Tuesday, September 1, 2009

What If Yonic?

This question is the result of a severely random train of thouhgt. It started when I read The Sex Which Is Not One by Luce Irigaray. We readthis article in my English 251class (my teacher was very apologetic afterwards because so many people were offended. I just kinda wanted him to drop a pair and say "Yeah, we read this. It was racy, but I expect everyone to deal with it maturely and if we have a serious poblem come talk to me," and then continue disussion, but that didn't happen.) But we discussed it with the backdrop of literature and how males write versus how women write and how each sex enjoys literature differently.
One of the questions that was posed was whether or not the structure of the story would be different had women been the forerunners of literature. My teacher mentioned that the geeral form of a plot follows the sexual experience for men, with a lot of rising action, a climax and then falling action and a conclusion. A peak. From what I understand and can imagine, the experience for women is much different, and my teacher asked us if we thouhgt that it would affect literature. And I think it really would. I think that sex might be one of the most human, spiritual, and personal experiences a person can have and it follows that something of that nature would effect (affect? I can never get it right.) many aspects of a society of humans.
Ever since that discussion, I have just wondered how far that is true. Our society - and most societies - is a patriarchal one and it shows. Look at skyscrapers. Each one is phallic and each architect wants theirs to be bigger, taller, and more pleasing than any other. Weapons too. Swords, spears, arrows, even guns are a tad phallic and were designed (by men) to be powerful and durable.
So my question is how would everything be different if we were in a strictly matriarchal society? Buildings? Weapons? Literature? What else?
I think it would be really cool to write a fantasy short story about a society like that, where everything is yonic (which was such a hard word to find online. It took me ten minutes of googling to find the opposite of phallic and it is still not a perfect term).

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