On a more serious note:

Noah's posting on the "infamous snow penis" was the first I'd heard about this particular controversy, so I can't be sure that I'm not repeating what the pundits and wags at The Economist and elsewhere have already said...but I can't help but find the whole issue unspeakably disturbing. Of course, it's all too easy to judge someone based upon a couple of comments, possibly taken out of context, as published in a newspaper like The Crimson, but still: every quote attributed to the student who tore this penis down makes me stereotype her as another "feminist," utterly without introspection, who has been brainwashed by the Andrea Dworkin / Catherine MacKinnon school of feminist anti-pornography into spouting the same old man-hating cliches about the reign of the phallus. Which is a shame; I'm sure she's much more thoughtful than her comments make her seem.

But how can you begin to respond to a comment like "It was offensive because it was pornographic?" A penis made out of snow can't be pornographic, no more than an actual penis can; there's no context. And outrage without context can be a dangerous thing. Here's what I mean: over the summer, an enormous flower sculpture of an erect penis was constructed in a New York park (in Brooklyn, I believe) as a celebration of gay pride; I can't remember which park, but the sculpture made the front page of The Village Voice, and I recall it as being much larger and better-constructed than the 9-foot cock in Harvard Yard. Which is just to say: a phallus can be as much a symbol of gay pride as of straight domination, and though this penis happened to have been made by the Harvard crew team, it could just have easily been made by the BGLTSA.

Based upon the article, however, Keel doesn't seem to have known who made the statue, or why, before she tore it down; she "assumed that some of her harassers were among the creators of the statue," but couldn't be sure. And this is the scary part. When you get to the point where an erect penis, by itself, is inherently "pornographic" and embelmatic of an atmosphere of violence against women, you're a step away from the kind of wholesale censorship and puritanism that can be much more damaging to truly oppressed genders and minorities than the existence of porn can ever be. "MacDworkinite" anti-pornography laws passed in places like Canada have been used, almost exclusively, to prosecute and censor literature, artwork, and porn by/for gays and lesbians, for whom depictions of sex are a tool of empowerment, not oppression. It's all just collateral damange, it seems, in the MacDworkinite mission of keeping the oppressive phallus out of sight.

All I'm saying, in the end, is that Keel is damned lucky that the BGLTSA didn't make that sculpture...and that if it snows again in Harvard Yard, maybe the BGLTSA should erect an even bigger phallus to take its place.