I read an arti­cle about a giant snow penis being erect­ed and the con­tro­ver­sy it cre­at­ed. The arti­cle dis­cussed the way the entire joke was tak­en by some of the women on cam­pus. Some of the female groups felt that “such a dis­play is demean­ing to women”, and that “women do not need to be remind­ed of the pow­er of the sym­bol of the male gen­i­talia.”

Although I agree that such a pub­lic dis­play is inap­pro­pri­ate, I com­plete­ly dis­agree with the rea­sons these women put forth. I’m will­ing to bet that the males who erect­ed the sculp­ture were not think­ing, “Hey, let’s cre­ate a huge dis­play of male gen­i­talia so that women know that their place in the world is below men”, but rather, “I’m bored. What can we do?” As one of the builders said, “We built it for fun”. I don’t believe that the motives behind such an act are sex­ist. Sometimes peo­ple just do stu­pid things.

I find that this has been a great trend in cer­tain groups of think­ing, such as part of the fem­i­nist move­ment. Sometimes mem­bers take things the wrong way. For exam­ple, I know of peo­ple who com­plain about com­mer­cials for house­hold clean­ing prod­ucts, and state that it’s sex­ist to have a woman being the token spokesper­son. They believe that the cre­ators of the ad have the mind­set that the main duty of a woman are the house­hold chores. When I see the com­mer­cial, I ask why a male isn’t the spokesper­son, why they show a male as being infe­ri­or to a female in doing the house­hold chores. And since both sides see things in an oppo­site man­ner, I decid­ed to ignore it com­plete­ly.

After all, we take offence to how we see things, not to how they are.

The idea of women being remind­ed of the pow­er of the male gen­i­talia is an exam­ple of this. In the world, there are many, many phal­lic sym­bols. Take almost every type gun as an exam­ple. This can even be broad­ened to just about every pro­jec­tile weapon. Sure, these things are reminders of the penis; they look the same, they serve a sim­i­lar pur­pose, even the actions are the same. But not every sin­gle fuck­ing object that holds a point is a phal­lic sym­bol. I don’t look at the Washington Monument and say, “Oh yeah, I have a penis. Aren’t penis­es great and supe­ri­or in every way to vagi­nas?”

There seems to be a great over­sen­si­tiv­i­ty still lurk­ing from the PC move­ment that swept Canada in the 90’s. Things are tak­en the wrong way many times, when there was no inten­tion of insult­ing any­one offend­ing any group. I wish peo­ple would­n’t place so much mean­ing in what oth­ers do, espe­cial­ly when the world is so full of sequa­cious peo­ple. Then again, the blind do lead the blind.

The only way I would be able to place some blame on the erec­tors ::ahem:: of the stat­ue would be if there was some sort of sub­con­scious sex­ist mind­set that they had. This means that the cre­ation of the snow stat­ue was not a con­scious deci­sion to men­ace the women on cam­pus, but rather a sub­con­scious exten­sion of their sex­ist ideas.

But some­how I doubt that.