PT.3 VAGINA-SPEAK: THE MAKE-BELIEVE OF MEN

Glaringly absent from Missouri Republican Todd Akin's remarks is the image "woman". Akins speaks *about* woman not *to* woman. In a magical way it is *as if* the treatment of her vagina-speak is a fantasy creature itself and the comment, a tale of make-believe and myth-making.


WHAT MEN SAY *ABOUT* WOMAN

How Did It Get This Way?

Remember, if you grew up in the 1950's, the article shared in part one of this three part exploration into what men say about "woman" shows what is more likely the road Dad took to rule his 'head of the house' status in marriage. Oral contraception, ie the pill, developed and marketed by women for women, is what spoke *to* wmn's true and deep concern: unequal citizenship status under the law. For there is a myth of woman in lieu of a history of women already on record.


The time is past due to uncover the covering. -stephanie pope


PANDORA & POLIS
The concern in woman and women for *wmn* and *mnwmn* is age-old and is an inheritance in antiquity through both Christian and Greek mythic patterns of thought (one-god/many gods) in relation to one side of the divine, *wmn* and its treatment in the religious and social imagination shaping the racial archetype.

In Greek antiquity in Athens, in the story shaping polis, (polis means ancient Greek citystate) the myth of Pandora indicates in lieu of equality “women were given” *marriage*; given in marriage is one thing but given to marriage, often to settle disputes fought over in war, obscures, blurs and collapses a necessary distinction made between *her sex* and the good with female sex as “the goods.” Her sex, now objectified as “the goods” settles distracting yet ideological disputes when it come to the business of the state in the statement operating in self-paternalism.

Placed behind a symbol, the veil, she is her sex, an object of trade ― the veil given woman appropriates her voice and does away with her right to speak otherwise. Standing in for her, the veil is a means in speaking *about her* while not speaking *to her*. There is an avoidance of unveiling what "she” embodies. Her "space" is thrown into negation in the very supposed act of speaking "on her behalf".  In other words, her “vagina speak” is placed in a stoppered condition. You don't see what it embodies and represents and this "right of representation" is appropriated. She is spoken *about* in speaking *for* her without representing her point of view about herself.  If you think I am kidding, you can trace the three meanings for the Greek term, "veil" just as did I in an earlier essay. Hidden behind the veil and by looking at the Greek term for “veil”, krêdemnon, I uncover three meanings at work. This manner of uncovering a covering is aletheia.  Aletheia is truth revealed by unsealing a seal intending to conceal. Let me borrow a quote from that essay to unveil this insight.

Although the image, woman is at once caught between the fantasy birth and the historically crafted image of autochthony, I begin to note that our deepest inheritance as ‘woman’ is not erased when it is silenced in the allegorical memory of our history as a people—nay planet! It is handed down in the down-handed symbolic hand-me-down mneme contained within the belly of the human story that simultaneously names woman in an ‘us’ which does not represent her. The Athenians had a word that expressed this symbolic image-idea which inheres woman to culture thusly. It is krêdemnon and it means ‘veil’. The term signifies a “headbinder,” and in as much as the body of a woman represents the polis itself, the veil signifies the battlements that crown the city and fortifying the city against invasion. So the krêdemnon that means veil or ‘headbinder’ also means the battlements that protect a city against invasion.

Her own face and body are made to hide and be the hide itself covering over that which is unrepresentable, the existence of *wmn*. Thusly, the third sense the early Athenians had for the veil is likened to the stopper of a bottle, a ‘cap”, capping the volcanic force and tapping its energy…her “sexuality”, seizing her “property”,  the sexual energies proper to her person.

Among these 'energetics' would be her own mind's mythic pattern, its own style of being present in determining family planning, gynacological care, care of the health of bodily processes, etc., in essence, her self-determined, self-paternal, citizen status. This status is the right to life that is being violated in Todd Akins comment suggesting there is a form of legitimate rape.  It is the rape of womb rights. How so?

Inherent in the psyche of this thinking is the metaphorical recognition how rape-- the rape of "wmn", the feminine face of the divine formation of *us* justifies as moral this religious imagination in its even more insidious assault on polis. It cannot be just today, not at least since the 18thC, the way it once lays claim in antiquity. Not if the Constitution is still the law of the land. Life, representable as it is, female and citizen challenges that it is never right to rape that which is representable as it is, her equal status as an American citizen. the individually female individual is guaranteed by the Constitution the equally inalienable right to determine her own life's well-being. Her own "representation" suffers a tyranny of paternalism if, in being spoken for, she is cut out of self-representation in polis. 

Now it seems to me what has been going on since 2010 in Congress when Congress speaks has more to do with silencing the variant and individualy female citizenry of women's voices speaking "wmn" for itself.  It also seems to me these folks are messin' where they've not got the right. That is a misuse of public trust. Sadly, female citizen status itself now lacks equality in representation under current law reform when it comes to womb rights, one of which is the right to an abortion. In her currency of exchange, woman has been spoken *about* not *to*.
That is a heads up to you my American fellowhood of lass and lad dealing with the so-called well-meaning todd akin type folk trying to put you in *your* place. They are as good as saying you are to be governed and are not fit to self-govern in shaping polis. They are denying you the right to participate in consensual self-paternalism. Now go a step further. Apply that to this big attempt today by the Christian social conservative thrust to redefine *marriage* as that between a *man* and a *woman*. Think about to whom and to what special interests this (self) is in service. It is about sex. It is about dumbing-down meanings related to citizen status.
Alas, once more Mr. Speaker! You don't speak *to* my vagina, you can only speak *about* it. Vagina-speak knows better than you how no means no.

Such no-ing is a big *NO*, too, because what operates in the social rule when one's majority rule passes into law laws without respect for individual rights as equal rights can do so only by appropriating toward its own citizen status privilege. This is how paternalism gets out and reigns. This is how its currents destroy democracy in the name of “god” who is not *gd*.

Just a little something more to think about before November elections.

MORE VAGINA SPEAK: IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER

THINGS MEN SAY *ABOUT * WOMAN : PT.2

Foster Friess, a prominent backer of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, demonstrating the versatility of aspiring.  The non-medical SuperPac funder very early in 2012 suggests that aspirin is great at developing the muscles around the knees and thus  prevents unwanted pregnancies. -Mock, Paper Scissors 

The last two years have been pretty tough on women when it comes to things men say *about* them. Most people know by now where this attitude is coming from.  So I won't mention the Republican presidential platform when it comes to social issues nor the litany of early candidates for president  pushing a religious conservatism so far right of today's  consensus on social issues it truly fits a categorical nonrepresentative political bloc whose outcomes are creating undue chaos and derision that continues to reek havoc with the well-being of women  unbalancing with an intent to topple their true social consent.  Let the example speak for itself and listen to the unbelievable moment Foster Friess  undoes a truly stunned Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC. 

 

Paternalism

"Paternalism" comes from the Latin pater, meaning to act like a father, or to treat another person like a child. ("Parentalism" is a gender-neutral anagram of "paternalism".) In modern philosophy and jurisprudence, it is to act for the good of another person without that person's consent, as parents do for children.

                     –Peter Suber, “Paternalism”

Paternalism when applied to the citizen status of women, if it appropriates a woman’s citizen right to participate equally in self-government, for example, passing laws which may not reflect social self-consent to control access to abortion, oral contraception, gynecological healthcare insurance, etc., may reflect not consensual self-paternalism but rather minoritarian or majoritarian tyranny. There is a difference between government and self-government in shaping the laws you and I will go on to live by. Consider this important insight from Peter Suber’s essay,

In a democracy, paternalism in the criminal law can to some extent be construed as self-paternalism. If "we" made the laws against usury and gambling, then "we" are restraining only ourselves. Before we justify these laws as self-paternalism, however, we must ask whether we are describing our democracy accurately or platitudinously. If laws to protect citizens from themselves were made by one non-representative faction, class, or bloc, or if the electoral process is distorted so that the outcomes of elections do not represent true social consent, then we may be dealing less with consensual self-paternalism than with majoritarian (or even minoritarian) tyranny. To overlook this possibility would justify paternalism by turning a blind eye to one of its most objectionable features.

In an even larger way, you can see an example of paternalism’s conceit operating right now in Mitt Romney’s remarks regarding “the 47%.” Paternalism works unfairly a redistribution of power over all citizenship status, not just female status. In western psyche’s mythic inheritance paternalism’s moral code seems to begin in a religious philosophy of kings and prophets (not to mention profits). And then, as times moved on, times changed. Or, to say this another way, *gd* took on the image of god, the creator likened to that of “clockmaker”.

When *gd* Was a Clockmaker

Set within this context the Constitution underwent shaping in the 18thC giving face and body to the law of our land. The Constitution is not grounded in the Bible per say. Ideas forming constitutional language are influenced by the image of god as clockmaker inherent in mythic patterns of deism in an epoch of enlightenment and work between images of many gods not merely the one god of monotheism. (see http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/age-jefferson-andmadisonreligion/essays/thomas-jefferson-and-deism#_ftn1). These images of the many gods are none other than inborn patterns of the racial archetype of the specie. You don’t have to be a deist, nor believe in deism over Christianity or vice versa, for these inborn patterns in the psyche to be operating or for their affects to have effect. One resultant constitutional effect is the upholding of separation of church and state. Within it is the premise that when majority rules take shape, the lawgivers must protect the interest of minority rights to life and to liberty and to preserve citizen ability to pursue a happy life to the fullest extent.

Once more let me say it. The Constitution is grounded in the idea that whoever rules must work on behalf the equal rights of all the people not just their own preferred kind (religion, business interest, cultural ethnicity, age group, city, neighborhood, etc) The idea that underlies the Constitution, something the President, before he/she can take office must vow to uphold, is based in majority rule with respect the citizen status rights of the minority; these rights are guaranteed equal under the law. Congress, under the sway of the 2012 tea party entrance into lawmaking, has been using the tactic that redefines what a term means to narrow meaning and pass law that does not respect certain citizens’ rights to equal representation. They are appropriating and speaking on your behalf against your right to equal coverage to health insurance, opportunities for meaningful work, equal access to affordable education, etc.


UP NEXT PT.3  But, How Did It Get This Way?







MORE VAGINA-SPEAK















THINGS MEN SAY *ABOUT * WOMAN : Pt 1
If you grew up in the 1950's, the attitude published in the New York Daily Mirror article was prevalent among American men.  But, the old form daddy knows best in that old time religion is no answer to today’s currents of social, spiritual and economic distemper. Nor, judging by the antics of conservative Christian politics in America these days, should it be.  I use the term “Christian” loosely because the religious politic of the Christian right gives body and face nationally to what seems an ailing imitatio Christi dragging behind it a terrible lack in ethical compassion for what ails us as a people. At root, an image of psyche, it cannot represent all of Christianity itself nor the wholly psyche and Jung may be right when he says, “In the long run we worship as a divine example a man who embodied the deepest meaning of life, and then, out of sheer imitation, we forget to make real our own deepest meaning―self-realization….”[i] If I and Daddy are one in our deepest most meaningful form governing forms, the governing form nearest to this may well be at work in terms of a consensual self-paternalism reshaping the American cultural myth. The shadow in it would be working, too. And that tyranny would be well worth challenging. That said,  I know as I sort among senses for things as they are in the soul of the American polis, "man", alone, (meaning "men") can never speak *to*  the idea, “woman" anyways.

What Did She Just Say?

I mean “man”, in terms of male gender, cannot define what woman is and wants for herself as a self-determined kind in body, spirit and soul. He can only speak *about* woman and woman here takes on the meaning of *an image* he has of what all women ought to be, i.e. a gender construct. But, she is the boss of “she”; he is not the boss of “she”. In other words, “he and she” in their belonging together will not work as an oppositionalism anymore. *They* want to build in life something else together these days.

I’m talking about soul, of course. Today both men and women want better soul-making. You see, in terms of material imagination and archetype, just as *an image* of god cannot contain all of what is meant by the word, *god*, so, too, what is *man* and what is *woman* cannot be contained by the image one has or the image one’s society has for all that *man/woman* is. Should you appropriate what speaks *to woman* to speak about her you will have already dumbed down and appropriated her voice speaking for itself.


To Form A More Perfect Union

If one does this in religion, i.e. dumb down the image of god to lay claim to all god means one is practicing idolatry. Therefore, and to avoid doing that in the name of religion, the religious imagination rewrites god by spelling god’s name thusly: “gd” [as in the Hebraic inheritance, JHWH.] Missing letters help to make this point stick and written thusly help us to remember it. One’s own “god-image” cannot speak all *gd* is and means.

Something like this is true for you and I now as we struggle together on national concerns relating to each other how best to (re)form a more perfect national union. Just as woman is not man and cannot speak for all he is, man is not woman and cannot speak on her behalf but must represent her voice fairly and equally and likewise must a woman do this in Congress or the Presidency if elected to represent him. That is because “a man” is not "man", the metaphor  and “a woman” is not “woman”, the metaphor.  The meaning carried in metaphorical language representing "sex" and sexual union to our specie as carried in the biological archetype as metaphors open to reveal themselves is much harder to grasp. So let’s write woman, *wmn* and man, *mn* and the one citizen body lets write *mnwmn* to keep this awareness affirmed.

Furthermore, the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness in our Constitution is what representation in citizen body vows to uphold. It is not the individual implicit bias of a man or a woman's interpretation once elected to office or superegos of special interests, religious Christian groups notwithstanding. Any time folks try to dumb down and redefine terms to coalesce governing powers in the hands of special interests to pass law that does not reflect true social consent their thinking is guilty of paternalism. There are different kinds and paternalism in and of itself i.e. consensual, self-paternalism seems to me to fall closest to the notion, self-government.

UP NEXT: Pt 2  of "Vagina-Speak" 

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[i] C.G. Jung. CW volume 13  Alchemical Studies. New Jersey: Princeton, 1967, p 53.