PSA Documentation on Gender

In our lesson we discussed Luce Irigaray, a French feminist philosopher who takes on Freud by offering a challenge to his configuration of women as necessarily lacking. In Irigaray’s Sex Which is Not One, questions are raised in respect to the assumption that female sexuality is dependent upon male sexuality, and that female sexuality is based on nothing because women’s sex organs cannot be seen opposed to a male’s organs that are visible and larger therefore making it dominate. Her contention includes that we must acknowledge that women already have more than one, multiple even, zones and planes of desire (two-lips touching in addition to an organ whose sole purpose is for pleasure as well as other erogenous zones), as opposed to the one organ or instrument of man (who needs an instrument for pleasure and whose one great organ has to serve the multiple functions of urination and ejaculation). Can there be a system based on female sexuality rather than the phallogocentric system that currently exists?

According to Freud, women’s pleasure is always masochistic, it comes from being a sexual object, from being looked at and desired by men, and also women get pleasure by giving men pleasure. But because of their multiplicity, women feel liberated and no longer feel like an object to the male sexuality Irigaray conjectures female pleasure as auto-erotic; a female is always touching herself, “A women "touches herself" constantly without anyone being able to forbid her do so, for her sex is composed of two lips which embrace continually.” Irigaray then presents the notion that female eroticism is not based on the visual, the precept of looking, the male `gaze', all of which are predicated on the phallogocentric system, but rather on touch. Touch requires closeness or nearness while vision is distancing. A system based on female sexuality would counter vision with touch, it would lessen the distance between people and might ultimately lead to the blurring of ownership.

According to Wikipedia, a public service announcement is a non-commercial advertisement typically in the public sphere, ostensibly broadcast for the public good. The main concept is to modify public attitudes by raising awareness about specific issues. My Public Service Announcement reads “ A Touch Can Set You Free”, with an artistic picture of a man and woman touching hands. This announcement could be posted almost anywhere as long as a large number of people are able to view it, both men and women. Its main intention is to initiate curiosity to an extent that a person would further research its meaning and in return create awareness. This statement is indicating, in a more artful manner, what Irigaray was contending, that female eroticism in not based on the visual but rather on touch. Instead of pleasure being masochistic, a woman is capable of gain pleasure in ways other than pleasing a man. In return touch forms a closer bond is formed, and may lead to the reduction of ownership (a man sexual dominance over a woman), and maybe this “Touch Can Set You Free.”