Okay, so finally there is a picture of the snow-sculpture which has caused such a brou-haha at Harvard. It actually is more graphic than I had imagined. It ain’t no aroused snowman, that’s for sure! The Wall Street Journal has a very good op-ed piece about the whole mess.
A notable quote:
For a week, the “phallus-breakers,” as the Harvard Crimson called them, refused to come forward, even as debate raged over their modern-day iconoclasm … Amy Keel, Class of 2004, owned up to “dismantling” the sculpture. And this is where the story turns strange. For we learned that, while Ms. Keel’s actions were admirable, her motives were a muddle, a jumble of academic feminism and strained logic.
Her letter argued in earnest that she was justified in defiling the phallus because it was put up “without permission” from the university. “The only thing it did was create an uncomfortable environment for the women of Harvard.” Its “only purpose could be to assert male dominance.” This leaves one imagining men walking around campus saying, “Gee, that snow sculpture is reassuring. Let’s go harass some Radcliffe girls.”
But it gets better. “No one,” she wrote, “should be subjected to an erect penis without his or her express permission or consent.” She was, she said, a victim of “gendered violence”: Some Harvard males had tried to intimidate her and her accomplice while they knocked the thing down.
But Ms. Keel doesn’t need exotic concepts like “gendered violence” and phallocentricity to justify what she did. Old-fashioned ones like decency will do just fine. The trouble is, by rejecting traditional mores as so much bourgeois conventionalism (to borrow a phrase), Ms. Keel has left herself impotent in the face of real obscenity.
My point, exactly. I think.
