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I found on my recent trip to the Art Gallery of Hamilton a good number of pieces which I thoroughly enjoyed, but I suppose that after a few days of digestion, the exhibit which has left me with the most thoughts was Fun With Penises by Donna Ibing. This series got me thinking critically about some of the ways our feminisms attempt to subvert patriarchy, and as a trans-feminist and penis-haver, about the ways in which they succeed and the places in which they might do better.
Briefly, Fun With Penises is a 1980s series of oil paintings depicting disembodied penises accompanied by decorations somewhere on the spectrum from dismissive-satirical to a more neutral connotation - for example, one penis was depicted with a construction crew with scaffolding, and another as a peeled banana; while another was depicted simply under some gorgeous floral decoration. Some commentary was provided next to the painting explaining some of the motivation behind this; straightforwardly, women are constantly depicted in art by men, more often than not as objects of sexual desire, or maybe more broadly speaking, as objects. Throughout history, it's been much rarer that women have the privilege of depicting ourselves, and by extension, of seeing our self-perception expressed in art. Fun With Penises therefore subverts this trope by instead depicting penises - and by extension men - in vulnerable or unserious positions.
I think that when I say I'm writing a trans-feminist critical review of the 1980s feminist paintings of disembodied penises, it's obvious that a major point of my critique is going to be that Ibing's framework is limited by cissexism. So, starting off with one of the weaknesses I find in this work's execution of the subversive intent: a core axiom for my feminism is that a woman is not the opposite of a man, and so I think to respond to the objectification of women by objectifying men is a non-sequitur. The objectification of men isn't anymore the opposite of objectification of women than the objectification of a fish is. I think that to subvert the objectification of women by men, one needs to depict women in a more dignified light rather than men in a less dignified context. Critically, we need women to be depicting ourselves.
I say this not because I care about men - because like, whatever - but because in this time and place, I don't care about men and I think this series cares too much about men. Men have historically been the ones to depict women in art, and when they depict us as meek, unassuming, sexual, just as bodies on a canvas like meat, or any number of things, they dominate the conversation of what being a woman means and limit our ideas of ourselves and what we can be. To realize the full potential of our self-actualization as human beings, we have to do a lifetime of unlearning just to shed all the baggage and bullshit. And even once we've deconstructed patriarchal ideas of what we can and should be, value and prioritize, we then have to actually navigate the material barriers of a society that operates from the framework we've disassembled in our minds.
That's rough stuff, and looking at this series, I don't feel it meaningfully helps me to re-consider what it means to be a woman, to undo the internalization of patriarchal thought. It doesn't help me to re-think womanhood because, plainly, it doesn't say anything about women. It asks me to think about men. A cissexist framework would have me think that re-formulating my thoughts on men necessitates me reformulating my conception of womanhood by negation, but I am more than the negation of a man. Ibing's series suggests that the prudent way to elevate women is to mediate the process with a conversation about men. I wholly reject this line of reasoning not only as male supremacist, but also as just sad and ineffective. The series burns men back with a taste of their own medicine, but it does nothing to heal the open wounds they've left me with. And while I don't want to be weird and take the high road about how hating someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die, I would like to prioritize my betterment over men's worserment. I deserve more than a bit of schadenfreude for my tribulations.
Now for something a little more relevant specifically to the trans part of the trans-feminism, I'll address the elephant in the room: a penis does not a man equal. Targeting penises as a proxy for targeting men has the obvious effect of catching me in the crossfire; I get to look at this series and see part of my body isolated and objectified. For trans women viewing this series, this is just a doubling down on the very thing the series is trying to subvert. I look at these paintings and see my body, a woman's body, objectified. The power dynamic of men objectifying women's bodies in art without giving women a voice is here replicated in the power dynamic of a cis woman objectifying trans women's bodies without giving trans women a voice. How am I supposed to form empowering and validating opinions and perspectives on my body as a woman if it's being constantly associated with men? Is my marginalization the price cis women are willing to pay for the convenience of the use of phallocentric symbolism as a shorthand for what might otherwise take more thought to convey?
But besides the nasty thorn in cis-feminism's side that my entire existence is, I'm not convinced that the equivocation between men and penises is productive to any kind of feminist agenda. We are replicating the premise that gender is tied in some innate and immutable way to our bodies. This series leaves unquestioned the premise that penises maps one-to-one onto men, and then asks "what if a penis embodied weakness, bondage and delicate beauty instead of force and power?" But I don't want to subvert the power that men have by associating penises with weakness.
Yes, a penis can and should symbolize these things just as well as we've been conditioned to think it symbolizes violence and force. But if we let those things be transitively associated to men, we are leaving open the door for how the values projected onto women's bodies and body parts are transitively associated with women. A vagina or a boob doesn't mean anything, it's an organ, and it cannot carry any kind of meaning over to the person whose body it belongs to. We need to do away entirely with this idea that any one body part or body type can mean power or weakness, beauty or ugliness, and, yes, manhood or womanhood.
In the face of all this, this series also makes me think about the ways that these values we project onto penises affect me as a penis-having trans women, specifically in the context of sex. I recently read Fucking Trans Women by Mira Bellworth, which is an 80-page zine about exactly what it says on the tin. Largely limited to the perspective of pre-op and no-op trans women, it's a valuable sexual education resource for trans women and people who have sex with us about how to do so in a way that centres our bodies and the pleasuring thereof to make the most of it, when so much of our understanding of what is even possible to do with a penis comes from trying to translate our male-centric understandings of our genitals onto our womanhood. We might find our understanding of our own bodies limited in no small part due to patriarchal values being projected onto our penises and our understandings of how they can be used.
Although I recognize that this is not directly something this series is trying to subvert, I have been thinking about how Fucking Trans Women does so much better of a job subverting patriarchal understanding of penises than Fun With Penises not just because that's something it's actually trying to do, but because of the choice of medium. I think that the choice to dialogue about our bodies and sex through visual art really limits the discussion, because now we are talking about how women's bodies are perceived and not how we can use them. An instruction manual for sex (and that is an incredible reduction of what Fucking Trans Women is) is a medium more suitable for this purpose. And I think that an important part of re-centring discussion of women's bodies onto women's perspectives should involve a re-learning of how we can use our bodies, particularly, how we can learn about women's sexuality in ways that centre women's pleasure instead of men's pleasure. I think visual art is better for discussing how we perceive women's bodies, and I'm not going to knock the importance of that! But I also think this might lend itself more to male-centrism (most especially in a heterosexual context) because generally when we're perceived, it's by someone else, which in the context of this discussion is men. But this is neither here nor there, because as I've said, I do think that changing our self-perception is important for our liberation (and men's perception of us, but it's not like they're listening.)
To bring this back home to how all this junk about sex with trans women is relevant to all women with a concrete example, in Fucking Trans Women, Bellworth repeatedly makes the point that flaccid penises are fuckable and that people might even want to fuck them. More importantly and excitingly, she goes into detail about some of the ways you can actually go about this, as she finds this to be a weak point in the state of the research at her time of writing, but the details aren't relevant to this essay in particular. What is important is that we are taught a penis is fuckable when and only when it's hard; in a sexual context, the only thing to do with a soft penis is to make it not soft anymore, and significant difficulty in this transformation is a source of shame and embarrassment.
This is, in her analysis, at least partly a consequence of the projection of patriarchal values onto the penis. A penis is only sexy and fuckable when it's hard because hardness means force, power, domination, exertion of the will. To be soft is to be malleable, fluid, vulnerable, to be subject to, and for these things to be applicable to an ostensibly male organ is unthinkable under patriarchy. A penis shouldn't be able to be stimulated in such an embarrassing state. And so it goes unquestioned that a stimulated penis is a rock-hard penis.
So then, the reason I say that all this stuff about learning to fuck trans women's penises is relevant to our deconstruction of the way we think of gendered bodies is that when we re-think what's possible in screwing penises, we are forced to re-think the values we associate with them. A penis is just as good at penis-ing in a flaccid state as in an erect one, and can undergo a beautiful diversity of sexual stimulation characterized by the gentleness, grace, finesse and temperance that one might be tempted to associate exclusively with clitoral stimulation.
When we decouple these feminine-coded values from particular anatomy, we ungender them and undermine the notion that masculine or feminine values have any basis in biology or reality. That is to say, delicate beauty is something that can be equally interpreted from a penis as from a vagina because it isn't a feminine trait, it's a human one. This is to the great benefit of trans women and (although for now they probably aren't interested in listening) cis men, and people who have sex with us, because we can have better sex and a better understanding of our bodies that's centred in what makes us feel good. But when men are forced or allowed to confront that their penises, too, are beautiful and dainty flowers, we remove the patriarchy's ability to associate beauty and gentleness with weakness or fickleness. When men learn to stimulate a penis the same way as a clitoris, we can't hide behind cissexism anymore to pretend that having sex with women is difficult, that making us orgasm is hard or impossible just because the raw force with which one can get off an erect penis doesn't map onto the shred of finesse with which one stimulates a clitoris. That is to say, male supremacy won't be able to pretend that the technique with which a penis is understood to be stimulated is superior to the technique with which a clitoris is understood to be stimulated when men internalize that the values and techniques they associate with clitorises and their stimulation are also just as well associable with penises.
While I don't think this was necessarily done with trans women in mind, I do wonder if in Fun With Penises, Ibing chooses to depict the penises as flaccid and pretty intentionally. I don't think that this is meant to be mocking penises wholesale; I think that the intended effect here is that any man who refuses to see feminine, delicate beauty as dignified and good will be scandalized and discomforted by the art, but that anyone who isn't blinded by this stupid gendered coding of softness as inferior will be able to appreciate the organ. Sure, most of the penises are situated in unserious gag contexts, but the penises themselves are small, flaccid, and pretty. I think the depictions of them are faithful, respectful, and altogether flattering. The penises take on negative connotations only because of the values that the viewer brings to the table. While most of my review here has been going over what I think could've been done differently with this series, I do like some things about these paintings, but I have less notes about the things I like. I think this is something Ibing got right with the series; if you come to it with no preconceptions that values associated with femininity are inferior to those associated with masculinity, it's easy to see these paintings as silly but ultimately respectful and nonthreatening depictions of a beautiful organ of the human body.
Overall, I think this series certainly did a good job in its function as art in that it gave me over ten thousands words of thoughts (the saying is true), and although maybe the imperfection with which it seems to attempt this subversion might not seem worth the kind of milquetoast jab at men, it was the 80's, man. It was probably at least a little more cutting at the time, and I respect what it's going for, I just want tomorrow's feminism to be better than today's. I could probably say a lot more about this series, but I appreciate that it's gotten me thinking critically about what it means to subvert sexist understandings of women and women's bodies, and some of the subtler ways I think male-centric thinking can weasel its way into our self-understanding. For me, the most important takeaway here is that I want to learn and define what womanhood means to me in its own right, and not just in contrast to what manhood means. I am confident that without trans-feminist perspectives at this point in history, we are going to hit a ceiling on our deconstruction of patriarchal paradigms. Our liberation can only be stunted when we fall into traps of cis, white, abled, or liberal feminisms, among many many others.