ABSTRACT
Everyone in the intellectual world and the arts would love to get one of the MacArthur Foundation's "genius grants". One of this year's geniuses is Susan McClary of UCLA, cited as "a musicologist who explores the relationship between human experience and music and relates the creation of musical works to their musical context". She is the feminist in charge of discovering that classical music is chock full of phallic themes, patriarchal violence, "assaultive pelvic pounding", and "the necesssary purging or containment of the female". One of McClary's breakthrough ideas is that the pelvic pounding in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony adds up to non-orgasmic rape. Not all MacArthur winners write about penile problems in Beethoven symphonies, but in the current intellectual climate, it does not seem to hurt. In fact, it probably helps. The truth is that the MacArthur Awards, launched in 1981 to reward high achievement and high promise, are not what they once were.
