The tentacle is representative not only of what ties women down, it could be symbolic of phallic imagery, which then references the male dominance and inequality of the patriarchy, often less obvious but ingrained thought patterns in all of us could explain why we put ourselves under so much pressure, linking then back to the idea of sexuality as women express sexuality to please men, the biting of the phallic symbol therefore counteracts this.
Biting is typically a thing people do out of fear, for example:
biting nails (can also be linked to anxiety/ ADHD)
distract people from pain (eg biting on a rag)
In my COP essay last year I studied Laura Mulvey's Visual and Other Pleasures, and it was revisited this year in class by my tutor, it's a fascinating piece of feminist literature which can also be applied in this instance. The expression of the male fear of castration; while women have no penis, the fear of castration is already planted, men then go around this through voyueristic and fetishistic scopophilia. Voyueristic being the pleasure of looking while fetishised male gaze often leads to exploiting women's sexuality to draw in the gaze of the male viewer, we can see this in the media, quite literally 'sex sells'. In this case the fear of castration is apparent in this part of my animation as the creature I made (mirrored on the narrative character Koko the Clown from Betty Boop's Snow White) looses his limbs and they become clocks, denoting the fear of women's lack of time and impossible expectations of time keeping. The character then shrinks and is eventually warped into the shape of a mouth, the tentacle coming originally from his stomach now protrudes from an open mouth which then clamps down on the tentacle, biting it off from whatever creature lays within.
This is supposed to be metaphorically representative of women needing to cut ties with their demons, this tentacle may well represent the phallic symbol but at the same time it could be a multitude of hidden inner demons and concerns that they perhaps hide or try to keep it bay, a busy schedule as Tiffany Dufu says...
"It's no wonder that so many of us are wondering around with these feelings of inadequacy given the fact that what we imagine ourselves to be doing, the expectation that we have about what we should be doing literally each and every day is humanly impossible."
Visually representing these 'feelings of inadequacy is done through the tentacle. For me, throughout my life this has always been so. Making this project more personal for me, the visual symbol of tentacles has always denoted mental health problems, inadequacy and fear. This is because when I first started seeing a psychotherapist she got me to visual things; I imagined tentacles coming out of my insides, they'd wrap around my body strangling, suffocating and generally holding me tight. This sense of being emotionally wrapped up and unable to communicate certain things I felt worked well and ever since I've visualised tentacles as this symbol. Regardless of this, I feel universally this will be a good represented purely due to the nature of animals with tentacles :
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