Penn State Men's Action

[gerry]

Kristin Colella is a senior majoring in English and is a Daily Collegian columnist. Her e-mail address is kac395@psu.edu.


My Opinion
Education is essential in preventing rape


I just found out the urinal cakes in the men's bathroom in the HUB contain an anti-rape message.
"You hold the power to stop rape in your hands," to be exact.
All I can say is, "Thank God." Penn State is finally starting to get it.
I am so sick of our society constantly putting the burden to stop rape on women by telling us to protect ourselves from men.
Let's face it -- the only way rape will ever stop is if rapists stop raping.
How many times have women been told the long list of things we must do to prevent ourselves from being attacked?
Don't go out late at night, never walk alone, don't drink too much, don't dress too provocatively, carry Mace.
I've seen those reminders written on posters in women's bathrooms all over campus, so yeah, I'm overjoyed the message to stop rape is finally being sent to men.
I know most men who read the urinal cake message are not rapists, but we have to acknowledge the fact that some men on this campus do rape.
You might have the image of a rapist embedded in your mind as a man dressed in black lurking in the bushes at night. While some rapes are committed by strangers, most are committed by someone the victim knows. We have to let go of the stereotype of the lurking man and realize the guy you sit next to in class or party with on the weekends might be the perpetrator of a rape or sexual assault.
As I learned in my women's studies class last semester, telling women to lock their doors and stay inside at night are reactive responses. They do not reach the source of the problem -- the men who rape. We are simply limiting the things women are allowed to do instead of seeking proactive solutions. What our society should do is explore the reasons why men rape and educate boys and men that they cannot rape because rape is wrong. This message has to reach Penn State students in every way possible, and that includes urinal cakes. One of our readers sent a letter to the editor last Friday about the urinal cake message. He insinuated the message was ridiculous because he alone cannot stop all rape. Here is a piece of his letter: "It was informing me that my penis was so powerful that it could all by itself stop rape -- not just some rape but all rape could be stopped if my magic wand just willed it so."
The reader completely missed the point. The message is not meant to accuse him of being a rapist or suggest he alone can stop rape.
Rather, its purpose is to reach as many men as possible and try to change some of their attitudes toward rape.
Some men who read the message might have always thought sexual crimes were the victims' responsibility to prevent; others might have even committed a rape or sexual assault.
While one man certainly can't stop all rape, one man can stop raping. And one man's changing attitude toward rape can help create a society that places blame on the perpetrator rather than the victim.
I know I've been talking a lot about crimes against women, but it's important to realize that men can also be the victims of rape and sexual assault. In both cases, though, men commit the majority of offenses.
Look, I'm not trying to man-bash here. I think men have a tremendous amount of power within themselves, but this power should be used in a positive way.
There's been a lot of talk these days about female empowerment, but what about male empowerment?
Men truly have the power to stop rape. It's in their hands.


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[elfeminista]

Those utinal things should be in every public bathroom.

"He insinuated the message was ridiculous because he alone cannot stop all rape. Here is a piece of his letter: "It was informing me that my penis was so powerful that it could all by itself stop rape -- not just some rape but all rape could be stopped if my magic wand just willed it so."

Great...

One other thing that also can help, I think, anyway, is that we males can keep our eyes peeled for rapists or potential repists, and if by any chance someone brags about having done it, play amateur detective.

[gerry]

The action also reverses the meaning of "Urinal," the famous work of Surrealist Marcel Duchamp, which degrades women and suggests rape.

[elfeminista]

*** BARONESS ELSA VON FREITAG- LORINGHOVES GAVE MACEL DUCHAMP THE URINAL AND SAID "HERE, CALL THIS ART" ***


My friend Gillian just Wrote a paper about this- if anyone is interested I can send it to them..


The book bellow also shows who this interesting Woman was. Her case is stereotypical of males coopting of Women's ideas,and achievements and calling it their own. Of course, Women's History, art and cultural contributions were and are still erased and ascribed to mens "genius" until some determined Woman digs up the evidence. Erasure *is* part of the patriarchal formula. By selectively erasing specific aspects of the Women's movement aspects that puts a name and a face to the oppression. Herstory, feminism, becomes part of His-story.
I think Heart writes about this often, and Mary Daly was writing about this and women before her were writing about it.

Here is some proof= At the Saint Mark's bookstore here in NYC, one of the best bookstores for politics Lit vrit etc., "Off our backs" is no longer being carried while arcane unread and ridiculously infantile (man)archist rags litter the periodicals section, never being bought. The man who is the magazine buyer explained that "well nobody buys it, why don't you get some of your lady friends to buy more ".... In the same store Catharine Mackinnon, Mary Daly, Dworkin, Shulamit Firestone were on the shelves 2 years ago. Not anymore. but there were 8 copies of gender trouble on the Shelves. Leslie Feinberg, Camile paglia, Judith Butler, Suzy bright, (I mean suzie bright under Women's studies!), Books on islamic feminists, socialist feminists, anyone *but* second wave radical feminists line the shelves.

The urinal and the concept was Elsa Von Frietag's creation... read about her life (buy this cool book) and read about his life, look at her art, and then tell me who conceptualized the Urinal.

Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity:
A Cultural Biography.
By Irene Gammel.
Illustrated. 534 pp. Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press. $39.95.

The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) -- known to her amused, admiring, often quailing friends simply as the Baroness -- was a public event, a proto-Happening. She painted her shaved head red. She wore a tomato-can bra, a bustle with a taillight and a bird cage around her neck with live canaries inside. The streets of New York were her theater. Dada was the name of her act.

Many people who watched her clanking imperiously through Greenwich Village in the years just after World War I probably took her for only another New York nut job; until recently, history has done that too. But she was also an artist, a poet, a voluble fixture of the cultural avant-garde and a guerrilla fighter in sexual politics. This is how she comes across in Irene Gammel's ''Baroness Elsa,'' the first full account of the Baroness's life. It attempts, on the whole persuasively, to position her as a catalytic figure in the American art of her day and in the evolution of certain more contemporary forms -- junk art, performance art, body art.

Despite her title, the Baroness was no blue-blood. Born Else Hildegard Plötz in a German resort town on the Baltic, she was the child of a bullying middle-class father and a mother who died insane. In her teens she high-tailed it to Berlin, where she worked as a chorus girl and lived off the kindness or perversity of various men and women, setting the pattern for a picaresque, pickup life. She must have been an experience. Tall, slender and boyishly handsome, with an explosive intelligence and assertive presence, she made sexual gratification an evangelical pursuit. After moving to Munich, she became immersed in the vanguard art world, the only environment in which she ever felt at home. It provided her with work (modeling), sex (all sorts) and two of her three marriages, the first to the architect August Endell, the second to the writer Felix Paul Greve.

Greve, who was gay when she met him, was a slippery character. In 1909, to escape debts, he faked suicide and left for America. Elsa followed later. He deserted her in Sparta, Ky., and headed for Canada, where he became Frederick Philip Grove, a novelist and a family-values man. Elsa made her way to Manhattan and within a year married an expatriate German baron, Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven, who in 1914 sailed to Europe to fight in the war and took his own life a few years later, leaving her only his name.

Elsa came into her own as part of the New York Dada scene. Her sexual fieldwork continued, with many successes and a few notable disappointments. She developed a crush on Marcel Duchamp, who responded with passive evasion. (''Marcel, Marcel, I love you like hell, Marcel'' was her cri de coeur.) William Carlos Williams initiated a casual flirtation only to learn that she was not a casual person. She ambushed him at his home in Rutherford, N.J.; he retaliated by decking her on a Manhattan street.

She started to make art: painted portraits, witty, delicate sculptures of found materials and assemblage-style costumes. Her beyond-the-fringe daring was a power of example for her male colleagues -- the wannabe Dadaist Ezra Pound spoke approvingly of her ''principle of nonacquiescence'' -- and may have produced collaborative results. Ms. Gammel presents strong evidence that the Baroness supplied Duchamp with the urinal from which his ground-breaking ''Fountain'' was made, and provided the prototype for his cross-dressed Rrose Selavy.

If her contributions to art went unacknowledged, she was recognized for her poetry -- thanks to other women. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, editors of The Little Review, published her experimental work, which mixed personal statement, fractured syntax and phonetic sounds. Djuna Barnes, a devoted fan, commissioned Elsa to write a memoir, which she planned to use as raw material for a biography.

[gerry]

I don't know what to make of von Freytag herself, but she sure does belong in dada history.

What you (is it you saying this?) write about St Mark's Bookstore is so very telling.

I stand corrected on what i called "Urinal"---actually called "The Fountain."

And yes the Jesuits have always been a pain in the ass for the Church.

[elfeminista]

Re; Saint Mark's bookstore.

Yes I am saying it and since i wrote this i took the opportunity of it being fresh on my mind to call them again and bitch about it.

Ps.= "urinal" is fine too... I mean, after all, i'ts DaDa.

[sam]

I was in that bookstore about a year ago and they had no Dworkin books. They did have all the college porn rags prominently displaying lots of faux-lesbian posturing; one feminist wrote in an email that she calls them thesbians, and if I thought most internet readers were smart enough to catch the subtle pun I'd use the term more regularly.

[elfeminista]

Hey Sam, the gentlemn at Saint Marks bookstore fought me tooth and nail but in the end promissed he is going to get off our backs if he can. he was mumbling something about the distributors 'maybe' not including it, and denying that there was any political reason for dropping it. He also said regarding the books "we sell what is popular".

.I often order a feminist book or two books from them and then *not* go pick them up. They dont send them back then ...they put them out on the shelf, and gee whadaya know, they sell.

[sam]

I often order a feminist book or two books from them and then *not* go pick them up. They dont send them back then ...they put them out on the shelf, and gee whadaya know, they sell.

Oooh, I like that strategy and I'm going to use it with local bookstores.

[deedle]

Heh. I like it too

A little bit of subversion can go a long way