Diana DeAugustine: The penis as a wound on a woman’s thigh

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Lacking Nothing (Healing Wound) is the best retort to Freud’s idea of penis envy. God bless the child who’s got her own.

DeAugustine’s piece resolves more than 20th-century problems, however.

In Plato’s Symposium, he advanced the idea of three sexes – male, female and hermaphrodite. In a bad mood, God had split them in half, which means everybody wanders the earth looking for his/her other half: both same sex and opposites attract.

In the photo on the left, DeAugstine imagines a female nailing down her other and carrying its mark on her thigh. Like Sweeney Todd with a razor in his hand, she’s compete.

Pipilotti Rist  made her first big impression in 1997 with Ever is Over Again, in which a young woman strides down the street carrying a cudgel. The cudgel is a flower (men are beautiful) and a weapon (dangerous too.) As the girl in charge, she assumes both their beauty and their power.