2 October 2009: "Will a crocheted penis take my male brand to the next level? #cock_crafts #crocheting"

This post is about phallologocentrism. Carles' concern about the patriarcal order always reverts to the dilemma presented by the supposed aggressive evolutionary quest for mates in the male: "Feel bad for women in 2day’s society since a lot of men just see them as ‘fuck dolls’ without realizing it. Sad that men just think with their peters and hurt women and hurt themselves." But is this biological imperative in fact a phenomenological apparition, a product of the perception of an epiphenomenon in the wake of promiscuous expression?

To rephrase in the terms Carles chooses to explore this thorny question, is it inherently patriarchal to write of the penis in the context of craft, traditionally the preserved domain, the liminal space in which femininity blossomed free from predation by masculinist lawgivers? Domestic crafts such as crochet flourished in the gendered space set off by the sexual segregation predominant in Western bourgeois society. The yarn phallus is at once a parodic taunt at the patriarchal order and a manifestation of its hegemonic grip. As Luce Irigaray wrote in Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un, "It is only through the pleasure of the 'body' -- of the Other? -- that [perpetrators of the phallic economy] might articulate something. But men would understand nothing about it, because what they enjoy is the enjoyment of the organ: the phallic obstacle." The crochet penis, as Carles has adroitly observed is the material sign of that obstacle and its trace. "It’s always a good sign when u wonder if something could make ur life better," he remarks about the phallus, cleverly punning on the word "sign." And the wonder at the sign's usefulness, whether it effaces the body or lifts it to the level of meaning within a phallologocentric libidinal economy, whether the yarn phallus itself inscribes us into language objectively and subjectively, is a "good sign" indeed. But the question is a pregmant one: is our entrace into subjectivity via the phallus an "improvement" over the prelingual state conceptualized by Kristeva and lauded in The Newly Born Woman (La jeune née) by Cixous and Clément in these terms: "We know this perfectly well: it happens that women talk, that they step out of their function as sign...woman is in a primitive state; she is the incarnation of origin."

Carles is certainly thinking of these words when he proposes an inverse penis envy, in which one yearns not for the world-ordering phallus to anchor meaning in a biased language but the artificial phallus that can unfix meaning and free it to circulate, enabling the return of lalangue and pure expression -- the abject, the onanistic, the polymorphously perverse and the joyous scatology of the prenatal: "It’s chill to have a ‘real penis’, since u can do stuff with it like urinate or ‘tug off’, but sometimes I feel like there would be less pressure on men if they had some sort of yarn-based art+craft generated penis." Out from under the onus of the phallus, men would rediscover the body as it exists outside the domain of inscription/proscription. "I think life might be better if we could have some sort of ‘replica peens’/sexual organs." This would usher in the possibility of the conception of an egalitarian order beyond the Law, since "Most men just see penis size as a social status symbol."

After pointing out the metaphoric cancer that the genital sign system imparts to human society, Carles concludes by drawing together the stray threads of his argument, linking phallologocentrism with consumerism and the post-ironic pursuit of signifiers that retain their power to denote the self in the shadow of the Other: "Much like ‘unEarthing a buzzband’, early detection is critical." But we can only find a mirror in our critical scrutiny, and a return to the primordial substance, the earth. And the Earth mother?