The Reign of the Phallus
Keuls, Eva C.
Phallocracy is not one of the regimes Aristotle knew and studied. Its discovery belongs to Prof. Eva C. Keuls, as set forth in her new book The Reign of the Phallus. Like the regimes about which...
...women's studies, among both classicists and the general public (lured by its lush raspberry cover, tantalizing title, and hundreds of illustrations of erotic/pornographic Greek vases), Keuls most desires not the scholarly or the curious, but the ideologically correct reader...
...After all, the phallocrats of Athens were avid heterosexuals...
...The duo of Socrates and Plato she wrongs not by censure but by praise...
...Her vested interest in finding signs of feminist resistance prevents her from considering the possibility that the women of Aristophanes' plays serve as comic equivalents of more powerful persons, on the spear side, who might carry out non-ridiculous schemes toward the same end as the women: peace...
...For his faulty biological speculation, Aristotle ranks as "one of the fiercest misogynists of all times...
...TOPICS AND GUEST SPEAKERS Panelists will discuss a variety of important First Amendment issues including: pornography and freedom of speech...
...This is bizarre...
...As to Plato, his dialogues are not statements of dogma...
...that is, phallocracy may be upright or flaccid...
...Instead, phallocracy has a "severe and crass" classical form and "modern, more subtle, forms...
...Keuls applauds Sparta's non-expansionist foreign policy...
...Although this book will circulate outside the ghetto of Diana Schaub is assistant editor at the National Interest...
...Her sense of humor is serious ly out of kilter...
...monogamy...
...Political activities are a most notable omission...
...Her contention: The women of Athens were the herm-choppers...
...Feminism has come a long way since then...
...Why must we assume that a chaste bachelor is a homosexual, especially when the bachelor in question is a philosopher, a breed known to favor the single life (Locke, Nietzsche, etc...
...Lawrence Instead, in Athens the phallus was regarded and displayed as "a kind of weapon: a spear or war club, and a scepter of sovereignty...
...the freedom of association...
...Her handling of Socrates is worse She construes his dying words as a ribald phallic joke and supports that construction with some medical misinformation ("men tend to have erections at the moment of death") on a par with any of Aristotle's errors...
...She speaks of the "doctrinaire feminism of Socrates and Plato...
...In fact, those images which most unambiguously portray male supremacy are found on symposium (party) cups-the ancient equivalent of our stag films and pornographic magazines...
...The herms adorned court yards, public and private, throughout Athens...
...The suppressed rage of the much put-upon female citizenry finally erupted in rebellion-organized rebellion...
...Having teased the reader with a promise and a hint-a promise of an "original" solution respecting the identity of the profaners and a transparent, not to say naked, hint at sexually motivated sabotage-she goes on to detail the plight of the women of Athens, the restrictions, degradations, and abuses that not only justify, but make laudable their alleged revolt...
...Unable to extract enough feminine anguish from the reading of history as formerly written, today's female Jacobins have taken to rewriting it...
...That Keuls's radical feminist forebears were responsible for this act of "genital aggression" is not revealed until the fourteenth chapter, even though the very first describes the event and the ensuing scandal ("the Watergate of ancient Athens," a singularly unapt analogy...
...In addition to a semi-formal banquet Saturday evening, there will be opportunities for outdoor recreation in sunny northern California...
...Fantasy, however, seldom accords with reality...
...hers is scholarship in the service of a cause...
...Unlike the Spartans she admires, Keuls has not spared Athens...
...But even without the exaggeration, many features of ancient life are repellent to modern sensibilities...
...Early commitments to speak have been received from U.S...
...For Keuls, mercy toward Athens passes expectation and understanding...
...In The Bostonians (an expose of peculiarly American sexual politics), Henry James says of his female Jacobins: "They read a great deal of history together, and read it ever with the same thought-that of finding confirmation in it for the idea that their sex had suffered inexpressibly, and that at any moment in the course of human affairs the state of the world would have been so much less horrible (history seemed to them in every way horrible), if women had been able to press down the scale...
...The vase paintings, whether of festivals, myths, or everyday life, whether lovely or brutal and unsettling, are alien to modern eyes...
...On the eve of the expedition to Sicily, a misconceived and mismanaged jingoistic venture, these ubiquitous statues were defaced-and, according to Keuls, castrated...
...Keuls thinks that Athens was the Greek city most guilty of these offenses...
...The evidence amounts to the claim that "a certain feminism was in the air...
...Travel scholarships will be available to defray student expenses...
...Where possible, visiting students will be housed in Stanford students' apartments...
...O 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985...
...Political expedience, not mercy, dictated Sparta's treatment of its vanquished enemy...
...Though "doctrinaire" is a compliment in her lexicon, neither Socrates nor Plato deserves the appellation...
...She takes the ridiculous schemes of Aristophanes' protagonists (sex strikes and distaff putsches) to be allusions to actual female protest...
...This is the more remarkable because Plato never married and, as far as we know, never had any sexual liaison with a woman...
...Each picture, rather than serving in lieu of a thousand words, seems to require a thousand words of explanation...
...Because she takes the view of a character to be the view of the author, she is not able to get beneath the "oily" surface of the Oeconomicus...
...Delegations of law students are especially welcome...
...One wonders how creatures so kept and so debased could have possibly found the will to resist, even in such an anonymous way...
...In her vindication of Sparta, Keuls states that Sparta "is entitled to the gratitude of the Western world for a sublime act of mercy: after defeating Athens, she spared the city and its inhabitants...
...In its earlier, more virile condition, phallocracy was male rule founded on the identity of the phallus with power...
...To take the case of Socrates: A man whose wisdom consists in knowledge of his ignorance is not likely to be doctrinaire about anything...
...Such wondering need not absorb one overmuch, however, since the evidence for the women's night rampage is so flimsy-more vulnerable to be cut down than those stone appendages...
...commercial speech...
...the religion clauses and government neutrality...
...Her mistake is to read comedy as if it were history, and she does so in disregard of her own caveat about this error...
...the symposium, call or write: Mr...
...But they seem to rewrite primarily for one another...
...Decorative art is not "painted history...
...Keuls doubts (and here she stands on the creditable authority of Thucydides) whether justice was done...
...Moreover, why should heterosexual attraction or ex perience conduce to the recognition of female equality...
...20006 (202) 822-8138 53 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 The assumption that they are leaves Keuls unable to reconcile the seemingly contradictory proposals forwarded in the Republic and the Laws (sexual communism vs...
...The result was sexual slavery and imperialism-bellicosity at home and abroad...
...She says straightforwardly: "I hope that many readers will come to this book primarily through an interest in human sexuality, patterns of social dominance, and possibilities of reform, rather than from a background in ancient history...
...Keuls transforms even innocent-looking scenes into tableaux of exploitation...
...Court of Appeals Judges Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, and John Hart Ely, Dean of Stanford Law School and author of "Democracy-Distrust...
...telecommunications and broadcast deregulation...
...Keuls confounds Ischomachus with Xenophon...
...Phallocracy or not, Athens sired genius, all kinds: philosophic, dramatic, artistic, political...
...Keuls misreads the rest of the greats just as badly...
...The air samples come mainly from Aristophanes and his post-expedition, post-defeat plays of female insurrection: Lysistrata, Thesmophoriazusaz and The Parliament of Women...
...Perhaps it is not surprising that a feminist should step to the defense of a denatured polity like Sparta with its institutionalized disparagement of family life and its forced economic equality...
...But as it is known that the wife of a certain Ischomachus became a notorious adultress (mistress to her son-in-law) and as everyone knows of Socrates' inability to govern his termagant wife Xanthippe, Xenophon's real point may be to show the folly of attempting to manage one's wife, or at least the folly of male confidence in the outcome...
...Her own allegiance is with Sparta, its formidable and victorious rival...
...The Society is represented at more than 65 law schools...
...This sacrilege seemed a jinx upon the upcoming invasion of Sicily...
...Keuls is right to emphasize the political seriousness of these works...
...Xenophon's dialogue on household management (Oeconomicus), which includes a discussion between Socrates and Ischomachus on how to manage a wife, is called "an oily tale, full of male condescension...
...The scenes they depict are various, but they are far from a complete record of Athenian life...
...Though she regards Socrates and Plato as her allies, Keuls does not refrain from unseemly, close to salacious, surmises about their private lives: "Plato developed into the Western world's first feminist...
...Herms were stone pillars affixed with a bust of the god Hermes and his erect phallus...
...Eugene Meyer, Executive Director The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies 1825 Eye Street, NW Washington, D.C...
...Vase paintings are her main subject...
...But the use of the word "sublime" is revealing...
...Keuls does not recognize the laughable as laughable...
...Like the regimes about which Aristotle taught, phallocracy comes in varieties, but not good and bad varieties (as the proper regimes monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and their perversions tyranny, oligarchy, ohhlocracy...
...INFORMATION For information about the society or registration for Mr...
...Among the Athenians, the cult of the phallus was not an expression of reverence for the mystery of generation, as it was for certain primitive peoples and for neoprimitives like D.H...
...Brian J. Brine Symposium Director Stanford Federalist Society Stanford Law School Stanford, CA 94305 (415) 497-1551 OR J. MADISON The Federalist Society is a nationwide organization of conservative and libertarian lawyers and law students dedicated, to the principles of limited government and a limited judiciary...
...Whereas Sparta had a Lawgiver, Lycurgus, and lots of nameless law-abiders, Athens had almost a superfluity of extraordinary individuals...
...Authors seem to think that simple awareness of a hermeneutic sin will preserve them from committing it-in other words, that "knowledge is virtue...
...THE REIGN OF THE PHALLUS: SEXUAL POLITICS IN ANCIENT ATHENS Eva C. Keuls/Harper & Row/$27.50 Diana Schaub The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies presents A Symposium on the First Amendment MARCH 1-3 Stanford Law School PUBLIC PARTICIPATION All persons interested in philosophy and policy applications of the First Amendment are invited to attend...
...Clearly, Keuls feels no mere antiquarian interest in the sexual mores of the Athenians...
...In fact, a state of perpetual war with their unsubdued slave population, the Helots, kept the martial Spartans from engaging in long or frequent campaigns outside their borders...
...it led, in the manner of a religious community, to a flurry of expiatory trials...
...Those readers with some "background in ancient history" might spy her falsifications and absurdities...
...Such phenomena, then as now, indicate something about the status of women in the hearts and minds of men...
...she gets jokes that aren't there and doesn't get those that are...
...Especially unsavory are those, like slavery, that contravene our belief in natural individual rights...
...hence we must assume he was homosexual by inclination...
...In writing social history, Keuls relies only secondarily on literary sources...
...There will be approximately twenty speakers, including prominent judges and academicians...
...So now, after the lapse of more than two millennia, she has new suspects and new evidence to offer in the never-adjourned court of history...
...Chief among these is her dotty detective work in the case of the mysterious "mutilation of the herms...
Vol. 18 • December 1985 • No. 12
