Disengendered: Male Domination, Media and Penis Graffiti

"I'm a boss, I'm a boss, I'm a Queen so where my muh fuckin' ... I'm a boss"   -A woman outside the University Library, October 23, 2013

I woke up this morning without a single thought to the male sex organ.  I think that should be somewhat clear that, as a man, I was not obsessing over my manhood as it were.  I went about my daily rituals before going off to school. I got breakfast at the University Center cafeteria and saw a sign next to the small inner alcove where dirty dishes are dropped on a conveyer belt to be washed out of sight.  The sign was the result of a marketing campaign to show that the cafeteria knows what the customers want; it's a shiny magnetic silver with various shaped and colored magnets where people can, presumably write suggestions and post them: at the top of this magnetic post it board reads "We Heard You".  Today, someone arranged the magnets to look like an erect penis and testicles.  

Today or yesterday, I got there about 9:00 am.

The point is someone took magnets (yellow circles for the testicles, several blue squares for the shaft and an orange triangle for the head).  I saw it immediately, I am sure most people did, or am I?  I got there two hours after they opened, maybe no one was awake enough to see it.  But everyone walks past this sign to drop off their cups and plates and cutlery ... I dunno!

So, in consideration of the fact that, most likely, everyone will see this cubist rendition of 'cock and balls', I reorganized it to look like the scattered mess it often does.  Then I thought about something I find both sad and telling; that I see graffiti 'cock and balls' all over campus.  In almost every bathroom stall, occasionally on back row desktops, etc.  So I begin to consider the meaning of the erect phallus in the mind of the younger male (assuming these are all males in their 20s and I, in my 30s).  I am drawn to two interesting thoughts, Faucault and the Mook.  

Faucault, simplified, expressed a specific type of power structure which allows for how people live; bio-power. This brings into question the way much of society has been run up until the point of Faucault's writing (her in the last part of The History of Sexuality).  The idea that things aren't just as they are and that society agrees or disagrees upon what is right or wrong, good or bad, etc. is at the heart of Faucault's work.  If you consider yourself to be somehow in the right and other people say that something you believe in is wrong then it stands to reason that these people are trying to take away your little bit of bio-power.  Camps seem to have arose surrounding one of these main disagreements in contemporary society surrounding the issue of heteronormativity. Men with little knowledge or concept of their privilege, or perhaps enough awareness to not want to let it go without a fight, have taken on such a camp.  Their war cries: "She was asking for it", "She's a slut" and other such notions of what is aptly called Rape Culture; essentially they only exist as a diatribe by decrying any female as suspect or as a target for anger, fear and hatred.  The symbol for this legion is the erect phallus, the 'cock and balls', their violent broadsword of negation of the feminine (does it go deeper than this, definitely, but this is enough to know the content of this group's collective consciousness).  To further understand this grouping of the angry male oppressor, consider their archetype; the Mook.

The Mook is best explained in the 2001 Frontline documentary, Merchants of Cool, in which they express the basic roots of the archetype (link above, skip to 22:45 for the specific definition).  A swaggerous, over-masculine daredevil, devoid of inhibitions and with a preordained preoccupation with his own proboscis pubis; the Mook is a collections of years of the worst male archetype and stands as a counterpoint to the fiercely tender masculinity that began to ebb its way into American culture in the mid-60s as a response to feminism and the realization of some male anti-war protesters of their own mysogyny (often despite furious denial to the contrary).  The Mook wasn't created by the media, but rather given a name and a purpose and made more pointed, specifically, to show what manhood was supposedly all about and to lead by example the testosterone obsessed throng.  The various other archetypal men of domination are all reinforced by the Mook's swagger and virility; they can now openly mock and attack the supposed turncoats of masculinity; homosexual men, cisgendered male feminists and feminism in general, transgendered people, anyone who denies that this is (to recall James Brown) A Man's World.  Though they cannot openly support and defend rape, they can decry the plight of men as oft coerced into sex by trickster vixens and then accused by that self-same temptress: willfully omitting the blinders of his own lack of restraint, his hormone-fueled (often also compounded by drugs and/or alcohol) total lapse of judgement and, worst of all, the humanity of the other person.

On a purely theoretical level; the image of the erect penis is, to the angry male in fear of losing dominance, a talisman, a simulacrum, an idol, a totem.  The curse this image wards off is the presumed disposition of man in a world Post-Patriarchy; the idea of man as powerless.  Powerlessness, rather than shared power, is what Patriarchy fears because that is what Patriarchy doles out to the other.  All power for us, no power for them. This fear, however, is unwarranted and simply smacks of transference.

Of course, while writing this, I was firmly aware of the connection between the subject matter and the news that a college student had been harassed by 4Chan e-vigilantes because she was mistook as someone in a video engaged in a public sex act.  This became an unfortunate reason for me to complete this blog.

People deal with a sense of powerlessness in various ways.  I don't support the idea of picking out and attacking a perceived other for any reason.  One lighthearted incident happened today after breakfast as I walked to the University Library.  A woman, I believe in her twenties was looking down at her cellphone and loudly reciting the lyrics:

"I'm a boss, I'm a boss ... I'm a Queen so where my muh fuckin' ... I'm a boss"

She looked up at me for a moment and then looked back down as she walked and continued singing.  The lyrics seemed oddly fitting as an expression of one way of coping with a certain powerlessness.  In her case, the powerlessness seems to stem from neither being a boss, nor being the originally intended recipient of the lyrics.  

Ima Boss by Meek Millz

Bitch, I'm a BOSS!
[x2]
I plan the shots
I call the cost

We in the bitch',
It's goin' downnnnnn.
Yeaa I'm the king,
Now where my mu'fuckin' crown?

[Chorus:]
Bitch I'm a BOSS!
[x6]

taken from http://www.azlyrics.com and fair use invoked. 

So Meek Millz, notably not anyone's actual boss, wishes to say he calls the shots, but to whom?  The young lady, for her part, loving the song but censoring herself, not for profanity but predominantly for the patriarchal ideology (removing the word 'bitch' and changing 'king' to 'queen', making herself 'The Boss').  Is it a coincidence that the lyrics changed in her head to fit her own need to have some power and feel as though she is 'The Boss'? I think not.  The content of lyrics are important when they are used and especially for how they are used.  In the case of the woman outside the library, I felt as though I was witnessing the recitation of a mantra.  A mantra with the magnetic power to bring with it the very strength it evokes.