Thought of the Day: The Penis and... that other thing

So you know how Freud (and consequently everyone else) talks about this penis envy, how women are messed up because they feel a "lack," and they'd better admit it or else it's a repressed lack, which is like keeping a crocodile in your bathtub. And you know how every feminist worth her salt has chafed and howled and mauled that poor sap to pieces ever since. Well, I was thinking. Everyone spends twelve years getting ideas put into their heads; if we're lucky we get another four to pull them out, and then the rest of our lives to put new ones together, but throughout it a creative mind can look at any situation or idea and tug from it the phenomenological experience. If there's anything that's been hemmed in by external forces and demands, it's human genitalia. But they're right there, part of us, and so anytime we feel like trying to think of them in a new way, as we experience it, we can.

Anyway, I was thinking in this particular, phenomenological way. And I recalled the first time it really struck me (though I knew it as "fact" long before) that men do not have an interior. Which is to say, they don't have an interior experientially because they can't get to it. No one can. They are sealed off. And I thought, "How sad!" and I had felt a twinge of envy, because it seemed safer, as well as a little disgust, because it seemed like a primitive thing to be just a one-way conduit from beginning to end, like a roundworm, and also a trifle unhealthy to be so closed that no one could get inside but with a knife (anus aside; but someone else would have to discuss that possibility).

I didn't grow up with brothers. I peed outdoors. I sometimes wished I were a boy because then people would not tell me how little blonde girls are sold as sex slaves across the border, and that I had better stay away from highways, roads, and public places in general. But it never occurred to me to want an extra, external little homunculus, the aspect of maleness with the least benefits. It seemed like it would get caught in things.

So from that perspective, preceding Freud or anyone else, the penis seemed like a front porch, a fine thing to have in many situations, probably. But my own construction was the natural thing, the normative as they say in theory. I had the door to the house itself. Female anatomy goes somewhere. And even though it isn't as ostentatious as a front porch, it is tremendously useful, and has its own architecture, the door knob, little windows, trim and such. We don't say of our doors, "I am so fucked up because I have this, this -- what? A NOT-PORCH! That's what it is. A complete lack of porch." The door's point of reference is the interior. We go through doors, and we sit on porches, and they aren't really comparable. So this comparison thing should probably stop, because even though the parts do indeed work together, they are not two sides of the same thing, not a simple + and -. Men have a lack. They lack an accessible interior. Women have a lack. We lack a... whatever that thing is.