Impermeable masculinity

There is much about the impermeability of masculinity in gender studies as a metaphor for locking away emotions and keeping them at a safe distance. For example there is the idea of the body builder who makes his whole body resemble 'the power of the phallus' which is a bit ironic when you compare to the actual penis. You can google to find many references. For my MA I wrote an essay. As a member of Feminists Against Censorship it was a post-feminist analysis of the possible pleasure/unpleasure in the porn film genre supposedly aimed at heterosexuals at the time...

"In her book Volatile Bodies (Indiana Press 1994), Elizabeth Grosz suggested that the existence of practically no literature about male body fluids could reflect mens' attempt to distance themselves from a type of uncontrollable and excessive corporeality they have attributed to women. Male bodies seem to have sealed themselves off - the idea of penetration and male orgasm involves the constitution of the sealed up, impermeable body. 'Perhaps it is not after all flow in itself that a certain phallicized masculinity abhors, but the idea that flow moves or can move in two way or indeterminable directions that elicits horror, the possibility of being not only an active agent in the transmission of flow, but also a passive receptacle... A body that is permeable, that transmits in a circuit, that opens itself up rather than seals itself off, that is prepared to respond as well as to initiate, that does not revile its masculinity... would involve a quite radical rethinking.' Grosz goes on to suggest that heterosexual men must be more willing to take on passive positions... then they will be able to reclaim, reuse, reintensify zones and functions that have been disinvested."

Rachel's brain-dump re fluids and flows made me think about this again. I notice I also wrote about 'becoming' rather than 'being' and will revisit that concept in relation to our ponderings of movement and stillness.