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That shotgun sure makes people nervous

zuzu

A guy, name of Dick, domain name a common anti-feminist trope, sent an email to the Feministe gmail account asking what was up with the little girl with the shotgun.

Is it supposed to be a penis? he asked.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Dick, I replied.

Dick observed that it didn’t look much like a cigar, and suggested that in that case, the artist lacked talent.

38 thoughts on That shotgun sure makes people nervous

  5. Hah! Dick showed up on my website last year. I can’t decide if his site’s a joke that no one’s getting, or if it’s actually “real.”

  6. There’s no denying the phallic nature of firearms. But such is usually given by context, which in this case is either not present or decidedly on the other side of the fence.

    Given that the children is holding the shotgun as she would hold a kite (I’m guessing that was the original image) and not as though she about to fellate it or destroy it in an act of righteous symbolic indignation, I think Dick has, well, dicks on the brain.

  7. I always thought of it as more or less a toy gun, the way I’d think of a little cartoon boy waving a gun around. Funny how paranoid people get. Some people act like she’s pointing it straight at them, which is a bit over-analytic, and that “Is it supposed to symbolize a penis?” is just creepy.

    Seriously, Dick, repeat after me. “Small children are not after my penis, even if they’re female. Small children are not after my penis, even if they’re female.” Try that about a hundred times until it sinks in.

  9. The post “Women Are the Special Olympics” made me laugh out loud. I sure hope it’s a piss take.

  10. ako (7):
    To be honest, the idea that it may be a toy gun never even occurred to be, and I must admit that I find it slightly offputting.

    Common nonsense has it that feminists are bitter old hags, or at least unattractive women, and the combination of the gun (symbolizing – to me – “I won’t take shit lying down”) with an image of a joyful and, presumably, innocent girl seems to cleverly call that into question. I for one can do without the supposed dichotomy of “happy and attractive” vs “bitter, physically unattractive feminist” (perhaps related to the image of “the ugly woman who ‘turned lesbian’ because she couldn’t ‘net’ a guy”) – even if there certainly is enough nonsense going on for me not to begrudge anyone any bitterness they may feel.

    That whole thing about being a half-hearted revolutionary who divides their time between trying to make the world a better place and actually enjoying that place, I suppose.

    Lastly, it seems a clever take on calling women “girls”, implying “cute and harmless”, and answering it by “Cute? Maybe. Harmless? Never!”

    Of course, that violates expectations, and even a toy gun will (that of “boys play with toy guns, girls play with dolls”, if nothing else), but a toy gun would render my favourite interpretation (“Watch out. I’m a force to be reckoned with.”) impotent. NPI, of course.

    But arguably, I shouldn’t worry so much about whether feminists are or are not perceived as an ugly old lot, and more about how physical attractiveness seems to affect people’s willingness to listen. Am I playing coy when I say/hope that trying to subvert generalizations about feminists is an attempt to make it harder to other them?

    Is this “changing the system from within,” “evolution rather than revolution,” or deluding oneself by appealing to the patriarchy saying essentially, “Hey, I’m still playing by most of your rules, cut me some slack”? And thus we’re back to the same old questions. What fun.

  13. Heliologue I’ll deny the “phallic nature of firearms”. They aren’t phallic. I mean, c’mon, hasn’t Freud been pretty much discredited by real psychologists for decades now? Anything longer than it is wide can be a phallic symbol to a good Freudian, that doesn’t mean its true.

    I’ll admit that I’m a historian, not a psychologist, so I’m just talking out of my ass here, but I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything particularly masculine or penile about firearms.

    Of course, I’m also a gun owning libera. I like ’em because they’re fun to shoot [1], not because I either need or want extra phallic symbols. But really, if guns are phallic symbols, why aren’t pencils? Or CD spindles? Or bottles of nasal spray (just think, not only longer than it is wide, but it also goes into organic orifices and shoots out liquid!)

    [1] Last Valentine’s Day I took Carol, my wife, out to a shooting range at her request. She maintains it was the best Valentine’s present she’s ever gotten. And yeah, that does sound awfully redneck.

  15. Dick’s site is a joy to behold. I couldn’t have written a better parody of the MRAs myself. In fact, I would be on the verge of suggesting that Dick was really a radical feminist woman setting out to lampoon and humiliate the patriarchy on exactly the same model as whitehouse.org lampoons and humiliates the Bushocracy, but then there’s his silly email about the gun. And for a second it all looks real. But, really, it can’t be.

    I think he’s just joking, and trying to get us to go to his site. I did: the Top Ten Reasons Why Men Are Better Than Women are so enlightening that I may give up this feminism lark. Instead I shall marry a boring, fat businessman, and devote the rest of my life to spoon-feeding him, bathing him, changing his slippers and offering to placate his penis, as if he were a giant, immobile, stupid, lazy baby, and I were the sort of freak who gets off on having sex with one of those.

    Isn’t life wonderful without feminism? I’m so glad I’ve gone the way of Dick.

  16. I kind of feel like it looks a lot more like a cigar than it does a penis. I mean, if someone said I had to go with one or the other.

    Mostly, it looked like a shotgun, though.

  18. Looked like a sawed-off to me. Maybe I’m not being Freudian enough or something, or maybe that guy is too much.

  20. If you spend all your time looking for penises on the net, you’re likely to find them. Even where they aren’t.

    And I’ve got to believe Dick’s site is a parody — the “off limits to ladies” business sounds too much like Landover Baptist‘s “unsaved unwelcome”.

  22. Heliologue I’ll deny the “phallic nature of firearms”. They aren’t phallic.

    I may be splitting hairs here, but … though not everyone considers their gun to be a phallic symbol, they are treated as such in popular culture (especially movies and TV) so you do get some people who take their cues from movies/TV and treat their guns as phallic symbols.

    Clear as mud? 😉

  23. ” I think he just wants to get some attention for his site– even though he claims the ladies aren’t allowed to read it!”

    That sounds like perfect MRA logic to me. troll every single feminist blog you can find posting links to your site – that women aren’t allowed to read.

    Perfect MRA logic.

  24. I’m just waiting for the dude’s-crotch version of “Grindhouse” to be made, really.

    What, you haven’t seen “From Dusk Till Dawn”?

  25. Omigoddess PENIS PANIC on Wikipedia? I’m dying here!

    (reads)

    Omigoddess it’s a REAL PHENOMENON?

    Thanks for making me choke on my salty peanuts for visualizing men shouting “Witchcraft!!!!” on days that were probably just more cold and humid than usual.

  27. To be honest, the idea that it may be a toy gun never even occurred to be, and I must admit that I find it slightly offputting.

    I’m a terrible literalist, which is why my brain landed on the ‘toy gun’ idea. Because leaving aside all the symbolic stuff (which generally sails right over my head) little-girl-with-toy-gun cute; little-girl-with-real-gun creepy. If it were a grown woman, I’d think ‘real gun’ but it’s a kid. Now it’s a drawing of a kid, so viewing gun-girl picture as a represntative of the female or the feministe or whatever is as fair as viewing it as representative of a little girl, in which case all the symbolic stuff comes back.

    But for the poor benighted literalists, it’s less creepy to envision a happy child waving a toy gun, and letting the rest of you deal with the symbolism.

  28. That sounds like perfect MRA logic to me. troll every single feminist blog you can find posting links to your site – that women aren’t allowed to read.

    Perfect MRA logic.

    Lya, I suspect that he is trying to ‘save’ the men who read feminist blogs but since you can’t actually know who is what then it seems to be a pretty stupid prohibition. Then again, it appears to be a pretty stupid site and it didn’t take me five days to decide that.

  29. that shotgun always made me think, “hmm, pistol-gripped pump without a stock, and she’s holding it one-handed — she’ll never hit anything that way”.

    then right after that i thought, “pistol-gripped pump being held flippantly one-handed, and no stock — she’ll destroy her wrist if she fires that”.

    it does kindof look like it’s right at the minimum legal length, too. the barrel’s probably okay, judging by proportions to the rest of the thing, but the lack of a shoulder stock might put it below the minimum overall length. so unless it’s a toy, the girl could be a felon.

    …i must be way too much of a gun nut for my own good.

  30. She’s not actually got her finger on the trigger, so I always figured she’d stolen it and was running away while laughing and yelling “HAHA I’ve got your phallocentric hegemony mister!” at the original owner.

    Colt made everyone equal, but socio-economics ensured that not everyone had an equal amount of guns.

    (the gun is good, the penis is evil…)

  31. Phallic imagery was around for thousands of years before Freud stumbled onto it and made a mess of it. So, technically, it *could* be phallic symbolism, in which case I’d say she’s … running off joyfully with someone’s phallis? Taking a symbol of power and running with it, maybe.

    I dunno. I was never very good at subtext. I just saw it as a little girl playing with a very boy-oriented toy, which is enough to put some people’s panties in a twist as it is. And she has a BIGGER one! *grin* Subversive on that level, nothing deeper than that. Those who actually run the site may feel free to correct me at will. (Like you NEED my permission! 😉

    That said, I got the connection re: the commercialization of the Easter holiday right away when I *read* about the chocolate Jesus, so maybe my sub-text reading doesn’t suck as much as I think it does….

  32. If we’re nitpicking the gun: I always assumed it was supposed to be an actual shotgun, not a toy. If it’s a toy, it’s illegal in the states- it doesn’t have an orange cap.

    More on topic: I think that, culturally, guns are definitely phallic. Movies and popular culture have certainly made the connection between a weapon and a penis pretty clear with things like “This is my rifle, this is my gun…”, or talking about men who are “shooting blanks.”

  34. It’s always possible it’s not a penis, but an ovipositor.

    Imagine the reaction of already anxious males considering the idea of a female implanting a ‘gift’ of female fertility into the male body. What was that saying? “abortion would be a sacrament”.

  37. You have all reminded me of the time we were giving a hard time to one of our male classmates who was, as we say, “obsessed” with firearms and military hardware. After one particularly tedious and long-winded rant about missiles, I drawled out: “you seem to be obsessed with phallic-shaped objects.” While H. was trying to think up a response, one of my other classmates (male) piped up:” Well, isn’t that why they call them “Reentry Vehicles?” Which left H. totally speechless.

  38. I read an essay once written by a woman who had gone into a military establishment to report on the language used there. It was increadable.Talk about phallic language. She included a description of a mushroom cloud that would make my grandma blush. I tried to find it online but was unsuccessful. I think I have it somewhere at home.

    Also, in literature, guns are often phallic. I don’t think you need to get too fruedian to acknowledge that (personally, i hate talking about frued). The suggestion of power and dominance, agressiveness and industry, those are all tradionally male characteristics, making guns, in some circumstances symbols of a certain kind of male sexuallity, or phallic.

    That said, I also agree that they are not always such. And the little girl up there doesn’t seem to be holding a penis to me.

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