“Femina Women” And The Tone Of The Phallic

There is the idea in a resistive tactic that the phallic is assertive/bold, that it is responsible for overt suppression of the marginalized and feminine. A kind of resistance goes against this phallic directly, “blow for blow,” because there is no shame in going against this phallic; this phallic is naked and overt and so are the resistive forces against it.

Yet there is another side to the phallic, or another kind of phallic entirely, which is not as overt, and against which it is much harder to resist because this phallic itself appears feminine, oppressed, marginalized; this phallic is in appearance on the side of the weak. This is not the phallic of dramatic law and suppression, rather this is the phallic of the statistical knowledges, the govermental knowledges in Foucauldian terms, characterizing the science of government, the knowledges with population management as the end-goal. This governmental knowledge is “boring” even as tries to be exciting, it has a more subdued tone, and it does not overtly challenge the marginalized. This is the side/kind of the phallic which has made certain women the head of the family, the user and developer of the statistical knowledges, the subscriber to the knowledges of control; they are the good housekeepers, the “Femina women,” named after Femina, the popular women's magazine in Nepal and in the Indian subcontinent.

In what we consider to be quite trivial, that is, in the knowledge of good-housekeeping and the art of the proper lifestyle, as written out in lifestyle magazines usually reserved for women, we find the most serious tactics for the control of the whole society via the nuanced, mellow and silent control of the household by a driven woman "doing the bills." We need to take seriously the joke that says that men are suppressed by women within the walls of their homes, yet this does not mean that complaining men are the site from which a rebellion against the “good housekeeper” is possible. How then to resist the mellow, whispering phallic which does not pick a fight? One way to begin is by recognizing that the origin of Femina women is still the male subject: we have, in the women's housekeeping magazines many “professional men," such as doctors and cooks and gardeners, giving vital knowledge and advice, producing the knowledges of control for women to subscribe to, and so we see that men have flourished as producers of lifestyle related knowledges, and it is particularly their usage of the muted tone in their writing, their understanding of the importance of this subdued tone in their talking with these women, that has made them authoritative figures for the “good housekeepers.”