Vaginas are not the only kind of genital

There was a piece in the last issue of Woroni, ‘E-vulva-lution and the phantasmagoric penis’, about Vagina Soit and pornography and there was just so much wrong with it. It wasn’t stupid. It was very well researched for a Woroni article and was also very thoughtful at times, but its thoughts just weren’t correct.

Before going any further, some context is necessary. Vagina Soit was a fiasco a few weeks back where the Sydney University student newspaper, Honi Soit, published an edition with 18 vaginas on the cover. It was immediately asked to rescind the cover because it was illegal under the Guidelines for the Classification of Publications Act 2005.

Now we can move onto the substance of the piece. Let’s go blow by blow.

The article opens by claiming that people were offended and that is why the Women’s Collective was pressured into pulping the cover. That’s not quite right—the cover is illegal, that’s why they were asked to pulp it. You can write a piece questioning why the legislation is the way it is (which is partially what the author does), but to suggest that people were offended is misleading. The piece wasn’t out long enough for people to get offended—the issue is the potential for lawsuits, not the actuality of offence. And it is perfectly understandable that a student body with limited funds and a lot of exposure responds to potential lawsuits with requests to remove the potentially offensive material.

The author then jumps to the conclusion that the legal threats were an attempt at ‘thwarting naturalistic representations of female genitalia amidst the prevalence of pornography’s artificially sexualised standards’. Woah; hold up a second. How did USyd SA go from avoiding lawsuits to waging a covert war on behalf of pornography?

The author then goes on to ask ‘what drives the urge to discriminate against body types and police the appearance of the vagina?’A small point, but I think ‘body types’ and ‘the appearance of the vagina’ is again misleading. Honi Soit can put fat, average, Anorexic, famous, mutated, engineered, atrophied or robotic bodies on their cover. They just can’t put genitals. They can’t put vaginas on there, and they can’t put cocks either, or mixed genitals for that matter. The most ironic factoid in this case is that the photo that appeared along with E-vulva-lution in Woroni featured a penis and a vagina with a tick next to the penis and a cross next to the vagina; but they were the censored! This isn’t about policing the appearance of the vagina; it’s about policing the presence of genitals on material for consumption by the general public.

Later we have ‘what qualities of the female genitalia are so terrifying that they demand the distanced containment of pornography and the regulation of censorship’s moral watchdogs?’

Good question, but could we not make one alteration: ‘what qualities of the human genitalia are so terrifying that they demand the distanced containment of pornography and the regulation of the censor’s moral watchdogs?’

This alteration makes a huge difference. The question is no longer one of female revolution against the oppressive patriarchy, which is silly because penises are governed by the same laws, and instead becomes a question of human sexual liberation, something that still has a long way to go and involves everyone. We instantly move away from conspiracy theory territory and into constructive discussion of how we can all move towards a healthier relationship with sex and the human body.

Then a throwaway line about graffiti penises as a ‘banal reminder of the privilege [men] enjoy’. Let’s dig into this a bit, because it’s fascinating and an area where we can actually develop a contest of ideas. Penises are not drawn on things because men have some sort of privilege that women don’t. If a woman wants to draw a graffiti vagina on something then she is more than welcome. She could also draw a penis, as could a male graffiti artist draw a vagina, or an intersex individual draw boobs and a penis. Penises are drawn for a variety of other reasons; I will list two.

First, penises symbolically represent affirmation, and so drawing a penis on something you don’t like (e.g. The Herald Sun) symbolises your placing yourself in existential opposition to it. The author severely understates the scope of the phallic myth when she suggests that it is principally about scaring the female species into sexual submission. Nonetheless, this is an important point that the article alludes to—is there some way to make the vagina a more affirmative symbol? Since Beauvoir at least, women have been fighting for more existential power, and a strong thwart to this is the culturally entrenched identification of the male member with transcendence (life affirming) and the female genitals with passivity and immanence (life sustaining, to use Beauvoir’s terminology). Having a broader discussion of this symbolic association that doesn’t start from the position that men are evil fuckwits looking to subjugate everyone would be a good start to rectifying this imbalance, which causes no end of grief to men who like deep, assertive, confident women with iron in the soul. It would also allow women who desire such power but also find that they quite like being on the ‘bottom’ sexually (though not in an intimate relationship’s power dynamics) a chance to contribute to a discourse that has increasingly marginalised them.

Returning to penises on things you hate, the second reason why you see a lot of penises is that most of the people doing the drawing are men and they are much more familiar with penises. So they draw penises. If there were more women keen on graffiti art you would see more vaginas on things. Perhaps you could suggest that women are discouraged from graffiti art because it is such a patriarchal subculture. But this would not sit well with street art’s claim to being inherently counter-cultural. More likely women just don’t particularly like climbing up to hard to access locations in the wee hours of the mid week morning and painting penises, or stencils of fists, or whatever else street art is doing these days. Perhaps women choose to express their rebellion in other ways. The solution then is not to deride male expressions of rebellion that make use of the penis but instead to bring into the spotlight rebellious actions by women and work on having equal cultural value placed on those expressions as those made by men. The important point here is not to make the existing system less patriarchal, or to make it more matriarchal, or even to make it more homogenous/androgynous (though we probably need a bit more of that at the moment), but to devote more cultural energy to valuing the contributions men and women make in their own unique ways to the cultural discourse and, in this case, to counterculture and rebellion.

Moving on...the mid part of E-vulva-lution is devoted to the thesis that the penis has been paid insufficient critical attention. That’s very contestable. Jung, Freud and the other early psycholoanalysts, as well as modern symbologists, have spent oodles of time analysing and commenting on the penis, as have feminists and gender theorists. One might reasonably ask ‘do you have any data on this?’ Has there been a systematic study showing that vaginas are ‘discussed’ more than penises? The whole assertion smacks of conspiracy theory: men are repressing discourse of their own genitals (yet penises are everywhere) in order to increase the taboo around vaginas. Why would they do that? How do they do that? Perhaps the cause of the limited banter on penises is that there aren’t organised movements campaigning to have pictures of cocks on student publications in an attempt to draw attention to the politics of the penis in the way there are organised movements to have vaginas in the public sphere.

Next up is the claim that the pornography industry airbrushes vaginas because ‘the labia minora are just too obscene’. This is again misleading. It is quite common in mainstream pornography like Penthouse and the like to have shots where the model parts the labia majora to show off the minora. The minora are thus emphasised in pornography. A more plausible explanation for why vaginas are airbrushed to de-emphasise the labia minora in standing and close legged positions is that the individuals who purchase such pornography prefer vaginas that are ‘tucked in’ when not deliberately parted. Such vaginas do exist, as the author notes. This might seem sexist initially until we remember that fat men with neck beards don’t feature on the cover of romance novels. When pandering to fantasies we don’t, as a rule, expect people to indulge in a wide variety of representations. We depict ‘ideals’. There are certainly arguments to be made that, as a society, we should embrace a wider range of appearances as ‘beautiful’ or ‘attractive’, but this is quite different from decrying a prevalence (because there is a variety depicted) of tucked-in vaginas in pornography as sexist patriarchal oppression.  

This seems a good juncture to discuss one of the author’s closing points, namely that ‘the vagina in the picture stands in for the enigma of the feminine’ and this is troubling. Again, I would ask what evidence there is for this. Have interviews been conducted with consumers of pornography in which it is clear that they like to abstract the vagina and divest from the woman and her personality? The evidence, in this case, actually points the other way. In gas station pornography, shots featuring only the vagina are inevitably part of a set of photos that include whole body shots and often shots only of the face. In many such magazines, especially those that are on the softer side like Ralph and FHM, photo-shoots are frequently published alongside multi-page interviews with the models so the readers can get to know them better. This would suggest that readers are very much interested in solving the enigma of the feminine and don’t want to consume just the vagina. The quote, from Kuhn, is very literary but there is almost no sense in which it is a testable hypothesis. You can’t just go making statements of this sort and then basing a pornography vilification campaign off them without some empirical or a priori substantiation.

Finally, the author’s comments about pornography more generally. She suggests that pornography has heterosexual men as its default target audience. Actually, it has people who want to buy pornography as its default audience, and a large portion of this market is constituted by heterosexual men. There is also an enormous industry for homosexual pornography, ‘porn for women’, porn featuring transvestites, soft-core erotic fiction (often very ‘romantic’) that is classed as pornography under the act and, in a curious twist, pornography targeted at men who are aroused by the idea of submitting to a woman! This would seem to undermine the author’s point that porn ‘seeks to objectify women when it plays out the subject/object dichotomy that casts men as the consumers of porn and women as the objects to be consumed-thereby institutionalising the sexuality of male supremacy’. Some porn focuses on male domination of women (and some of it is consumed by women), other porn takes a different approach. Porn seeks to appeal to people looking for a masturbation aid and thereby make money. It does not seek to objectify women.

I’m done now, and it strikes me that this has grown increasingly negative, which is something that I try to avoid. I do solemnly swear to write some constructive stuff on pornography and on men and women getting along within a week.

I would also like to point out that the author made some interesting points that do deserve discussion, in particular why we still think naturalistic depictions of genitals are not fit for PG-15 ratings. A part of me thinks the author was trying too hard to find a hook for an abstract discussion. The hook – vagina soit – then dragged the whole thing down.

Mark Fabian has a history major with a focus on gender, sexuality and popular culture; he is not a porn maniac (or at least he doesn't think so!).