by Dena Ronona
(02/13/08)
The other day I walked past the thick, smooth trunk of a tree next to Hungry Bob's Diner. I felt desire, reached out, and brushed my fingers over it. I often do that. Every morning on my way to work, I head through the San Francisco hills past magnolia, cherry, and manzanita. I place a palm against a trunk as I pass, checking for ants first, and then slapping it lightly and letting my hand linger so I can remember the texture. In the winter before it peels, red manzanita bark feels perfectly smooth. The trunk by Hungry Bob's belonged to a ficus and rose in a uniform, mild gray, unbroken by branches or pruning scars for fifteen feet. It was squat and almost fleshy in its bulges -- the most penis-like tree I had seen in some time.
The association annoyed me. Hadn't civilization sprouted enough phallic symbols? I was about to nip the symbolism in the bud and go back to enjoying my trunks innocently the way I enjoy plucking off bits of lavender or rosemary. But honesty made me pause. The phallus did matter in my life, and I was curious what trees might teach me about it. It so happened that I used to be a lesbian and was now in a relationship with a man. Like most sexually active women, I now moved my fingers under a belly and between two legs to a phallus every couple of nights. I wanted it to enter me. The presence in my fantasies and in my body of this symbol loomed.
Was I a prototypical Freudian lass? In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud claimed that, "All elongated objects, such as sticks, tree-trunks and umbrellas (the opening of these last being comparable to an erection) may stand for the male organ -- as well as all long, sharp weapons, such as knives, daggers and pikes." For Freud, phallic symbols point out women's masochism and longing to be dominated and possessed by a phallus, a sword, a gun, the thing she lacks, the pillar of civilization. However, it's hard to be masochistic towards a tree. Could the tree as a phallic symbol suggest other connotations for the phallus? Could there be another way to think about this instrument of pleasure and generation? Or are the scripts of violence and domination so final that, like the Bible, they can only be ignored and never rewritten?
Feminists have often tried to re-imagine female sexual parts. They have tried to exorcise the Playboy plastic model and forbid talk of vagina dentatas, unclean abysses, or fish. But hardly anyone wants to touch the meanings of the phallus. Some feminists boycott the phallus or perform symbolic castrations. Others pick up dildos so women can wield the sword too. "Sex-positive" feminists have embraced anything that might turn women on, including penis-worship and masochism. Writers like Carol Queen vow to do as they please and submit to men. Butches get dildos and go out packing. Femmes, too, have started to hide surprises under their miniskirts. It seems everyone wants to sport a phallus and take power into her own hands and body. Good Vibrations published a video called "Bend Over Boyfriend" which was one of its top sellers ever, featuring women strapping it on and fucking their boyfriends from behind. A spirit of campiness and play accompanies all this. But no matter who wields it, the phallus comes with an almost snide sense of dominance.
Even the radical theory-heads in the academy often reinforce this association. As an undergraduate in English, literary studies, and women's studies courses, I felt I was swimming in words like "phallocratic," "phallic imagery," and my favorite, "phallophany," or the sudden materialization of the phallus. All this linguistic, masturbatory play was supposed to defuse its power as a symbol of male dominance. Recently, a Berkeley professor of gender studies told me, "The way to get rid of its power is overuse. Just repeat it and by the repetition it becomes laughable, it loses its force. Phallus, phallus, phallus."
"But doesn't that reinforce it?"
"No, it becomes meaningless."
I imagined the word trotting across a blank screen and circling back to the beginning of the line and filling another line, and another. Meaningless, my ass. For a few moments you might be able to sing "phallus phallus, phallus phallus" to the tune of Old McDonald, but what then? Surely you would fall back on the old meaning when the phallus reared its head in your life.
Could there be other ways to be turned on by phalluses? The old nature-nurture conundrum sticks its head in here, but I'm going to banish it. Camille Paglia says "Women have genuinely biological but politically incorrect urges for surrender,'" and though most people roll their eyes, I don't actually have the means to disprove her. Who knows what role biology plays in the interplay of aggression, arousal, and phalluses? The debate sidetracks us from actually testing out the waters. Maybe humans can think about the phallus differently and maybe we can't. Why don't we try? The flesh and blood penis doesn't insist on being a pistol. I know from clothing-optional hot springs in Northern California that these are humble, often small, appendages, sometimes overshadowed by the balls, which are droopy, ponderous, like egg sacks. Moviemakers show breasts and vaginas but keep the fig leaf over the penis. Maybe they are afraid the scepter will fall short.
Whereas the phallus traditionally takes a woman or her virtue or her virginity, trees rarely threaten. They give. Oxygen in the air, fruits on the branch, and wood from the core all sustain us. In Shel Silverstein's classic children's tale, The Giving Tree, the tree martyrs itself to sustain one boy, a model of unconditional love. One Buddhist sutra calls the forest "a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demands for its sustenance." Why not see the phallus as giving? A flesh-and-blood penis does give out sperm.
As a girl I was obsessed with climbing trees. The mulberry tree in my yard branched five feet up the trunk, and I hung and walked my feet up until I could swing over and straddle the branch. I spent long afternoons cradled between two limbs, reading. Secretly, I wanted to be closer to the tree than other humans knew how to be. The neighbor boy jumped on the swing but couldn't get up the trunk. I smiled and stayed up there, watching the cars pass. I imagined that the more time I spent there, the more I could feel the tree. My reach would slowly grow until I could sense a half-inch or an inch into the bark.
On a summer camp trust walk, I had to close my eyes and let a friend guide me to a tree. I explored it by touch and smell, memorizing the texture of the bark, the shape of the leaves, and the girth of the trunk. I rubbed the needles of my baby pine and smelled their sharpness. Then I was led away and told to open my eyes and find the tree. I found it easily, and once I did, I placed my hand at the base and did not want to leave it.
The other day I saw a photograph by Edmund Teske of a male torso laced with leaves. The chest, hairless, rippling with muscle, rises in shadow. We see nothing above the neck. Below, the tops of the thighs and the groin fade to blackness above the edge of the photo. All along the chest run the silhouettes of vines. Each oval leaf angles away from its fellows as they climb and twine. This is a masculinity of restraint. The heat lies in the intimate way the vines surround him and trace the skin. Shadow lends the body a softness, obscurity, and slowness. I would like to see the phallus, too, photographed in this light.
Some years back, I directed my parents to a women's bookstore to get me a Christmas present. My father chose a blue plate with a gray, bare tree and the moon in the background. The branches curve and fork like wishbones toward the sky. I have it up in my room now, surrounded by rocks and driftwood. I like to think it my prototypical phallus.
The pleasure we take in trees is linked to a traditionally masculine quality -- strength. Trees are constant, stable, sheltering. We rest against them. Yet a tree is passive and receptive even as it is strong. It waits for touch and never imposes it. It suggests fertility, a connotation that fits the phallus perfectly though it is usually attributed only to the womb. Trees often serve as religious symbols of wisdom, life-force, and continuity. I grew up singing about "the tree of life," a metaphor for the Torah. If we reimagined the phallus in this light, how might we experience sexuality? In my childhood, I danced in synagogue as I sang, "It's the tree of life for them that hold fast to it, and all of its supporters are happy."
Of course, a tree doesn't make as obvious a phallus as the Washington monument or a sausage or a gun. Trees branch above and below ground; you have to chop lumber before you get a phallic shape. We could liken the tree's canopy to the hair that curls around a phallus, but hair grows at base of a phallus. A phallus isn't photosynthetically self-sufficient like a tree. A tree houses both sexes and knows how to both send out seeds and be pollinated. Most importantly, trees do not penetrate. There's no in-and-out, no friction, and no release.
As one imperfect symbol among many, though, trees might help open up the experience of the phallus. Once I came across a picture of a female-to-male transsexual with a daisy sticking out of his penis. He had had surgery that left a little hole there into which he could put a flower stem. He smiled with one hand on his hip and one holding his small penis and the flower. This odd phallus -- appealing, nonsensical, and peaceful -- pleased me. It made me wonder how else the phallus might be decorated. It could also be a piece of driftwood, a dolphin, a tulip, an oil lamp, a roll of sushi. In the catalog of a woman-owned feminist sex toy store, I find some dildos in the "non-representational" category that intrigue me. One smooth cylinder without ridges or a head is nicknamed "Babe" and clothed in swirling blue and white. A special set in hand-blown Pyrex glass has blue, red, and green swirls. Each specimen bears a name like "Andromeda" or "Nebula," and one looks like an alien tadpole. If you buy a "Make Your Own Dildo" kit, you can mold and color a shape to your liking. We need an exhibit of these. I see a white-walled room planted with phallic statues of all descriptions. Along with trees, I see unicorn's horns, icicles, wine glasses, caterpillars, and walruses. There might be phalluses with little faces giggling or screaming like the Munch painting. There might be phallic Coke cans, keys, Palm Pilots, or bar stools. Re-imagining the phallus tests the freedom of the imagination in relation to the body. Domination may continue as one meaning of the phallus, but it need not lord it over the other associations. It seems self-evident that we'd be better off with a multiple-personality phallus than a one-trick wonder.
As I walk to work tomorrow, I probably will pass Hungry Bob's without a glance at the ficus. I might admire a magnolia for an instant with its solid, clean trunk and huge white petals scattered at my feet. Then again, I might ignore the tree and think of my boyfriend in the dark of my bed and his body. The day when these images merge may remain science fiction. Then again, it might come to pass.
