Too Phallic

In less than two weeks, freshmen will be randomly sorted into one of the 12 tribes of Harvard and vigorously inducted into their new clan. The initiation ceremony, fondly known as “Housing Day,” customarily takes the form of ritual chanting and most hearty house rivalry in Annenberg.

Naturally, each house views with great anticipation the day when it will take possession of several dozen new happy souls. But one less happy consequence of this feeling is the fierce debate, already raging on house lists, over the garb in which they shall enrobe their novitiates. Internal strife has engulfed Quincy, Winthrop, and Mather, among others, prompting students to wage ferocious verbal battle in an attempt to persuade each other that their T-shirt design is, indeed, the best.

As Charles J. Swanson ’08, one particularly zealous member of the Winthrop clan, wrote in an e-mail on the Winthrop House e-mail list after a fierce exchange: “This is dead serious. There is absolutely no sarcasm here. I really feel this strongly about the [T-shirt design] and the implications of this debate for our house’s relationship with other houses.”

The particular design in question featured a slightly altered line from a song by the Wu-Tang Clan, a popular rap group: “Winthrop ain’t nothing to fuck with.”

While hardly lyrical genius, the design has some merits: It doesn’t feature a penis, or penis-shaped object. In several houses, previous designs and current proposals have shown a distinct tendency to veer towards the phallic in their attempt to inspire house pride. Mather house, for example, last year clothed its troops in a design featuring the blockish Mather Tower in a phallic shape with the witty shibboleth, “Nice Unit,” underneath.

This trend is perhaps understandable. As feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949, “The individual’s specific transcendence takes concrete form in the penis and it is a source of pride…It is easy to see, then, that the length of the penis, the force of the urinary jet, the strength of erection and ejaculation become for him the measure of his own worth.” Or maybe certain Houses’ predilection stems from the notion that any object whose length exceeds its breadth automatically conjures up the image of a penis.

Nonetheless, we encourage House committees and house-members to expand their horizons beyond the purely phallic. After all, there comes a point where we have to ask ourselves whether these T-shirts are really intended to welcome freshmen or are merely a forum for upperclassmen’s inside jokes.