Word: maleness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...malignancy in that vital and exceedingly sensitive part of the body. The treatment--surgical removal of the testicle--is even worse to contemplate. But another reason is that testicular cancer is relatively rare: only 7,400 cases will be diagnosed in the U.S. next year, representing 1% of new male cancers. Prostate cancer is 30 times as common...
Beyond that, says Dr. Lawrence Einhorn of Indiana University, who treated Lance Armstrong, "we have looked at several risk factors, and the only one that's really been proved is cryptorchidism." In plain English, that means undescended testicles. In a male fetus, the testicles normally develop inside the abdomen and descend into the scrotal sac before birth. In some cases, though, one (and sometimes both) of the testicles stays inside the body. The laggard normally drops into place in the child's first year of life, though surgery is sometimes needed to help it along...
...while most undescended testicles eventually get where they're supposed to be, the delay seems to cause some sort of damage: cryptorchidism affects only 3% of the male population but is a factor in 14% of testicular-cancer cases. Doctors have identified other risk factors, such as a family history of testicular cancer, HIV infection and a previous bout with the disease. But none of these explain the dramatic rise in incidence. Other possible risks include occupational exposure to extreme temperatures and the maternal use of fertility hormones...
Divining this in Barney's art, you can begin with the word cremaster. The cremaster muscle pulls the testicles up into the body and is an indicator in the fetus of male gender. Everything in the "Cremaster" series swirls dizzily from there: for him, biological destiny is a prison. Escape from it is a heroic act--in fact, a spiritual right. Thus his transmogrified, half-human creatures elsewhere; his fixation on Houdini, the impossibly malleable escape artist; and now his Gilmore, who spent the better part of his adult life in prison, only to be released into the world, where...
...hard to believe, watching a good deal of the freakish imagery in Cremaster 2, that Barney is serious about bees morphing into male bodies oozing sexually with honey; about a seance medium whose face is pierced with rivets. But that is one of the most intriguing things about him: in an age of slick ironists cool beyond belief, Barney is a dead-earnest symbolist plummeting through the rabbit hole of his own nutty logic. You may not get everything that you see. And certainly you may not enjoy it. But it fascinates all the way down...