GUN AND PENISES
(http://www.salonmag.com/people/col/pagl/1999/05/12/penises/index.html)
American society's problem isn't firearms -- it's the sexually dysfunctional men and women who abuse them.
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ASK CAMILLE | BY CAMILLE PAGLIA
May 12, 1999 | Dear Camille:
Reading and listening to "experts" discussing the killings at Columbine High School in Colorado, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the practice of circumcision in American society is as good a culprit for the massacre as anything raised by those talking heads.
There is a man named William Pollack from Harvard who sells books around the country (my sis-in-law paid $20 to hear him lecture in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago) who claims that violence, rebelliousness and depression among boys are due to misguided societal expectations about maleness, which start when the child enters his fourth year. Clearly the good doctor should look into the misguided practice of genital mutilation on much younger boys -- but not one word in his 400-page book is dedicated to that traumatic experience shared by more than 100 million American men.
Very pragmatically (and without entering into the very pertinent but complex issue of psychological harm) I would suggest that circumcision interferes, in some cases fatally, with the wonderful discovery of self-manipulation and pleasuring that constitutes masturbation during puberty. Children who should be ecstatically sliding their foreskins back and forth until climax four or five times a day are instead building bombs and planning the murder of other equally obnoxious and damaged kids.
One harvests what one sows, or however that saying goes in good English.
Ari Zighelboim
New Orleans
Dear Mr. Zighelboim:
Applause for your bold switch of subject back to sex in the clamorous Columbine post-mortem. The Northeastern major media, with their urban liberal animus against guns, have managed to completely censor out the subliminal sexual psychodrama in the bloody Columbine saga. Only Matt Drudge and Salon, immediately after the incident, dared to report on still-uncorroborated gay rumors snaking through the Denver grapevine. And the National Enquirer, which broke every piety in its flashy documentation of the risk-taking lifestyle of both Nicole and O.J. Simpson, headlined its May 11 cover story about the Columbine conspirators, "Gay Secret That Made Them Kill" -- a reference to taunts from girl students about the boys' twin-like bond.
While this column has indeed raised questions about the ethics of compulsory infant circumcision, I'm not sure I'm convinced that circumcision produced the atrocities at Columbine. But the symbolic attraction of guns for sexually frustrated young men needs to be explored. It's obvious that the gun as devastating phallic tool gives any average dork the predictably perfect, mind-blowing ejaculations not vouchsafed by wrinkly Weak Willy, who rears his pointy head or cowers lumpishly at the worst possible moments. Eric Harris, the main brain in the Columbine affair, had a fetish for shotguns and waxed rhapsodic in classroom compositions about both the barrel and the shell.
"This is my rifle; this is my gun. One is for shooting; the other's for fun!" In a comic World War II memoir that I stumbled on as an adolescent, a clumsy infantryman had to shout this mantra as he stood at attention, one hand gripping his rifle and the other his penis. We didn't really need great Freud to tell us about phallic symbols: The identification of guns with explosive male sexuality is already implicit in Emily Dickinson's extraordinary poem, "My Life had stood a Loaded Gun," in which the spinster muse transsexually reinvents herself as a bedroom blunderbuss with a killer "Yellow Eye."
Arguing in my first book that the Western paradigm of thought as aggressive projection and penetration would end up in cinema as the arrowlike light beam of the darkened movie theater, I pointed out that while the Chinese may have invented gunpowder, they used it only for fireworks and never developed the lethal lobbing tube of the European cannon and musket. As a tomboy whose Amazonian craze was always for swords and spears, I've never felt the allure of guns, but I think I understand their hypnotic high-tech beauty -- their well-oiled intricacy; cool, smooth skin; and startlingly dense, compact heft, which gives the owner so exhilarating a sense of coiled power.
While guns aren't my thing, I would vigorously defend the Second Amendment right of mentally competent adults to own and collect weapons without harassment by the government. Multiplying gun laws isn't the answer, since law-abiding citizens are never the problem. Loopholes do need to be plugged: It was too easy for a ditsy teenage girl to buy guns for her manipulative Columbine pals. But in the long run, it's cultural norms that need to be strengthened at home and school, where ethical reasoning about all types of behavior must be taught.
How rare it still is in this nation of sharpshooter Annie Oakley (one of my feisty patron saints) to find women gravitating toward or publicly endorsing guns, despite the National Rifle Association's ad campaign featuring female members. Valerie Solanas, who cut down Andy Warhol, and Squeaky Fromme, who took a shot at President Gerald Ford, remain freaks. I had an unsettling brush with a female mass murderer in 1985, shortly after I moved to suburban Philadelphia, when a 25-year-old ex-mental patient in guerrilla gear stormed into a nearby shopping mall with a semiautomatic rifle and managed to wound eight people and kill two. Luckily, the gods of shopping had sent me to our other major mall that afternoon, but I passed the shocking array of police cars and ambulances as I drove home.
The gun as mutant penis: Men or women who abuse guns are equally sexually dysfunctional. The first question that popped into my mind about the Columbine killers was, "What was their sex life like?" It's very difficult to be a man in today's post-industrial culture, with its bland service-sector jobs and endless paper-shuffling deskwork. All you have before you is eternal tethering -- to parents, teachers, boss, wife. There's little room for genuine masculine adventure and achievement. And there are few men to admire -- which is why violent video games and action-adventure films have been thriving.
You males whose courage, energy and ingenuity turned the global wilderness into civilization (and allowed women to emerge from the servitude of reproductive biology to become self-determining individuals) are not honored by the clichéd ideologies of our time. From feminism to therapy, the ruling premise is the Sensitive Male, as talky as a woman as he gets in touch with his banal feelings. Natural, robust, assertive masculinity is defined as a disease from which society must be cured.
You tartly cite Harvard psychoanalyst William Pollack, whose bestselling book, "Real Boys," has been tirelessly promoted by Oprah Winfrey in her ever-lengthening chain of white male gurus and black earth mothers. I know from the testimony of friends that Pollack is a superb therapist. But I'm afraid I must agree with your skepticism about his approach to current social issues. His bookish milieu has little understanding of either athletics or war -- which are crucial to any historical analysis of masculinity.
Specifically, I reject Pollack's position that mothers shouldn't push growing boys away and discourage displays of weakness, fear and tears. Everywhere, I see the opposite problem: white, upper-middle-class mothers clinging too much to their whiny sons and turning them into companion daughters or substitute spouses. Boys are not girls: the mocking epithets "sissy " (i.e., "sister") and "mollycoddle" do describe something real -- a stalling in the evolution of masculine identity, which requires boys to leave the maternal nest and make their way as independent adults.
Perhaps because of his background, Pollack overestimates the power of words in most men's lives. His program privileges female values and simply cuts boys down to pliable ciphers in a family matriarchy. It's actually a perfect recipe for producing obedient office-workers, happy eunuchs in the corporate food chain.
The weakest part of Pollack's book may be its velvet-glove treatment of homosexuality and its striking credulity about the gay gene -- for which there never has been solid evidence. From long observation, I conclude that blurred borderlines between mother and son are a primary factor in male homosexuality -- which every honest observer should admit is slowly increasing in the Western world. As a civil libertarian, I firmly believe in sexual freedom of choice; but as a scholar, I look for causation and historical context.
The Columbine guns were stupidly phallic protests -- cruel, abortive, self-destructive acts by bourgeois screw-ups who hated their meaningless lives, namby-pamby school and indulgent, affluent parents and who should long ago have been kicked out on their asses to fend for themselves and learn a few things about life. It's time to end the high-school stockyard tyranny. Let the puberty brats go at 14, and throw open the educational doors to returning adults. Classroom segregation by age has produced a toxic testosterone cocktail that's blowing this culture to smithereens.
But it's not guns at home I fear: It's guns abroad, escalating into nuclear war. Whatever the mad bombers of NATO think they're winning in the Yugoslav fiasco, they've predictably destabilized world politics. Our ham-handed president, Bill Clinton, and his increasingly fey buddy, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, were henpecked into war by a sullen virago, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who would have flunked out of the Margaret Thatcher school of military science.
(http://www.salonmag.com/people/col/pagl/1999/05/12/penises/index.html)
American society's problem isn't firearms -- it's the sexually dysfunctional men and women who abuse them.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
ASK CAMILLE | BY CAMILLE PAGLIA
May 12, 1999 | Dear Camille:
Reading and listening to "experts" discussing the killings at Columbine High School in Colorado, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the practice of circumcision in American society is as good a culprit for the massacre as anything raised by those talking heads.
There is a man named William Pollack from Harvard who sells books around the country (my sis-in-law paid $20 to hear him lecture in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago) who claims that violence, rebelliousness and depression among boys are due to misguided societal expectations about maleness, which start when the child enters his fourth year. Clearly the good doctor should look into the misguided practice of genital mutilation on much younger boys -- but not one word in his 400-page book is dedicated to that traumatic experience shared by more than 100 million American men.
Very pragmatically (and without entering into the very pertinent but complex issue of psychological harm) I would suggest that circumcision interferes, in some cases fatally, with the wonderful discovery of self-manipulation and pleasuring that constitutes masturbation during puberty. Children who should be ecstatically sliding their foreskins back and forth until climax four or five times a day are instead building bombs and planning the murder of other equally obnoxious and damaged kids.
One harvests what one sows, or however that saying goes in good English.
Ari Zighelboim
New Orleans
Dear Mr. Zighelboim:
Applause for your bold switch of subject back to sex in the clamorous Columbine post-mortem. The Northeastern major media, with their urban liberal animus against guns, have managed to completely censor out the subliminal sexual psychodrama in the bloody Columbine saga. Only Matt Drudge and Salon, immediately after the incident, dared to report on still-uncorroborated gay rumors snaking through the Denver grapevine. And the National Enquirer, which broke every piety in its flashy documentation of the risk-taking lifestyle of both Nicole and O.J. Simpson, headlined its May 11 cover story about the Columbine conspirators, "Gay Secret That Made Them Kill" -- a reference to taunts from girl students about the boys' twin-like bond.
While this column has indeed raised questions about the ethics of compulsory infant circumcision, I'm not sure I'm convinced that circumcision produced the atrocities at Columbine. But the symbolic attraction of guns for sexually frustrated young men needs to be explored. It's obvious that the gun as devastating phallic tool gives any average dork the predictably perfect, mind-blowing ejaculations not vouchsafed by wrinkly Weak Willy, who rears his pointy head or cowers lumpishly at the worst possible moments. Eric Harris, the main brain in the Columbine affair, had a fetish for shotguns and waxed rhapsodic in classroom compositions about both the barrel and the shell.
"This is my rifle; this is my gun. One is for shooting; the other's for fun!" In a comic World War II memoir that I stumbled on as an adolescent, a clumsy infantryman had to shout this mantra as he stood at attention, one hand gripping his rifle and the other his penis. We didn't really need great Freud to tell us about phallic symbols: The identification of guns with explosive male sexuality is already implicit in Emily Dickinson's extraordinary poem, "My Life had stood a Loaded Gun," in which the spinster muse transsexually reinvents herself as a bedroom blunderbuss with a killer "Yellow Eye."
Arguing in my first book that the Western paradigm of thought as aggressive projection and penetration would end up in cinema as the arrowlike light beam of the darkened movie theater, I pointed out that while the Chinese may have invented gunpowder, they used it only for fireworks and never developed the lethal lobbing tube of the European cannon and musket. As a tomboy whose Amazonian craze was always for swords and spears, I've never felt the allure of guns, but I think I understand their hypnotic high-tech beauty -- their well-oiled intricacy; cool, smooth skin; and startlingly dense, compact heft, which gives the owner so exhilarating a sense of coiled power.
While guns aren't my thing, I would vigorously defend the Second Amendment right of mentally competent adults to own and collect weapons without harassment by the government. Multiplying gun laws isn't the answer, since law-abiding citizens are never the problem. Loopholes do need to be plugged: It was too easy for a ditsy teenage girl to buy guns for her manipulative Columbine pals. But in the long run, it's cultural norms that need to be strengthened at home and school, where ethical reasoning about all types of behavior must be taught.
How rare it still is in this nation of sharpshooter Annie Oakley (one of my feisty patron saints) to find women gravitating toward or publicly endorsing guns, despite the National Rifle Association's ad campaign featuring female members. Valerie Solanas, who cut down Andy Warhol, and Squeaky Fromme, who took a shot at President Gerald Ford, remain freaks. I had an unsettling brush with a female mass murderer in 1985, shortly after I moved to suburban Philadelphia, when a 25-year-old ex-mental patient in guerrilla gear stormed into a nearby shopping mall with a semiautomatic rifle and managed to wound eight people and kill two. Luckily, the gods of shopping had sent me to our other major mall that afternoon, but I passed the shocking array of police cars and ambulances as I drove home.
The gun as mutant penis: Men or women who abuse guns are equally sexually dysfunctional. The first question that popped into my mind about the Columbine killers was, "What was their sex life like?" It's very difficult to be a man in today's post-industrial culture, with its bland service-sector jobs and endless paper-shuffling deskwork. All you have before you is eternal tethering -- to parents, teachers, boss, wife. There's little room for genuine masculine adventure and achievement. And there are few men to admire -- which is why violent video games and action-adventure films have been thriving.
You males whose courage, energy and ingenuity turned the global wilderness into civilization (and allowed women to emerge from the servitude of reproductive biology to become self-determining individuals) are not honored by the clichéd ideologies of our time. From feminism to therapy, the ruling premise is the Sensitive Male, as talky as a woman as he gets in touch with his banal feelings. Natural, robust, assertive masculinity is defined as a disease from which society must be cured.
You tartly cite Harvard psychoanalyst William Pollack, whose bestselling book, "Real Boys," has been tirelessly promoted by Oprah Winfrey in her ever-lengthening chain of white male gurus and black earth mothers. I know from the testimony of friends that Pollack is a superb therapist. But I'm afraid I must agree with your skepticism about his approach to current social issues. His bookish milieu has little understanding of either athletics or war -- which are crucial to any historical analysis of masculinity.
Specifically, I reject Pollack's position that mothers shouldn't push growing boys away and discourage displays of weakness, fear and tears. Everywhere, I see the opposite problem: white, upper-middle-class mothers clinging too much to their whiny sons and turning them into companion daughters or substitute spouses. Boys are not girls: the mocking epithets "sissy " (i.e., "sister") and "mollycoddle" do describe something real -- a stalling in the evolution of masculine identity, which requires boys to leave the maternal nest and make their way as independent adults.
Perhaps because of his background, Pollack overestimates the power of words in most men's lives. His program privileges female values and simply cuts boys down to pliable ciphers in a family matriarchy. It's actually a perfect recipe for producing obedient office-workers, happy eunuchs in the corporate food chain.
The weakest part of Pollack's book may be its velvet-glove treatment of homosexuality and its striking credulity about the gay gene -- for which there never has been solid evidence. From long observation, I conclude that blurred borderlines between mother and son are a primary factor in male homosexuality -- which every honest observer should admit is slowly increasing in the Western world. As a civil libertarian, I firmly believe in sexual freedom of choice; but as a scholar, I look for causation and historical context.
The Columbine guns were stupidly phallic protests -- cruel, abortive, self-destructive acts by bourgeois screw-ups who hated their meaningless lives, namby-pamby school and indulgent, affluent parents and who should long ago have been kicked out on their asses to fend for themselves and learn a few things about life. It's time to end the high-school stockyard tyranny. Let the puberty brats go at 14, and throw open the educational doors to returning adults. Classroom segregation by age has produced a toxic testosterone cocktail that's blowing this culture to smithereens.
But it's not guns at home I fear: It's guns abroad, escalating into nuclear war. Whatever the mad bombers of NATO think they're winning in the Yugoslav fiasco, they've predictably destabilized world politics. Our ham-handed president, Bill Clinton, and his increasingly fey buddy, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, were henpecked into war by a sullen virago, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who would have flunked out of the Margaret Thatcher school of military science.
