MAGA Has a Penis Obsession. 4B Feminism Is a Logical Response

Fifth-century Athens was also enamored of the penis. Phalluses were all over the place: painted on ceremonial jugs, used as stage props. Sometimes they had wings. They were a source of comedy, a symbol of fertility, a warding away of evil. The concept of “phallocracy,” writes the scholar Eva C. Keuls, “denotes a successful claim by a male elite to general power, buttressed by a display of the phallus less as an organ of union or of mutual pleasure than as a kind of weapon: a spear or war club, and a scepter of sovereignty.”

From the Greek context sprung Aristophanes' Lysistrata—perhaps the urtext of female sexual protest, though not a particularly feminist story—a comedy, first performed in 411 BC (by a likely all-male cast), wherein the women of the warring Greek city-states of Athens of Sparta form a pact not to have sex with the men until they reach a truce.

North Miami’s CAMP Gallery founder Melanie Prapopoulos chose Lysistrata, and Spike Lee’s modern adaptation of the play Chi-Raq (2015), as the jumping-off point for this year’s annual fiber arts show, dubbed “We Got The Power.” The work of more than seventy women artists, as well as one man and two nonbinary artists, fills the gallery space as a frieze that snakes through the newly pink-painted gallery. “The whole thing about the fiber show—it’s anti-patriarchal,” Prapopoulos told the Miami Herald in an article published the day after the election. “It’s women responding to institutions, the business establishments that are all male-centered.”

Prapopoulos started conceptualizing the show more than a year ago: she had in mind, she says, “Ukraine and Israel and Russia and Palestine,” and the idea grew from there. In reading about the rise of 4B, “For a moment, I was like, oh my God, I'm super psychic,” she says to me, this week. “But then I was like, no, Melanie. It's just a predictable world.”