that the sexes are “opposite” is the essential starting point for exploring the ways in which women have been subordinated and what the wider consequences of that subordination have been, it is just the beginning. This factor has always been present, although the degree of its impact has varied as other circumstances have changed. It is in those changing circumstances -- history -- that we must seek more complete answers to questions about why, how, and when females were subordinated and how sex has shaped history.
I begin my
new book, Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes,
and the Course of History, with what I believe is
the best one-sentence summary of history:
Hell hath
no fury like a man devalued.
It is my thesis that the most important events in the shaping of human history occurred before the point at which we in the historical profession have usually begun our stories.
The critical development in
so-called prehistory was the invention of agriculture.
Roots
EXPLAIN
women inventing ag – reasons
for believing this:
Only
reason for thinking men did is that it has been the basic axiom of history that
men did everything important, so they must have done this, too,
Women
were gatherers
In
horticulture societies studied in modern times, women do the farming
Ancient
myths
Story
of Adam & Eve as an allegory for women inventing ag.
CHANGES IN
ROLES OF BOTH SEXES AS A RESULT:
Women decline as producers, become
much more fulltime reproducers.
Men’s traditional roles were
devalued – hunting of no importance, protection
against predator animals less needed.
The Seed Metaphor
But how is it that men could claim that they are the ones with the power of procreation? Surely most people in prehistory saw creative power as something that was essentially female.
For the answer we need to look at one of the most momentous consequences of the development of agriculture. When men eventually took up the “woman’s work” of farming and began to use the plow, an irresistible metaphor arose – one that seems so obvious that it appears to have developed independently wherever plow agriculture was practiced. This metaphor has been a major basis for male power and domination throughout recorded history.
The belief that a seed planted in the furrowed soil is analogous to a man planting a seed in the furrowed vulva of a woman totally reversed the view of which sex has procreative power.
Men were elevated from the bystanders in reproduction to the all-powerful creators
Women were reduced from the all-powerful creators to the soil in which men plant their
seeds. Or, to put it less politely, women were reclassified as dirt.
Women still had all the work of reproduction, but men now took all the credit.
Once again,
Alice Cooper points to the most important result:
Man got his
woman to take his seed
He got the
power, oh – oh, she’s got the need.
. . .
Only women bleed
Author-ity
It is the belief that males hold exclusive procreative power that has given them much of the social power throughout history. And this is directly reflected in language. As with the monumental importance of the word woman being based on the reverse of the truth, another very common and extremely important word is based on the misconception about conception that grew from the seed metaphor. I refer to the word authority. What gives men authority? Think of the root of the word: author. It is the false assumption that males are the authors or creators of new life that has provided one of the most important bases of male authority.
We must take the story one step farther. The belief in male procreative power inevitably led in turn to the conclusion that the supreme Creative Power must also be male. The combination of the belief that God is male with the notion that humans are created in God’s image yielded the inescapable inference that men are closer than women to godly perfection. The belief, given its classic expressions by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Freud, that women are deformed or “incomplete” men followed logically. There is no telling how much evil throughout history might have been averted or eased had the growth of this vine of thinking somehow been nipped in the bud.
It
wasn
Verbal
Mounting
Let me focus in the time remaining on one other aspect of how the belief that males are superior is reflected in language.
Fuck you!
This may
not be a line well designed to win over an audience, but this brief sentence
that has in recent years become one of the most common expressions in the
English language has much deeper meanings than most people recognize. An exploration of what this and similar
profane epithets actually signify can open new vistas on some common male
behaviors and the motivations behind them.
What does it really mean when one man does this {SLIDE 5 - Finger 1} to another, or says the verbal equivalent?
An inquiry
into the meaning of Fuck you! might begin with a diagramming of the sentence. When we attempt to do so, two significant
facts that are easily overlooked become apparent:
| fuck | you
|
The first important point is that fuck is a transitive verb. It takes a direct object, and the identity of
that object matters a great deal.
Consider,
for instance, the object of the verb in the following declaration on the men’s
room wall in a Fellini’s restaurant in
FUCK THE MAN
Is there any difference in the
meaning of this verb when its object is a man from what it means when its
object is a woman?
Even more
significant is the other point about this vulgar sentence that becomes evident
when it is diagrammed: there seems to be no subject. Yet the question of who is doing the fucking
is at least as important as that of whom is being
fucked. We all recall from our grade
school days sentences in which the subject is an understood, but unstated, you, such as:
(You)| sit | down
|
But, while an understood you is the
subject of a sentence such as Go fuck
yourself, it would make little sense for you to be the understood subject of the sentence I addressed to you
a moment ago, because it would then read: You
fuck you! In fact, the only possible
(mis)understood subject of this sentence is I:
(I) | fuck | you
|
This realization -- particularly when it is combined with a man as the object of the verb -- leads to some remarkable implications.
“Sissy, Wimp, . . . “
A few years ago, I saw this manly advice on a bumpersticker on a pickup truck:
DON
Given the
general acceptance of the negative, notawoman definition of what it means to be
a man, nothing is more threatening to a man’s self-image than to suggest that
he is acting like a woman. The slurs
begin in boyhood with that stinging rebuke, You throw like a girl, and range from
the relatively mild sissy, through wimp, to the vulgar pussy
and cunt. The last two leave no doubt as to what is
being suggested about the male against whom the taunt is used: that he is not a
man at all; that he lacks the sexual equipment that differentiates males from
females and has been thought throughout recorded history, from before Aristotle
to after Freud, to be the basis of male superiority. Recall that such a deficiency was considered
to be literally damning in Mosaic law: “He whose
testicles are crushed or whose male member is cut off shall not enter the
assembly of the Lord.” The same point is
made more directly today when one male says another is “dickless”
or “lacking in balls.”
Having “big
balls” has long been a metaphor for power and dominance. Witness the adoption of the word cojones into
English, as a means of asserting one’s putative masculinity. Such language and the use of the profane
words for female sexual organs to denigrate men have become very common. It all comes down a simple formula based on
male wishful thinking and envy of female powers: male genital organs = power;
female genital organs = weakness.
Sexual
metaphors have been used throughout human history as a means of asserting
dominance. As we shall see in a moment,
the practice goes far beyond physical metaphors such as that just
described. These metaphors are all
unmistakably based on the notawoman conception of manhood. Collectively, the various permutations of male-is-superior-to-female
symbolism constitute the Master metaphor of human history,
the one that has been used as the basis of and model for all relations of
dominance and subservience among people.
Essentially, they all say: Whatever
is designated as male is superior to anything that is designated as female. Or, more simply, male = master; female =
subordinate.
During the
legal battle over the sexual integration of the Citadel, a remarkable statement
on the prevalence of this metaphor was given in the testimony of the military
college’s top-ranked scholar from the class of 1991. Asked how many times he had heard “the word
‘woman’ used as a way of tearing a cadet down,” he replied that “it was an everyday part,
every-minute, every-hour part of life” on the South Carolina campus. But he said that woman was not the term that cadets used when they wanted to
denigrate a fellow male student by indicating that he was like a female. “[T]he large majority of the terms you were
called were gutter slang for women. And
it goes all the way down to the genitalia, and that’s where the criticism
was.” He made plain that this practice
is a direct manifestation of what I have termed the notawoman definition of
manhood: “And the point was, if you are not doing what you’re supposed to do,
you are not a man, you are a woman, and that is the way you are disciplined in
the barracks every day, every hour.”
“They called you a ‘pussy’ all the time,” another former student said,
or “a fucking little girl.” Virtually
every taunt upperclassmen used against a freshman
“equated him with a woman,” still another former cadet said. One such insult he remembered seems
particularly significant in light of the arguments I have been making tonight:
“Bryant, are you menstruating this month?”
(Bobby Knight, the famed basketball
coach, uses the same symbolism. When he
wants to shame his players, Knight “puts sanitary napkins in the[ir] lockers)
Pseudosexing
The ultimate sources of the metaphor must be sought deep in our past: beyond what is usually called “history” – in fact, back beyond what is generally thought of as human “pre-history.” The origins of the master metaphor predate the evolution of Homo sapiens; indeed, they predate the emergence of hominids.
{SLIDE 6 - Rams mounting} What is going on in this photograph?
The idea that other animals use metaphorical behavior may be surprising, but it is plain that this is what is going on when a dominant male among several primate species, such as macaques, and a number of other mammals, mounts a subordinated male and simulates intercourse with him. The former is, in effect, “saying” to the latter: I am so dominant over you that I can treat you like a female. Such male animals apparently have some concept of “male-hood” in terms of being “notafemale.”
Such
symbolic mounting is an unexplored but highly significant aspect of human male
behavior. It is, obviously, a means of
asserting a vertical distinction between individuals; it provides an answer to
the question: Who’s on top? Accordingly, it is similar to another
practice we use to categorize people.
One
of the more consequential human tendencies that we have explored in these pages
is that toward pseudospeciation: falsely treating another member of our species
as if he or she were a member of a different species. It is this capacity that allows us to turn
off our natural identification with other members of our species and so be able
to kill them. Its power and consequences
have been very evident in recent years in a variety of locales, from the
Balkans to
The Master
metaphor is based on a similar, but generally unnoticed, process that can
usefully be termed pseudosexing -- falsely treating another member of the same sex
as if he were a member of the other sex.
This is what men do when they subordinate other men by symbolically
treating them as women. This tendency
may be as important a factor in war and other forms of violence between humans
as pseudospeciation so clearly is. The
reason for pseudosexing is the same as that for pseudospeciation: to “otherize,”to dichotomize, to distinguish in a dualistic
manner of “us” and “them,” so that dominance or hierarchy can be
established. Sometimes the human
practice of pseudosexing is as direct and literal as it is among some animal
species.
The Physical Mounting Metaphor
Many of you, I imagine, are saying to yourselves at this point, “I don’t recall ever seeing a man mount another man and simulate intercourse in order to show the dominance of the first over the second.” Indeed it is not a common occurrence, but in certain specialized realms it does happen. {SLIDE 7 - Wrestling} There are, for example, some practices in sports that bear a striking resemblance to mounting as a means of showing dominance: a wrestler pinning an opponent beneath him and, in American football, the practice of “piling on” a tackled opponent.
A more
direct form of mounting of subordinated men takes place commonly in prisons. In this male subculture, “respect is given to
one who can control the life of another.”
In male prisons, those who dominate are defined as males and those who
surrender are reclassified as females (girls, non-men). In prison,
“the supreme act of humiliation is to be reduced to the status of a woman.” Through the act of mounting subordinated
males, men in prison are proclaiming their superior “manhood.”
In
1997, five
If the
actual physical mounting of one man by another is not a common sight in the
wider world outside prison walls, police stations, and military schools that is
because the capacity for language has given humans a much wider range of
symbols and metaphors than is available to other primates. Human males do not have to act out symbolic
(or, in prison, actual) intercourse in order to pseudosex other men and
indicate that they are dominant over them, as they assume themselves to be over
females. Humans can use words in place of (or, sometimes, in
conjunction with) actions to symbolize precisely the same thing that the
ceremonial mounting by a dominant male macaque of a subordinate male macaque
(or the actual penetration of a subordinated prisoner by a dominant one) does.
And we do use words for this purpose. Sometimes it is obvious. Former world heavyweight boxing champion Mike
Tyson used to taunt an opponent before a bout by saying to him: “I
Making Hate
Fucking should not be confused with making love. The former is not a “verb associated with sexual pleasure” if sexual pleasure is
taken to involve affection; it is a verb associated with domination,
subordination and sexual violence.
Fuck you! actually
holds a meaning in direct opposition to I
want to make love to you. Fuck you! could
accurately be rephrased as: I
The symbolic
link of which this language is but a variant is older than the human
species. It is a linguistic equivalent
of ceremonial mounting.
Verbal mounting is an accurate way to describe the
language men use to express domination and subordination.
One man
saying Fuck you! to
another no more means that the speaker actually desires to have sexual
relations with the man at whom the words are directed than ceremonial mounting
by a dominant male in another species does.
What it does mean is something like: I am sufficiently dominant over
you that I can symbolically treat you as if you were a woman.
It means I am a real man (notawoman); you’re not. It
becomes a statement of logic: I am to you as man is to woman. We (men) all know that man is superior to
woman. Therefore I am superior.
Putting a Man Down
Exactly the
same pseudosexing message is at the base of virtually all of our language of
domination and subordination. “Fighting
words” are verbal mounting. Almost every expression
that men employ to “put down” other men amounts to “putting them down” --
treating them as women. Some
words that have become very common means for one man to taunt another are
especially direct in this regard. As I
have already pointed out, there can be little doubt about the implication of
calling a man a pussy or a cunt.
But consider the following examples:
Stick it up
your ass;
I really
stuck it to him;
Sit on it;
Rotate on
it;
Up yours;
You suck.
To say that
something or someone “sucks” has
become a very common expression in the last decade. What it means is that the person or thing
being so castigated is being linked with those who perform fellatio and have
been classified as inferior: women or homosexual men.
Why, other
than the mounting metaphor, would a man who seeks to dominate others be
referred to as a prick or a shmuck? Such a man is alternatively classified as a
real pain in the ass. To see how
this familiar expression is another instance of verbal mounting, think about
what might be causing a pain in that part of the anatomy. (Such a pain in the ass is likely to call a
man he is degrading an asshole.) And what image but that of symbolic mounting
is created by the man who has the misfortune of having such a domineering man
as his boss and complains to friends or family that the boss was really riding my ass
today? Other ways to put the
same complaint would be: He really
screwed me, He was really on me today,
He stiffed me, or He gave
me the shaft.
Ours is not
an age given to subtlety, and any doubt as to the meaning of verbal mounting
disappears in another, increasingly common expression for having been “screwed”
by someone: “He fucked me -- up the ass!”
If one man
gets carried away in “putting down” another, his colleagues are likely to urge
that he lay off of him. The
implication is that when one man is dominating another he is “laying” (on) him,
treating him like a woman, simulating intercourse. The suggestion that there is a time to “lay off” also fits this analysis, since it is usually said
after the subordinated male has given a sign of submission. Other male animals often give such a sign by
assuming a position like a female “presenting” or offering herself
for mating. This is what is meant when
we say someone, such as a politician, has “rolled over” for someone else, such
as a lobbyist or a special interest group, as in this 1999 example: “Then no
harm will befall [Texas Governor George W.] Bush for rolling over for the gun
lobby.” To “roll over for” is to assume
a female position and present oneself to be penetrated a male to whom one has
been subordinated.
And,
speaking of assuming positions, what does it mean when a policeman or another
man in a position of authority commands someone to assume the position? Assuming
the position is precisely what subordinated male animals do when they
present themselves to the dominant male to be symbolically mounted. The implications of being in a position of authority or dominance
should be clear. It means to be in a
position on top. Those who are in positions of command are
usually concerned about “staying on top.”
As a television commercial for Chevrolet trucks put it: “They say the one on top has all the
power.”
* * *
{SLIDE 8 – The Finger}
When the phenomenon of verbal mounting is comprehended, it
becomes apparent that what is unstated in the simple sentence Fuck you! is far
more than the understood subject, I. What the expression actually means is
something like:
(I see my
position relative to yours as being such that you are like a woman and I am a
man, so I could) fuck you (if I had any desire to do so)!
CLOSE
I hope I
have been able to show you a few examples of how our language was molded by
masculine insecurities and the “notawoman” definition of manhood and “prehistoric”
events that devalued what men had traditionally done – and how that language in
turn perpetuates the ideas of male superiority on which I was founded.
At its base, I think it is fair to say, all of these
problems stem from the insecurities many men have felt because “only women
bleed.”