L’arc et l’escarpin

Abstract

Through most of recorded history, in almost every culture and civilization, young men and women who reach the age of puberty have had to prove themselves in one of two contests, both loaded with sexual overtones: for the men, the trial of strength, symbolized by Ulysses' prowess with the bow; for the women, the ultimate trial of beauty, symbolized by the search for the mysterious beauty (Cinderella) whose physical attributes needed to be commensurate with the beauty of the lost slipper. Both trials are fundamentally questionable processes of selection and exclusion, essentialist in nature, that establish an arbitrary ordering of “masculine” strength and "feminine" beauty. The author questions whether, in today’s world, the methods we use to “judge” a person’s masculinity, femininity, or sexual difference are any less primitive, violent or essentialist?

Keywords

• myth
• rites of passage
• masculinity
• feminity
• sexual difference