Featured Writing
Giant Bats: Well Endowed Symbols
In art school I learned how to interpret symbols by sitting through
one too many art critiques. The joke around campus was: at Rhode
Island School of Design anything longer than it is wide is a phallic
symbol. I wasnt accustomed to seeking out such symbols before;
it all struck me as a wee bit contrived. But once exposed it can be
hard to shake. It begins to pop up often and it can be a lot of fun
to play with! We had a class assignment to find these symbols in printed
media and we got huge results. Advertisers were whipping it out everywhere!
And it wasnt just phalluses that were thriving but vast amounts
of yoni: the female counterpart to the male phallus. We learned that
Maya Ying Lins Vietnam Veterans Memorial was a good yonic example:
it was designed by a woman, in a V
shape, and was an indentation dug into a grass lawn. When her yonic
memorial was presented many men got aroused and protested. They countered
by erecting their own symbolic memorial: a big protruding statue and
a flagpole made by a man, Frederick Hart.
This symbolic interpretation game can also be applied to letter shapes.
Play along with me here. Feminine letters include: V,
A, Y, U. Masculine letters include: p,
d, b, l, i, and a testicular o.
Thus, feminine names and words including Vivian,
Ava, Maya Ying,
Venus, vagina,
vulva,
and yoni are all yonic.
Masculine names and words including Peter,
Cooper, Frederick,
dick,
penis, and phallus
are all phallic. Where did this all begin? With Adam
and Eve.
Are you still playing along? Baseball requires a bat, ball, and glove
sexually charged symbols all! First, the letter shapes suggest
the bat and ball as male and glove as female. Secondly, the shapes of
the objects have the bat as an obvious phallus and the concave V-shaped
glove as a yoni. Then theres the testicular o
ball/testicle/sperm. The white ball is projected from the bat to the
glove. Understand? Men use their sticks to spread the field with the
white ball and the farther they can project it the more likely theyll
get a home run, but if they do get some play they often only get to
first base. If they have a weak bat and cant put the ball in play
they strike out.
I make baseball gloves for a living (www.carpentertrade.com).
Dont ask me what that means symbolically. When I wanted to learn
about gloves I went to Ava a very yonic name for a very
yonic object. Ava, Missouri used to be where Rawlings made most of their
gloves. After I worked at Rawlings in Ava I came to Cooperstown. Cooper
is a very masculine and phallic name which clues you in to what they
make and sell there: bats! Lots of souvenir bat stores line Main Street
near the National Baseball Hall of Fame - but curiously, no gloves.
So I decided that the perfect companion for Cooper/bats/phalluses was
Ava/gloves/yoni I opened the first baseball glove store in Cooperstown.
The marriage of gloves with bats has been like the birds and the bees!
This brings me to the present. A few guys from Cooperstown asked me to contribute to their website about giant bats (pro-bono). Several questions came to mind. Why would anyone devote a site to giant bats? Does size REALLY matter? Is there something inherently male about obsessing over the size of our bats? Look at Ted Williams why is he standing with his hips forward and holding his giant bat right THERE? Am I reading too much into this? Cmon, is it really as innocent as Hey look at that! Neato! A giant bat! Or is there a giant pink elephant in this room?
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