The Most Obvious Lack & Man's Compensatory Creations

The most obvious lack of manhood, as pointed to in the preceding article, is the lack of fertility and generativity as evidenced by Woman and Earth. I can imagine Man watching Woman give birth, watching the Earth flower and fruit and blossom and emerge, and wonder to himself why he is seeming to miss out on something so fundamental to existence. Man ponders: What's wrong with me?

The sitting President of a majour Ivy League University, Lawrence Summers, created quite a stir in the academic world when he was reported to have been under the impression that innate differences were the reason why women were not more influential in the scientific community. The reason that women were not more involved in engineering, mathematics, physics, astronomy and the like was the result of a specific sort of lack in their female constitution. Needless to say, his comments drew a lot of ire from many well-informed people, and not only women. Many called for his resignation and asked that he step down from so prominent a position in America's educational community.

Mr. Summers indication of some sort of deficit or lack was right on the money, as far as I am concerned. The only problem was that his indication of lack was pointed at the wrong sex. The lack, as I understand it, should more properly be put in the direction of Man: that it is Man's lack of fertility--the ability to carry Life and have it emerge from one's person--that I suspect is what has driven Man to search out compensatory ways of creating.

If we look at the history of Art, Religion, and Science we see a trail riddled with the achievements of men. Music. Sculpture. Literature. Painting. Philosophy. Politics. Each realm has tended to be the province of Man. Some have suggested that this is due to the fact that Man sought to keep Woman down and out: that it was oppression that relegated Woman to a subservient role on the sidelines of where all the great artifacts of Civilization were being produced. Yet, to me that is an old, outdated argument that has some truth to it (true but partial), but not enough truth so as to be explanatory as to why Man held such sway over all of those realms for so long.

My gut feeling is that Man held such sway over the realms of Art, Religion, and Science because Man was attempting to give birth and create in his own way. I don't suspect that Woman felt such an absence of generativity and life-giving capacity because of Woman's ability to carry and give birth to children. Man very much did, though. Thus Man sought for ways to compensate for the inability to create and give birth to living beings (such as Woman and Earth do) by focusing on the creation of symbols and signs, systems and statues.

Man is still very much involved in that process to this day, still vainly attempting to make his inanimate creations come alive. Cyborgs and Robots. Frankenstein. Frankenstein people! Man's substitution for the lack he is reminded of constantly everytime he sees Woman and Earth is what Man is hoping to one day overcome. The irony in all of this is that Man is envious of Woman (Freud got it at least partly wrong)--as Man wants to know what it feels like to be that close to Life. He wants a baby. His baby! He wants to create a 'living being' in the hope of overcoming his sense of lack. It is how Man has compensated over the course of thousands of years. And little has changed. Just go to MIT. You'll see.