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Original RadFem Art: Body Modification is the Grotesque Creation of Males' "God Complex"
Man fears death, so he destroys life like a parasite
For David and Brian, For ALL the Victims of Males’ Psychological, Medical, and Sexualized Violence, Preeti Pathak, Digital Collage, 2025
My creative process is filled with fits and bursts of making, followed by periods of hibernation. Sometimes I don’t finish a work for months, even years. Part of the artistic process is foraging the world for information. We tuck the bits and bobs we collect, and they eventually blossom into a finished piece - a drawing, a written work, a song, a film, a photo, a performance.
This piece was first sparked by my existing fascination with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus and the interchangeable nature of Dr. Frankenstein’s name. Both the book and the cultural lore have made this a never-ending debate. But it seems Mary Shelley meant for it to be this way. Afterall, she was a genius and who better to play mind games? I always took the lack of the “monster’s” name to be a way to force readers to superimpose the doctor’s name on his creation. It’s the grotesqueness of the doctor that gives the “monster” a perfect name. Because the monster in this story is the actual victim. He was never a monster; only his maker was. In so many ways this parallels the realities of modern-day medical malpractice through body modification. Doctors (or people pretending to be like Dr. Frankenstein) hold a great deal of power and control over people and culture. There is no society where doctors aren’t revered in male culture’s hierarchy. They are able to command a type of blind trust that is uncanny, sometimes on level with religious figureheads. That’s because doctor’s hold the key to health. And without health there is no life. So no one hits at our fear of death quite like the doctor or the religious figurehead. But the doctor is truly universal. Even the atheist will have to, at some point, put her faith in the doctor. We go to them at our lowest, looking for a way to survive, and maybe even thrive. But sometimes they can become monsters with all their might. The power and control goes to their heads; we even have terms for this known as the “God Complex.” The ideology of “gods” is one of the most dangerous creations to exist. It erases the universal ecosystem and gives males a vessel for their propaganda of male superiority.
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