Indiana Snow Penises Given Generous Local News Coverage

From the Huffington Post news wire:

Local news station WLFI 18 filed this generous report about a neighborhood that was quite upset with one house's lawn decorations: snow sculptures representing male genitalia.

Neighbors who called the police said they "showed up, laughed and left" but later investigation revealed that under a state statute for "obscene matter" the creators of the snow penises could have received misdemeanor charges if they hadn't taken them down.

Who would have known a couple of suggestively shaped snow piles could cause this much of an uproar? We don't know how detailed these things were, but the sculptor must have made them pretty life-like to offend so many people.

More here, with video! (Unfortunately, the video blurs out the ice penises.)

Yet another sigh. Sigh.

So of course people are having problems with artistic representations of the penis. No surprise there. Our entire culture has been penis-phobic for centuries, excluding certain large pockets of gay culture here and there, which glorify the penis for their own reasons. So I guess I'm not outraged about the outrage as much as I'm bummed that the Puritans continue to have the last word on the topic.

If you click through and watch the news report, you'll see what I'm talking about. They haul out an archetypal ten year old boy who laments that he was forced to look at ice penises. They interview a soccer mom who seems more sad about what she obviously sees as a sick culture than angry, when the irony here is that, when you subtract capitalist exploitation, which forces sexuality on us for the sole purpose of making lots of money, we continue to be, as a people, pretty much scared of the cock. That is, the sickness in our culture is sexual repression rather than sexual abandon.

The local news station producing the report interviewed exactly zero people who were concerned about freedom of speech, artistic expression, or rampant unhealthy sexual attitudes. I guess such ideas are fine for the university, but not for general consumption.

Really, it's no big deal. The penises will, after all, eventually melt.

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