Just Looking ...

I am still a bit perplexed as to our understanding of why the penis is so taboo in western societies, why it is not to be represented. To be fair, Professor Kalmar makes the argument that it is not seen in soft porn, and although my repertoire of viewed soft porn is somewhat limited (I swear), I'm pretty sure that soft porn does not show outright images of vaginas or anuses, either. It was that thought led me to another: in a way, the penis is a organ that crosses the line between external and internal – it is just there, out in the open. We don't need a 'close up' to see it as we would with the analogous female organs.

Is this transgression part of the root of the penis taboo? I am taking a structuralist perpective here, one that follows a line of argument by Edmund Leach (expanding on a hypothesis by Mary Douglas). Leach notes than humans not only create classificatory systems involving, at the root, binary oppositions, but that we also avoid or taboo those things that fall on the boundaries between categories or names. In essence, we taboo those things that remain ambiguous and, I suppose, threaten the efficacy of our symbolic order.

Leach illustrates his point by noting Western taboos of meat consumption – that we don’t eat animals that cross various boundaries (reptiles and amphibians: land-sea, most birds that also swim: land-air-sea etc). This takes me to my point: the penis, in western culture, transgresses all kinds of common binary oppositions; it simultanously attracts and repels, elicits fear and fascination. I don’t disagree with the interpretation provided in class, that part of the erotic attraction/repulsion derives from the projections of upper class notions upon the lower body and its connection to the lower class, but I wonder if thinking in terms of the key oppositions embedded in the penis as sign might provide a complemetary understanding: it not only transgresses the external/internal, but life/death (gives life/takes life), benevolant/malevolent, nature/agency, drive/desire, and so on.

This view of taboo might also provide an understanding of why other items, specifically excrement, urine, mentrual blood, and saliva, are tabooed: they cross that line between belonging to the self/not the self. Perhaps the penis also can fit in the gradient between the self/not self category, as, in a way, it tends to 'have a mind of its own'.

Alright, that's enough penis talk for me today. Any thoughts?