How To Stop Men Being Cocky
Since Roman times, the phallus has been especially beloved – while nothing about the womb is celebrated at all, except by Judy Chicago and the knitters of pussy hats. This is really rather strange, given that female anatomy has some pretty showstopping faculties (ovulation, menstruation, conception, gestation, parturition, lactation, and mammoth moping). Unless you’re a seahorse or octopus, or were born by Caesarean, we all emerge from that juncture where two female limbs meet. The vagina is our red-carpet entrance to the living world. Out we come to seek and find (or not).
So, for a moment let’s forget all the impotent phallic symbols so favoured by town planners. The Eiffel Tower can be looked at another way. If you look up its skirts, it becomes a cave, and a monument to the vagina. With its legs outspread in a birthing squat, the Eiffel Tower displays its gaping carnal core to the tourists below. As 19th-century engineering’s equivalent of a cancan girl, it’s a flamboyant rival to Rome’s Cloaca Maxima. The Eiffel Tower looks like it has girded its loins and expelled the whole of Paris.
Sure, men are cocky now, after all their cockeyed, cockamamie cock and bull. The dickheads think they alone have the balls to run the world. Wild ejaculations of respect for testicles spill willy-nilly across the globe. Which brings us to the crotch of the matter: people are rarely acclaimed for having the breasts to do something brave, it’s always got to be balls, cojones – although the grandeur of the scrotal sac, in comparison to breasts, seems highly debatable. In a misogynistic society, one could argue it takes balls to have breasts. As for the vulva, this is only used as a term of abuse. Trump threatened Mike Pence with being seen as a “pussy” if Pence failed to (illegally) overturn the results of the 2020 election: “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy.” Well, what else is new? They’re both assholes.
Haven’t we had enough seminal insights too? Men are always having those. They avidly disseminate their seminal ideas, in fact set such great store by anything seminal that they sometimes ascribe seminal achievements to women, too. The obsession with balls persists, while all the fabulous, life-enhancing, life-generating wonderments of ovaries, Fallopian tubes, placentas, clitorises, labia, both minora and majora, are ignored. Where are the ululations for the uterus, the catchphrases of the snatch, the wit of the slit, in recognition of the crucially productive female groin, lap, funnel, box, spoon and fork? This really gets on my tits. But soon female germinations will be nursed to maturity, through a new fluidity of thought – if we could just egg on female supremacy a bit.
““It’s time society was more womb-based. In honour of our new age of free tampons, we need to discharge a heavy flow of labial lingo and symbolism across the land, along with some hot flashes of vaginal ideology.””
The ceaseless avoidance of vulval symbols is nuts. Let’s return to the womb – you know you want to. It’s time society was more womb-based. In honour of our new age of free tampons, we need to discharge a heavy flow of labial lingo and symbolism across the land, along with some hot flashes of vaginal ideology. As America’s emblem, the Statue of Liberty, with her multitudinous motherliness. Mother Nature, Mother Hubbard, Mother Goose, mother love, mother vinegar, mother-of-pearl, the mother tongue of the motherland … The “Mother of Exiles” was eulogised by Emma Lazarus, who awarded her an attitude very foreign to our bully-boy times: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! The gal has a lamp, because motherhood is an enlightening force. That’s why, when your mother fades, darkness falls.
Motherhood has always been a moral force for good, and proof of women’s importance in the world, whatever men might wish to believe. If most of human history was, as I suspect, matriarchal, human society was originally founded on the exertions of the womb. Birth was a risky but honourable undertaking in prehistory, and women were cherished and respected, not just as potential mothers but for their own sake. What a revolutionary idea. Not repressed, not raped. Respected. Now women are paid less and violated more, and the female body has been ghettoised, strong-armed by machismo.
Time to put feminine curves back into the body politic. It’s so flat without them! Pence, who calls his own wife “Mother” (an Oedipal mix-up not to be encouraged), got all tangled up over womb contents a few years back when he was governor of Indiana, endorsing an abortion law so extreme that it required all foetal remains to be reported to the government and formally cremated or buried. Noting that their every discharge was now apparently of intense interest to Mike Pence, some women decided to keep him informed of every stage of their menstrual cycle. They heaped him with daily updates on flow, spotting, cramps; and included Trump, once Pence was chosen as his running mate in 2016. This uterine barrage only ended when Twitter suspended the @periodsforpence account. But briefly, the menstrual taboo, which requires women to keep totally shtum all their lives about their periods, and also about the lack of them (menopause), was demolished.
Well, it’s a start. But we could get more mileage out of female naughty bits than that. We need city councils and cartographers to reclaim the matriarchal world order, inch by inch, with feminising place names. The hell with those little hamlets, Rump and Penice. We need: Womanhattan, Wombburrow, Wombledon, Breechbourne, Breastworthy, Tittsburg, Clitoropolis, Oviductia, Fallopidelphia, Loudmouth, Womenhoe, Uxoriousbridge, and the twin cities of Multiple and Orgasm. America already has the Carolinas, Louise-iana, Georgia, Virginia, and Mary-land.
This is an extract from Lucy Ellmann’s collection of essays, Things Are Against Us, Text Publishing, $22.99