A Convoluted Musing on What It Means to Have a Vagina (or a Penis, If You Prefer)

My friend Jon recently wrote this piece about our culture's obsession with bigness. It complements well something that I think about a lot: the beauty and value of smallness and slowness and femininity. So go read what Jon wrote, and then come back here and keep reading.

I'll wait for you.

. . .


What do you think? He hits it, doesn't he? I think Jon illustrates well the point that "small is better." But how many of us believe this, really? When we think of size and speed and gender, are we indulging in a bit of doublethink? Hear me out—and I beg your forgiveness for my lack of cohesiveness here. I'm really shooting from the hip, as it were. I'll try to make that my last cliché. No promises though.

When I was in art school, I received very mixed messages from the faculty and the greater visual arts community about gender and size and the meaning and place of womanness. I was told in my studio classes to make big art, because small = stereotypically feminine = not liberated = bad. At every turn, I encountered a reflexive raging against the small and "girly." My ceramics professor wanted every cup and saucer to be twice its expected size; his teapots could hold a full gallon (and they were butt-ugly*, but that's not the point). But my muses were the likes of Judy Chicago and Georgia O'Keefe and Mary Cassatt and Camille Caudel, aroused as I was by the engulfing, electric femininity of their work. These women moved me toward embracing and celebrating my own womanness and that of my sisters. Several of my professors embodied this electric femininity and encouraged me to allow it to overtake my creative self. Now, I'm not talking about dresses or underwires or long hair or pink. I'm talking about blood, the vigor and potency deep in belly that gives life, the excruciating drive to sustain and nourish life, and a way of viewing and relating to all of the world and people in light of this gravid impetus. I hope that makes sense. If it doesn't, let's have a drink together, and I'll try to explain it better.

I'm also not talking about a woman/man or butch/femme dichotomy. I think that in every person is a symphony of harmonious masculine and feminine energy. I can't defend this philosophically or biologically, but in my gut I grok it. In the biblical creation myth, God creates humankind (adam) in his image and likeness, and then divides the person in two, creating male (ish) and female (ishah). Adam has traditionally been viewed as male, the woman being created as a secondary being, an afterthought, a partner or helper or tool to please and accompany the man. But I like to think of adam as a genderless being, and the creation of ish and ishah as an equal division of the human; the genders are equal halves of one whole, and their distinction is secondary to their unity. We femme and butch, male and female, women and men are in reality one, all adam, all within and around and through each other. So much so that "each other" makes less sense all the time. We are always only ever we. Thomas Merton says that the person "who lives in division is not a person but only an 'individual.'" The person "who lives in division lives in death." This person is "lost" and "has ceased to be a reality." Thich Nhat Hanh says that "we are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness." Jesus prayed that his followers be one, even as he and the Father are one. Oneness, similarity, interconnectedness is reality, is life. I believe that this applies to gender.

I cringe at discussions of gender that rest on the presumptions that x cannot be feminine because many men feel it, and y cannot be masculine because many women do it. I prefer y is the feminine essence of every person; x is the masculine in each of us. Traditional gender roles and stereotypes may be arbitrary constructs; I think they largely are. But does this necessitate that masculinity and femininity are false? Perhaps people have simply abused the terms, or unfairly limited them, or forced them to be where they ought not be. Frankly, I don't see what is really wrong with a man, even disregarding sexual orientation, embracing and nourishing the feminine elements of himself, or a woman the masculine elements of herself.

Not only does our culture not seem to value what is relatively small, it also does not value what is relatively slow. I don't need to analyze this out; we all know it is true: slower is not better. Furthermore, slowness is often associated with femininity. Women, because of their body shape and smaller musculature, generally cannot run as fast as men. Slowness is inherent to women's sexual and reproductive selves: we often become aroused and reach orgasm more slowly, and our culture pokes fun at this. If you don't believe me, watch a few prime-time sitcoms. Pregnancy, birth, and motherhood make it "hard" for us to "keep up" with the professional and social world around us. Culture has offered to "fix" this for us with pitocin and cesarean sections, daycare centers and birth control pills. Please don't hear in this a condemnation of these things; I am only questioning their use as conveniences that "help" women exit the "dark ages" of vocational motherhood and long natural birth; I am questioning why we have come to view these conveniences as desirable. I am asking: from what are we being held back by what makes us slow? Why do we want those things? Women are praised when they "keep up" with the fast, masculine pace of the professional world. Men often feel ashamed when they exit the rat race and enter the slower-paced, feminine space of nurturing and living by the dictate of the biological rather than the atomic clock.

[I suppose I am rather sensitive to how our culture views the relatively small and slow and feminine because I am all of these things. I am about the size of the average 11-year-old boy, and I am often approached as a child. Though I am 30 years old and I was keeping house and a child (my sister) and taking care of myself entirely decades before my peers, people still try to parent me, speak to me in the same tone of voice they use for their children, try to "help" me to be how they think I "should" be. I also do most things with slow, careful deliberation: I read, write, bike, drive, pray, think, fall asleep, wake up, dress, breathe, cut onions more slowly and deliberately than what seems to be the norm. Sometimes, my slowness is mistaken for incompetence, and I receive a good bit of unsolicited and unnecessary advice and supervision. So, yes, what I observe about smallness and slowness and femininity is partly a personal issue for me.]

So here is the point of all this: why are small and slow and feminine considered inferior, and how does the (even unconscious) assumption that they are influence how we view gender and each other and ourselves? I have no answer. I suspect, though, that at least some of the sensitivity and defensiveness surrounding discussions of gender has a lot to do with the (arbitrary, really) perception that femininity and all that is associated with it is inferior. What is wrong with a person's being relatively small, slow, and emotionally available and yet having male genitals? What is wrong with a larger, physically stronger, more aggressive person with female genitals? Why must a woman do what is "masculine" but be what is "feminine" to be valued? Why is a man ashamed of doing or being what is "feminine"? Why is a woman who is butch or a man who is femme viewed with repulsion? Why is a "masculine" man more or a "feminine" woman less (or more)? I've heard it argued that one source of homophobia is a repulsion surrounding a man's being in the sexually "submissive" role, that being penetrated is weak and feminine and therefore not fit for a person with male genitals. Being penetrated is a vulnerable place to be, yes. But is vulnerability weakness? May we say that being penetrated is feminine and yet does not make one weak, and is not unfit for any person? May we say that a person with female genitals need not attempt to "keep up," that "keeping up" is not itself a virtue, and that slowness is beautiful and valuable? May we say the same of smallness? And in the grand and grandiose scale of history, the universe, and everything, is not all we are relatively slow and small, delicate and evanescent and low?

I think smallness and slowness are precious qualities, having little to do with actual size or speed and much more to do with grace and assailability. I would argue that the reproductive role of the female is power and strength, even though it places a woman in a slower, physically weaker place. I appeal to the New Testament theme of power as weakness and weakness as strength, the first as last and the last as first, Jesus' triumph over death by dying, God's becoming vulnerable and empty (and therefore being in a position to be penetrated???) by taking the form of humankind.

Let me put it this way.

Is this

somehow less than this

?

Which scene shall we celebrate? Which depicts something more important, more significant, more potent? And why? Which scene, in your gut, would you identify as "feminine" or "masculine"? Why? Is it necessarily wrong or unenlightened to do so?

Why?




*See? Butt-ugly.