[lbo-talk] urinals and physicists...

Gar Lipow gar.lipow at gmail.com
Sat Nov 9 17:34:32 PST 2013


On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 2:43 PM, JOANNA A. <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:


> Yeah. I always thought the penis envy stuff was a clear case of male
> wishful thinking.
>
> Joanna
>

Woody Allen once said something long the line of: " penis envy exists, but only among males."


>
> ----- 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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