Word: phallus
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While the cause of the destroyer of the snow penis’ action is cause for great sadness, as is any violence (“gendered” or not), undergraduate pranks often depend as much on the penile as the puerile. If the representation of an erect phallus moves her to violence, perhaps the penis police should try to avoid museums and sculpture gardens. Since ice is, by definition, a temporary medium, the destroyer of the penis might have restrained herself and let nature take her course, which inevitably takes care of the “problem...
According to Mary C. Cardinale ’02-’03, one of the phallus-breakers, the sculpture’s defenders labeled it a legitimate exercise of “free speech.” It is difficult to accept such a defense at face value, since “speech” suggests that those who built the snow penis were actually saying something...
...their own account, they weren’t. Confronted with feminist speculation that the phallus symbolized the power of masculinity, one of the creators responded simply: “Smart kids overanalyze things.” The same creator called the sculpture a “junior high prank...
This fracas should not concern free speech, when the creators themselves acknowledge they had nothing profound to say. Transforming the question of free speech to defend displays like the snow phallus – created not in spite of it being obscene, but because it was obscene—corrupts the First Amendment’s legitimacy as a valid defense for real artistic expression...
...debate over the snow phallus is not the first time college students have applied free-speech arguments to similarly degrading examples. For example, at Wesleyan University last fall, College President Douglas S. Bennet finally banned the practice of “chalking,” a euphemism for students scribbling smut on campus sidewalks, and a mainstream medium of expression at a lot of other schools nationwide. Bennet worried that the chalked slogans on Wesleyan’s campus were getting too obscene; some made pornographic references to faculty members. Opponents of his decision equate the chalked obscenities with free...