Joanna
----- Original Message -----
>From Samuel Delany's "The Rhetoric of Sex/ The Discourse of Desire," in
_Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary_ (1999):
One day in a Central Park playground in the summer of the same year in which my daughter had learned the discourse of children's books, around the fountain and having shed all clothing an hour back, a handful of kids in my daughter's play school group all clustered around a three-and-a-half-year-old girl named Mischkatel, who enthusiastically proposed a game to Sascha and Iva and Nord and Aiesha (this was, recall, the seventies): "Let's see who can pee-pee the farthest!" And while I looked on—I confess, surprised—the five of them stood to the ankles in the water at the fountain's edge—and let whiz.
The girls, of course, without exception, won—since, in general, the urinary track exits from the body proper horizontally, or even with a slightly upward tilt. And since every one was just standing there, letting fly, the little boys, who dangled a bit, had not thought to use their hands to guide their stream and so generally watered in a downward slant rather than straight out. Mischkatel, Iva, and Aiesha all more or less tied and left the two little boys, Nord and Sascha, frowning down at their self-evident lack and symbol of powerlessness, marking the male site of greatest physical vulnerability.
In a society where children play regularly naked with one another, this can _not_ be an anomaly. But I had to ask myself, sometime later, if I was empowered—as it were—to _see_ this by a situation from not a full decade before, when, in 1969, I had lived in San Francisco, and a nude sunbathing and beer fest had started on the tarred-over roof of our Natoma Street flat. Eight or half a dozen of us were sitting around, naked, drinking bottle after bottle of beer, when, as several of the men had already done, one young woman got up, went to the back of the tar-paper roof, and proceeded to urinate off the edge with as high-flying an arc as any one might want.
I remember how cool we were all being—in what, I suspect for most of us, was some astonishment. A young woman was about to speak, when a young man asked (another white male appropriation, no doubt): "How did you do that?"
Her answer was classic: "You aim, stupid."
Then she proceeded to demonstrate how, with two fingers of one hand in a V, turned down over the upper part of the vaginal crevice, one could control the direction of one's stream.
I am a writer.
Needless to say, I incorporated the scene (or rather one based closely on it) in my next novel. Some months after the book appeared, I received a letter, signed by a group of five women in Vancouver, that said, in brief: "Thanks."
On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 2:28 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgand2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 2013-11-08, at 2:00 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > Marv: Given the new scientific findings about technique, it could
become an
> > interesting spectator sport, giving pissing contests a whole new meaning
> > beyond the metaphorical...
> >
> > ----
> >
> > You mean going back to the _original_ on which the metaphor was based:
> > small boys in actual competition to see which could piss the furthest.
>
> I have a more grandiose vision of it becoming an Olympic sport. :)
>
> > Or wasn't it only a sport for _small_ boys?
>
> Evidently not:
>
> Pissing contests usually, but not always, take place between males. Sarah
Miles, in her book Serves Me Right, describes a female pissing contest that
she witnessed in Spain. This was a "distance" contest like the usual male
ones.[6]
>
> Havelock Ellis, in his book Psychology of Sex, describes a female pissing
contest in Belgium.[citation needed] This was an "accuracy" contest in
which women stood in a circle and attempted to urinate into a bottle,
placed in the center of the circle. Women can, once they have learned the
right technique, urinate standing.[7] A comic song from 17th-century
Belgium is about a similar contest, aiming into a shoe, between three women
seeking to impress a man.[8]
>
> There is also some Irish folklore about female pissing contests. In the
story Tochmarc Emire several women compete to see who can urinate deepest
into a pile of snow. The winner is Derbforgaill, wife of Lugaid Riab nDerg,
but the other women attack her out of jealousy and mutilate her by gouging
out her eyes and cutting off her nose, ears, and hair, resulting in her
death. Her husband Lugaid also dies, from grief, and Cúchulainn avenges the
deaths by demolishing a house with the women inside, killing 150.[9][10]
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pissing_contest
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