nawl

There is an enormous phallus outside of the engineering building.

You're not going to believe me, but I actually didn't notice it for a couple weeks. You see, the CS building is directly across the street from the engineering building, and I normally enter it from the other side. Most of my interaction with the engineering building thus far has been purposeful, so I am focused on, say, the object of my emergency between-class food run to the E-Quad Cafe instead of looking for sexual imagery around me, no matter how obvious.

However, one day I approached the department from a slightly different angle, and bam, there it was.

So the department lunch the other day was held in the SEAS convocation room, which like many other official rooms is lined with portraits of the past deans. Including this one, of Mr. Robert G. Jahn '51, professor of Aerospace Engineering. (And on a side note, founder of the PEAR lab, which gets a lot less discussion than I would expect for a funded laboratory in a major university appears to be dedicated to serious study of psychic powers.)

He has been depicted just emerging from the E-Quad, innocently standing at an angle to look at the viewer, the gigantic phallus positioned just so in the background, subtly reinforcing his masculinity.

This has to be intentional.

I asked "Do people not notice? Do they not care?" Someone responded, "Every once in a while someone complains, and then the art museum sends out pamphlets on how to appreciate modern art." A site on Princeton's sculptures says this:

Not everyone feels the same about Upstart 2. The Princeton Zoning Board also fought the placement of it as originally proposed. A change in the direction of the thrust of the sculpture satisfied the board. Different reservations about the work have been expressed by women, especially engineering students who feel the Engineering School is less than welcoming to females. "No engineer will deny the phallic implications of the statue," writes Donna Riley '93 in She's an Engineer? Princeton Alumnae Reflect.

Yesterday afternoon, I ventured inside Firestone library for the first time.

I was greeted by a circle, round and full, symbol of the vagina, the birth canal, the circle of life and death, of a woman's curves, of nonlinear reasoning.

(I should point out here that this is the main library. Technical books are, as far as I know, all contained in the engineering library, the math library, the biology library, and various other special collections around campus.)

In the background of the photo you can see card catalogs. Old ones. Huge ones. You can even search the scanned versions online. Wow. And here I thought all of the paper card catalogs of the universe had already been converted into postmodern art projects.

One of the awesomest pieces we read in my Women in French Literature course was a piece of feminist writing whose title was "O", a circle. It was generally about women in nature. Names were deemed to be symbolic of the masculine hegemony of rational thought, so the women in the story were associated with smells, instead. The idea of a plot was apparently also inherently masculine, so instead it was a series of vignettes about sensation. It is raining, and the women are gathered under some sort of shelter. One of them has to micturate and they gather around her while she pees and it rains. They're swimming in the ocean and they come upon a floating dead animal carcass. It smells bad and they all vomit.

That, along with Peter Handke's Selbstbesichtigung, of which we only really read part, but the excerpt stayed on my wall in Berkeley, remains in my memories of favorite language class experiences.

In any case, Jan has been complaining nonstop about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and so we went and found Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, which is about as far from the former in both style and content as I could imagine. My first semester in Berkeley it seemed like everyone in Wilde was either taking or facilitating the female sexuality course, and Cunt was the "textbook", so there were multiple copies floating around the common rooms at all times. I picked it up and read it in one sitting. There are sections that are guaranteed to annoy just about any reader, but at the very least it's a thought-provoking rant.

The great thing about finding the book in the library, though, was that it was in the feminism/women's studies section, leading to all sorts of great finds. The best was La Femme, an ancient four-volume work with a textured multicolor cover, a frontispiece illustration depicting the mythical development of woman, and an introduction wherein the author went on in great length about how he was embarking on a study of the female across every single living species in order to back up his claim that the women's movement was a denial of nature. I couldn't find a date, on the book, but a search in the online card catalog turns up this entry.