![]() Here again we have a subject whose head and other extremities have been removed from frame to focus attention on the genitals. Robert Mapplethorpe, Man in Polyester Suit (1980) In a very interesting discussion on the way the penis has often been central to ideas of colonialism and racism, he brings in the controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, especially his collection of black male nudes, Black Book (1986). Gustave Courbet, L'Origine du monde (1866)įriedman's book throws up a fascinating parallel. But at the same time, by cropping out the subject's head, arms and legs, it is also seriously reductive: woman as cunt. It works contrary to the conservative traditions that have often made women's bodies an unknown quantity even to themselves. ![]() The painting is unromantic, demystifying, somehow honest. Are such efforts laudatory attempts to undo the effects of centuries of oppressive censorship, revealing the unseen? Or are they somehow perpetuating the same old stereotypes, by allowing free rein to an audience's erotic fascination?Īn important representative case study for Rees is Courbet's L'Origine du monde. One consequence of this is the confusion over motivations when artists or writers do try deliberately to focus on the genitals. Maerten van Heemskerck, Man of Sorrows (1532) Consider, for instance, a painting like Maerten van Heemskerck's Man of Sorrows, where the one part that's covered up ends up, in consequence, demanding all your attention (not least because this work notoriously shows Jesus in a decidedly tumescent state): Rees describes this concept as ‘covert visibility’. This is something Friedman examines through art history, noting the abandonment of Classical nakedness in favour of a rather body-phobic tradition of fig leaves and the like.īut – in a process that is central to both books – this censorship only makes their invisible presence more powerfully felt. In the western world at least, the taboos about penises and vaginas became mixed up early on with religious prohibitions. Both, in their own way, try to examine how and why the cultural taboos about concealing the genitals have been variously enacted, reinforced and challenged over time, and to consider how such attitudes have made individual people feel about themselves, about their bodies, and about others. Emma LE Rees, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, Bloomsbury 2015 Ī brace of books about the sex organs and what they mean, books that benefit enormously from being read in tandem – even though doing so does serve to erode some of the claims to uniqueness made by each of them. ![]() David M Friedman, A Mind of its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, Robert Hale 2009.Whew!Īfter all that, I think it's safe to say I'm suffering from just a touch of penis ennui. I think it's safe to say that anything that involves a penis is covered in this book - eunuchs, circumcision, racism, size matters, impotence, penis envy, and Freud's cigar - it's all here. Over time the penis has been deified, demonized, secularized, racialized, psychoanalyzed, politicized, and, finally, medicalized by the modern erection industry. ![]() The history of the penis is the history of its evolution as an idea. After using his penis to dig the world's first irrigation ditches, and fathering the first human baby, he cried, "Let now my penis be praised!"Īnd throughout history, men everywhere have taken up his cry. Much of the found literature celebrates the exploits of the god Enki, who managed to ejaculate both the Tigris and Euphrates into being. In the Sumerian city of Eridu, in the south of modern Iraq, archaeologists have unearthed cuneiform tablets that are more than five thousand years old. That men have a penis is a scientific fact how they think about it, feel about it, and use it is not. ![]() It was an idea, a conceptual but flesh-and-blood gauge of man's place in the world. I just found it interesting that although they were both pretty young at the time, they still seemed to believe that possession of a penis carried some sort of clout, and neither one wanted to be found lacking.įrom the beginnings of Western civilization the penis was more than a body part. A few years ago, my two sons were playing a video game and I overheard the younger one say to his brother, "Well, at least I have a penis!" My older boy replied with, "So? I have one too!" To this day, I have no clue what brought that conversation about, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to know. ![]()
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