SELECTED PENIS ARTISTS

Many of the artists whose work includes penises and erections are homosexual men. For them the penis, the erection, the nude male body are objects of desire—and objects that they have not been allowed to show. When in the 1970s Robert Mapplethorpe began photographing naked male bodies or parts of bodies, often engaged in so-called transgressive sexual acts, it was not only an aesthetic choice but a political act. Formally his photographs are exquisite; the combination of elegance of eye with sexually explosive content is what makes his work both glamorous and important.

In his many photographs with the same title, Cock, penises are sometimes used as a design element, seen as the center and root of the man, thrusting out between dark, mysterious legs; or they're in close- up, partially bound in leather, so the cock skin looks supple and luscious. Man in Polyester Suit presents a suit-wearing male torso. The lines of the suit are boxy and straight-edged; everything is neat except that the fly is open, and a huge cock descends, like a tongue hanging out. Formally, the organic works against the manufactured. And the image has the wit of a wish fulfilled; it's what almost everyone really wants to know.

At the same time Mapplethorpe was working, Keith Haring was putting dicks all over his paintings. Because the paintings were deliberately childlike, and the images were of animals and children, no one thought to object to the phallic content.

Andy Warhol, going Renoir one better, sometimes mixed urine or semen with his paints, or literally painted with his prick. He also gave us the grainy black-and-white film Blow Job, which for thirty-five minutes concentrates on a man's face as he gets fellated off camera.

Another reason for the current focus on penises is a pervasive interest in the body as both source and subject of art. For heterosexual male artists, working with erect penises is a bold way of looking at sexuality. Andres Serrano's 1997 New York show, called A History of Sex, consisted of beautifully composed large color photographs of outrageous couples—an old woman and a young man, a big man and a pretty girl dwarf, a woman and a horse—in bucolic settings. Whatever these people may be doing —or about to do—their expressions are so serene, and they look like such nice people, that viewers are challenged to ask themselves, Why not? Someone holding his own quite large erection, who's outdoors with blue sky and water behind him, who's looking off pensively into the middle distance, a smile playing about his lips as if he's thinking about something funny his accountant just told him, brings the erection into the realm of images you can examine closely, and even discuss with your accountant.

Women artists have also been working with penis imagery, and for them it's not only a way of expanding the vocabulary of images we can see and talk about, it's also a way of confronting, or sending up, men. One early example (1974) is the "ad" Lynda Benglis placed in Art Forum, a full-page color photograph of herself wearing dark glasses and nothing else except a long, erect dildo protruding from between her legs. No words were needed.

Recently I visited Rhonda Shearer, who was preparing an interactive show with a penis motif. She wanted to play, she said, with our fears about looking at genitalia in art and life. Among the works was a mannequin of a little girl in a pretty pink dress with a big rubber dick under her skirt. There was also a wall with eighty-nine mostly very big talking dildos on it, which Shearer calls the Tunnel. The show's fun-house atmosphere makes prejudices against genitals into a joke—but Shearer told me men found the Tunnel intimidating. "When they realize that all of a sudden they're the sex object they tend to get quiet, or more introspective. It's an interesting turn," she said.



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley

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PENIS ART IN THE 1990S

At the same time "penis" the word began showing up in newspapers and on television in the mid- 1990s, the image of the penis started to proliferate in New York galleries. The photographs of Pierre Molinier, a French cross-dressing surrealist with a dildo obsession, came into vogue. Andres Serrano showed photographs of couples in which the men as well as the women were naked and aroused. There were so many group shows of erotic images, male and female, that critics began to say they were boring. Nevertheless, a great many people visited galleries to see them.

On the most basic level, an artwork with an erection in it dares the viewer to really look at this thing she's been taught not to think about. The act of viewing such an artwork expands the viewer's visual vocabulary and the ways in which he can think about male sexuality. Artists who work with penises, while using the image itself, are also playing with taboo and the idea of taboo, and with erotic charge and the idea of erotic charge.

For many people it's still jolting, or titillating, to find an erection in an art gallery, no matter what critics say. I asked one heterosexual man in the art business, who's in his forties, what he thought about all those dicks on gallery walls.

He said, "I think one of the last bastions of the male mysteries is the hard-on, and there's some sort of protection of that, we want it to remain a secret."

"You mean seeing an erection up on the wall is annoying?"

"I think it alerts one's senses," he said, "in a 'Maybe I'm about to beat the shit out of that guy' kind of way. There's a certain just animal sensation of 'What is he doing here?' It would be wrong to say one has no feeling about it. I do."

So if hiding erections is a power position, why are they coming out now? The answer must be that more than wanting power of the patriarchal kind, some men are beginning to want to be known, to be seen. There is a power in being known and seen, but it is not power as men traditionally understand it. Being known is a vulnerable position; it also makes communication possible. For this reason modern penis art carries cultural significance. It signifies the dismantling of a barrier, the opening of a door.



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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FAMOUS ARTISTS DO EROTICA

Through the ages great artists as well as lesser ones have drawn and painted erections and sex acts of various kinds. But in the Judeo-Christian West these works were considered to be pornography. Many are privately owned, and most of the rest are held by museums in special collections. In recent years, with the relaxing of censorship, these works have also become widely available in anthologies of erotic art. Some of the artists whose work can be found in these anthologies include Leonardo da Vinci (a cross-section of a couple fucking); Parmigianino (I've seen an engraving of a Witches' Sabbath, where celebrants sit on a huge erect cock with the rump of a goat); Thomas Rowlandson (a series of bawdy etchings done around 1810, including one scene in Kensington Gardens of a bunch of phalluses with legs); Giulio Romano, who in Mantua decorated a room in the palazzo of Duke Federico II with a ceilingful of erotic frescoes; Aubrey Beardsley, George Grosz, Egon Schiele, Hans Bellmer, Andre Masson, Felicien Rops, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cocteau, Dali and Picasso. More often than not in this erotic work the penis is seen as either comical (the disembodied phalluses) or a cause of embarrassment and shame. (George Grosz and Egon Schiele both did self-portraits while masturbating. Schiele looks hollow-eyed and haunted; Grosz is shamefaced in the shadows, ejaculating while two women perform for him. The phalluses, the active elements in both portraits, are huge, throbbing and red.) Picasso often drew penises, erect and flaccid, and his work often dealt with sexual relationships. Because he was Picasso, and anything he made was assumed to be high art, his erotic works were shown in museums and sold in galleries. In 1997, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York had a large Schiele show, full of penises and vulvas, a lot of writers got to speculate in print about genitals as fit subjects for artists.



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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PENISES IN ART

Before Christianity, Western art had its fair share of penises. Ordinary men were painted or sculpted with ordinary penises and gods were made with big, godlike erections. But in the respectable art of the Judeo-Christian West, which abounds in female nudes, erect penises have been conspicuously absent. Even flaccid penises aren't easy to find in the publicly accessible holdings of the grand Western museums.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for example, there is no armor for the penis in the armor collection; the armor has an arch and a space where the piece to protect the penis should be, but the piece is missing. There are one or two small and barely discernible penises on friezes in the Egyptian wing, though it's clear the ancient Egyptians were not shy about showing erections. The penises on the Greek vase paintings are small and sketchy, and are usually sported by creatures who also have tails. In the European painting galleries there are no naked adult penises. There are cherubs and Cupids with baby dicks, and a fair number of renditions of the baby Jesus' penis. Most modern people, though, when they look at paintings of the baby Jesus, don't think of his penis as a penis. (In the Renaissance, as Leo Steinberg demonstrates in an exhilarating monograph, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, the motive was theological. Painting after painting shows the baby Jesus sitting on his mother's lap, his penis exposed, his mother pointing to it with pride. His penis is proof that he has "embodied himself in a human nature," becoming "mortal and sexual" for the sake of mankind.)

In the section of the museum devoted to tribal art there's only one exhibition with a bunch of realistically juicy dicks. These belong to some life-size figures made for the death ritual of the Asmat people of New Guinea. The figures are carved standing, one on the shoulders of another, and the carvings are placed outside the house of someone who dies. When a head-hunting expedition takes place, fresh heads are placed in the gaps in the sculpture. The standing figures have hefty, hanging- down penises.

The only other dicks are on nude Greek and Roman statues. Some of them are small and quiescent, with carved pubic hair and baby balls. The rest have been broken off.

In 1993, when the Metropolitan Museum showed the larger-than-life-size male nudes of the English painter Lucian Freud, they put up a sign warning there would be nudity, even though none of the nudes had an erection. No such sign would be necessary for a show containing female nudes; female nudes are all over the museum.

Obviously, up until recent years most Western men have not wanted to represent penises, particularly erect penises, in their art; they also have not wanted to show the art of other cultures in which penises are prominent. One way of seeing this phenomenon is in terms of who does the looking and who is looked at. Traditionally women have been the objects and men have painted them or owned the paintings. Renoir's famous retort, when asked by a journalist how he could paint with his crippled hands, was "I paint with my prick." Like the sex act, in which the man is always said to possess the woman and never the other way around, such an arrangement can be seen as an expression of power. It's a different sort of expression from the exuberant erections of pagan times. We think of it as more civilized and therefore less threatening—but all it is, really, is more covert.

And the male position of powerful nondisclosure exacts a price; it makes men afraid to show what they're really like—and men and women afraid to see them naked. In the art world of the late 1990s this position has come seriously unraveled.



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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CONTEMPORARY PENIS WORSHIP

Today, if you want to experience organized phallic worship you have to go to Japan, or find a Hindu temple. For the personal kind, there are still men around—Enrique met one recently—who say things like, "I expect women to worship at the altar of my cock." But that's another story.

JAPANESE PHALLUS FESTIVALS

Shinto, the original Japanese religion, was a nature religion, and phallic worship was worship of the life force. Apparently, Japan is full of naturally occurring, penis-shaped stones, and these are thought to have magical, protective powers. There are shrines to phallic stones all over the country. In 1953 there were 420 phallic stones extant in Nagano Prefecture and 14 in Tokyo alone.

Phallicism is mostly a rural religion now—in practice, a farmer and his wife might make love in a field while the seed is being sown to insure a good crop; or a couple might spend a night with the silkworms to encourage them to spin.

There are also various local fertility festivals with phallic elements. As recently as 1953, at a festival in Chiba, right near Tokyo, a wooden phallus would have ritual sex with a straw vagina, after which they would be anointed with milky rice beer. In Tohoku a basketware phallus covered in red papier-mache was paraded through the streets once a year to purify the air. In Hakata they would build a phallus as big as a house, set it on fire and throw it into the sea.

Each year during a phallus festival at the 1,500-year-old Tagata Shrine, a new seven-foot penis carved from a Japanese cypress, and weighing some seven hundred pounds, is carried by twelve men from the Kumano Shrine, a mile up the road, to the Tagata Shrine. The phallus is so heavy that several teams of twelve are needed. After appropriate ceremonies the phallus of the year is placed in a room with other attending phalluses, and last year's specimen can then be sold. This festival, meant to promote fertility and prosperity and protect against evil, is a tourist favorite.

In some towns there are festivals during which young men wear protective phalluses carved of daikon radishes on their belts. Many local festivals sell penis-shaped talismans, some of which—like a boat with a phallic mast— are used as children's toys.

In some cases just the sight of the penis can be enough to root out evil. A May festival in Kyoto was dedicated to an ugly goddess who tried to break up young lovers. In order to quiet the goddess, the young men of the district would carry her on a palanquin through the streets; they wore only short coats and no loincloths, so she could plainly see their penises. In a town called Bingo, if the rice pot bubbled too much on the stove, the man of the house would expose himself to the pot. The pot would calm down.

There are a number of local New Year's festivals during which young men hit young women with carved phalluses or phallic-shaped objects in order to wish them good luck.

THE HINDU LINGAM CEREMONY

In Hinduism—the major religion of India—the phallic god Shiva, who represents the creative principle and the origin of all things, is worshiped in the form of his lingam, or penis. Hindu sacred art is often erotic, and includes many representations of penises, some of them sculpted on the outsides of temples. Shiva lingams inside temples aren't penis-shaped exactly; most of them look more like wide, flat, oval stones, or like fat, squat candles. In lingam-conscious India, lingams are also found in nature; the most famous is an ice stalagmite ten feet high inside the Amarnatha Cave, a major pilgrimage site.

My own experience with a Shiva lingam was at a Hindu temple in Flushing, New York—and it was Enrique, who came with me, who got the most out of it. The temple was an airy place to stroll through, with chapels for various gods and goddesses, and niches for statuettes of gods and goddesses who didn't have chapels. Signs said "Please do not touch the Deity." It was early evening. We sat cross- legged on the floor along with some Indian women in saris and men in business clothes, in front of the lingam chapel. A small statue of a sitting bull, on a stand, also faced the chapel. When the ceremony began the chapel curtain was pulled to reveal a big, oval, reddish green lingam, set in a yoni, a vulva- shaped basin, so that the top two thirds of the lingam were visible.

(Apparently there's a bull facing the Shiva lingam in every temple in India, and the painter Rackstraw Downes told me a tale about this configuration that he heard from a guide in the ancient city of Hampi. Shiva, the story goes, was in the mood for sex one day. However, his lover, Parvati, was not receptive, and he was forced to resort to the bull in the field. Shiva promised the bull that after he screwed it, he would let it screw him. The bull agreed. Shiva took his pleasure with the bull, and ever since the bull has sat there, waiting for its turn.)

Two young priests officiated at the Flushing chapel. They were naked on top and wore white lengths of cloth, wrapped around the waist, like figures on an ancient frieze. Their work consisted mainly of pouring libations over the lingam, and over the bull. Among the offerings were milk, honey, yogurt, clarified butter and cut-up bananas, apples and oranges. After each new substance offered, the lingam and the bull were washed down with water. A bell was rung between offerings; a flower was placed on the lingam where its forehead would be if it were a face. All the while the men in the congregation chanted in Sanskrit.

I enjoyed watching the ceremony, but didn't get much of a charge from it. Enrique, on the other hand, was thrilled. He said it was like the Catholic Church, only better. There was the same tang of incense in your nostrils, and the chant droning in your brain; there were bells and candles—but instead of worshiping the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, you could celebrate the generative principle and its connection to your own maleness. Just the sort of thing Christianity wiped out and replaced in the West, two thousand years ago.

THE GENERATIVE PRINCIPLE 

Enrique said a man could look at the lingam as a kind of model. "Because to accomplish anything you must penetrate. You penetrate other people's consciousness, or you take a seed and push it into the ground, and that's the beginning of anything you do. So the generative principle permeates absolutely everything. And isn't it fun? You can see it in a banal, silly piece of flesh plumbing. Through that silly piece of flesh plumbing comes anybody who's walked this earth."



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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IDEAS ABOUT PROCREATION

So convinced was everyone of the godlike nature of the penis and its products, so marvelous an instrument did it seem to be, that from 9000 B.C. until the eighteenth century most people believed that babies came from semen alone. Men planted the seed; women were simply the earth in which it grew. Semen contained everything necessary to make a man. People believed this even though children often looked like their mothers. With the invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century scientists discovered that semen teemed with tiny creatures, which we call sperm and they called animalcules or homunculi, because they looked like minuscule people. A human, then, was a homunculus that got planted and grew. During the eighteenth century, botanists proved that in the case of plants both parents were responsible for the characteristics of the offspring. It wasn't until 1854 that the fusion of frog sperm and egg was seen under a microscope and the basic facts of animal reproduction became absolutely clear. The suffragist movement began at about the same time. I'm not suggesting cause and effect— only that some discoveries can't be made until the climate is right for their acceptance.

Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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PHALLIC TALES

Though female gods often represented the earth, from the Neolithic period onward the gods responsible for creation were always male. Sometimes the penis of a god or ruler figured in his mythology. Penises of men and statues also might have ritual or magical properties.

MYTHS AND LEGENDS

In Greek mythology it was said that Chronos, son of the Titan Uranus, castrated his father and threw his penis into the sea. Although this was not a happy event for Uranus, it was good for humanity. Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, rose from the sea where Uranus's penis had fertilized the waters.

The Egyptian hero Osiris was slain in battle and cut into pieces by his enemy, Typhon. Typhon's followers took the pieces, with Typhon himself keeping the phallus. Then Isis, wife of Osiris, gained control of the government and rounded up the pieces of her husband. Only the penis could not be found—Typhon had apparently fled with it, and may have thrown it in the sea. In honor of Osiris, Isis ordered that the phallus be worshiped with solemnities and mysteries. Osiris's misfortune became the origin of phallus worship among the Egyptians.

The Chinese emperor Chou-hsin was said to be a sexual prodigy. His penis was supposedly so big and strong he could walk around a room with a naked woman perched on his erection. He lived by the precept of the Yellow Emperor, copulating with ten women every night without ejaculating (or "losing the Vital Essence," as it was called). Eventually he became impotent—at which point he beheaded the medical advisor who had counseled him to conduct himself in such a manner.

According to Plutarch, Rome was founded by the offspring of a disembodied phallus and a servant girl. The phallus appeared one day in the fireplace of the King of Albani. The king ordered his daughter to copulate with the phallus, but the princess sent her maidservant instead. The maidservant did as she was told, and the phallus impregnated her. Her two sons, Romulus and Remus, whom she abandoned in the forest to be fed by wolves, became the fathers of Rome.

KARNAK

The Egyptian god of creation was Amun, to whom the Temple at Karnak is dedicated. Built during the XVIII dynasty, which lasted from 1501 to 1342 B.C., and excavated in the nineteenth century by Napoleon's armies, the temple is still the largest columned building in the world, with two 330-ton obelisks out front, enormous statues, long corridors, rooms within rooms. It's also one of the world's major tourist attractions.

Ancient Egyptians believed Amun created the world each day out of watery chaos by masturbating and swallowing his own semen, then spitting it out. It's not entirely clear whether Amun used his hand for this task or performed autofellatio. There are many bas-reliefs on the temple walls of figures with big erect penises; in at least one of these a figure lying flat on his back with his legs folded over toward his head is about to take his own very long phallus into his mouth. But Amun's hand was certainly important.

Apparently each day, in the innermost temple, Amun's shrine, the original act of creation would be ritually reenacted. Nobody knows exactly what this means, but archaeologists are willing to imagine. Originally they thought a statue of the god standing up was used in the rituals, but now they think the ritual statue was the one where the god is sitting; he has a flail in his right hand and in his left he grips his big, erect dick. The walls are as high as men can see. This is obviously a holy place, but what does "holy" mean here?

When the priests performed their ceremonies, their whole bodies were first shaven, then bathed. They oiled and clothed the god. They brought him incense and dancing girls, anything to stimulate him to reenact creation one more time. Other than that we don't know what they did, exactly. It may have been something symbolic, but we'd all like to think it was something sexual. The high priestess probably had something to do with it, in her role as the wife of the god. The wife of the god had another title: God's Hand.

THEHERMS

Athens in the fifth century B.C. was a capital of phallic power, and one manifestation of the city's rampant phallicism was its high concentration of herms. Named for the god Hermes, herms were vertical stone slabs with sculptures of the bearded head of Hermes on top and protruding sculpted erections at penis level. The herms stood in front of private houses and at street corners; they marked boundaries between properties; they massed together in the marketplace, jutting out at each other and every passerby. Their presence was thought to protect the populace from evil, and individuals routinely touched the erections for good luck. Then one night in 415 B.C., as the men of Athens were preparing to sail to Sicily for a new foray against the Spartans in the continuing Peloponnesian War, someone chopped the dicks off all the herms. Bad luck ensued; Athens lost to Sparta. The herm- choppers were never found, and although this happened 2,500 years ago, for some strange reason it's still being discussed. In The Reign of the Phallus, Eva Keuls builds an elaborate case to show that it must have been the respectable women, confined to the women's quarters of the house, who castrated the herms in the dead of night, to make the point that phallicism had gone too far.


SWEARING

Nowadays Western people swear on the Bible, but before there were Bibles, men used to swear on their penises, or on the penises of the men they were swearing to. In the Bible when men swear, the translators euphemistically refer to the penis as a thigh. Here are two examples from Genesis: Abraham asking his servant to swear to him: "Tut your hand under my thigh, and I will make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and of earth,'" (Gen. 24: 2-3). And Jacob on his deathbed: "He called his son Joseph and said to him, 'If now I have found favor in your sight, put your hand under my thigh, and promise to deal loyally and truly with me,'" (Gen. 47: 29).

It may be that "thigh" really means testicles, or penis and testicles. In any case the word "testify" comes from this practice.

DEFLOWERING VIRGINS 

Christianity could banish all the penis gods, but it couldn't stamp out penis magic. In Europe throughout the Middle Ages people wore phallic amulets, drew phalluses on their churches and sought the protection of certain Christian saints who had inherited the phallic powers of the former gods—for example, St. Foutin, who was popular in the South of France, Provence, Languedoc and the Lyonnais. A medieval statue of St. Foutin was likely to be furnished with a large, erect wooden phallus. Barren women would scrape this phallus, steep the scrapings in water and drink the mixture in the hope it would make them fertile, or give it to their husbands to drink to improve their potency. Statues of other saints with prominent phalluses—Gilles, Arnaud, Guignole—were also appealed to with a scraping knife. The saintly penises, worn down by constant attention, would from time to time experience miraculous renewals. "The phallus consisted of a long staff of wood passed through a hole in the middle of the body," says Thomas Wright in his 1866 classic, The Worship of the Generative Powers, "and as the phallic end in front became shortened, a blow of a mallet from behind thrust it forward, so that it was restored to its original length." The practice of asking phallic statues of saints for help with fertility continued in some places well into the eighteenth century.

In another related practice in Medieval Europe certain statues of phallic saints were used during wedding ceremonies to deflower the brides. This custom originated in ancient times when a statue of Priapus would do the deed. The purpose in both cases was to insure good fortune and fertility. In The Worship of the Generative Powers, Wright says he believes that intercourse with statues of saints is what inspired women in the use of artificial phalluses for sexual gratification, "a vice which is understood to prevail especially in nunneries."

Using statues to deflower virgins was still common practice in the nineteenth century in India, Japan and the Pacific Islands. "Even today," Alain Danielou wrote in 1993 in The Phallus, "the young girls of Nepal have their hymens broken by means of a phallus-shaped fruit in a rite that grants to the god a sort of 'droit du seigneur.'"

THE DEVIL'S DICK

Witches' Sabbaths of the Middle Ages, which were described as large-scale orgies, probably descended from the phallic cults. Celebrants worshiped a horned god who, at least in the minds of the Inquisitors who brought the witches to trial, represented the devil. Like Priapus, the devil was often said to have a huge penis, and celebrants were said to have sex with him. His semen, they reported, was ice-cold. If nothing else the broomstick was a phallic symbol. Wright describes the way witches proceeded: "They took an ointment given to them by the devil, with which they anointed a wooden rod, at the same time rubbing the palms of their hands with it, and then, placing the rod between their legs, they were suddenly carried through the air to the place of assembly."

Beguiled by the devil's dick, witches were thought to have power over the penises of ordinary men.

During the Inquisition, people who were accused of witchcraft were often said to have made men impotent, or even caused their penises to disappear. (The spell a witch was said to cast to disappear a penis was called a "glamour"—the origin of our word for magical appeal.) The following is from a translation of Malleus Maleficarum, the fifteenth-century book on witchcraft that was a basic text of the Inquisition: "For a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: 'You must not take that one'; adding, 'because it belonged to a parish priest.'"



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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PENIS WORSHIP

Men have always been proud of their penises, but before Christianity they used to be more open about it. From the Neolithic period, when men discovered their role in conception, until Christianity spread through Europe, almost every culture had gods with visible penises. Not only visible, but huge.

The Greeks liked penises so much they had a number of penis gods—Priapus was one, Dionysus was another, Hermes another—in fact Hermes is a word for penis in Greek. Bacchus—also known as Liber—was the native Roman penis god. Osiris was the Egyptian penis god. Shiva was the Indian penis god, and there is still a lingam chapel devoted to Shiva in every Hindu temple. In ancient places as various and widespread as India, Japan, Greece, Rome and Britain, there were festivals every year in honor of the penis gods. Huge dummy penises were carried through the streets, people wore penis masks and the feasts usually ended in orgies. Women were often major participants. During the festivals housewives got to wear fake phalluses and behave like men. Then they went back to their circumscribed lives.

When the penis gods reigned, phallic monuments littered the landscape. Egyptians erected obelisks, those lofty squared-off phalluses with pyramid tips. Some survive—among them a Cleopatra's Needle relocated to New York's Central Park and another to London's Embankment. (The Washington Monument, more than forty stories high, is the nineteenth-century American version.) In Dorset, England, the Cerne Abbas giant, thought to date from the second century A.D., is clearly visible today. An enormous drawing cut in chalk on to a green hill, the giant wields a gigantic club and sports an erection that stretches from balls to belly button. The entire figure covers so much ground that a couple of humans can easily have intercourse within the bounds of the phallus. Over the centuries many have done so, hoping for fertility and good luck. On the Greek Island of Delos the remains of the Avenue of Priapus can still be seen—huge stone phalluses perched atop carved stone pillars like cannons aiming gism at the stars.

In societies that practiced phallic worship, phalluses often adorned everyday objects. They were common in the vase paintings of Classical Greece, which regularly took sex play as their subject— between mortals, and among mortals, satyrs and gods. In the excavated ruins of Pompeii the phallus
was a leitmotif. There were bronze ornaments in the shape of phalluses with bells hanging from them; gaily winged phalluses with phallic legs and tails; terracotta bowls with phalluses jutting from them; lamps made of faunlike figures weighed down by huge dick wicks. The ancient Peruvian Mochica culture made a specialty of pitchers with phalluses for spouts. These objects, in which the penis is either disembodied or disproportionately huge, give it an unseemly gravity. If you lived among these objects as a woman you would probably experience penises in some ways more as men do; they wouldn't seem alien to you, but on the other hand you'd be forced to think about them all the time.

Penises, apparently so magical, were widely thought to ward off the evil eye. Small sculptures of phalluses were found on the exterior walls of houses in Pompeii (and can be seen today on the walls of houses in Sikkim). In ancient Rome a victorious general would suspend a huge phallus on his chariot, to insure that success would not destroy his luck. Ancient Romans wore phallic amulets around their necks, or on a bracelet, to protect themselves. Some of these were penis-shaped, others were in the shape of a fist with the middle finger extended, or a fist with the thumb protruding between the second and ring fingers. Those hand symbols are still worn for good luck, though some wearers may not know what they really symbolize. The Latin word for these magical representations of the penis is fascinum—the origin of the English word "fascinate."

Vulvas were also used as good-luck symbols in some cultures. It's easy for me to imagine that men are reminded of their destiny and their importance when they see a phallus being worshiped. Because that's the way I felt when I saw drawings of the Shelah-na-Gig, the Medieval Irish vulva symbol. To my surprise I was proud that vulvas were esteemed for their life-enhancing properties, and were sculpted on the outsides of Irish churches.

Vulvas were not at all as widely revered as penises, and this is probably because men were in charge. It would be wrong to say that men were in charge because they had penises—the reasons are much more complicated, and strength and capacity for violence are more to the point. But erect penises were a symbol of the authority of men, reminding everyone that a man with an erection was a person full of fervor and determination; a person who might be dangerous.



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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TWO COMPARATIVE STUDIES OF PENISES

A NUDE BEACH

One of my informants took me to a low-key nudist beach in Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Among the beachgoers were families, heterosexual couples, gay couples. A lot of promenading went on, as it does on any beach, and as on any beach a majority of the promenaders were men. There they were, strolling and talking, as their dicks bobbed along on their balls or dangled meekly between their legs. Some looked like flower buds, some looked like pencils, some looked like faucets, some looked like mushrooms, some looked like sausages—and they all looked like each other. Flaccid and out in the open they seemed terribly vulnerable.

After a trip to a nudist beach you can see men in business clothes striding down city sidewalks and imagine them inside their suits as if they were vulnerable nudists.

GAY PINUP MAGAZINES

My first time shopping at a magazine store in the section for gay porn and pinup magazines I riffled through the available merchandise—Jock, Mandate, Bunkhouse, Stallion, Bear (for people who like hairy, portly, manly men), Foreskin Quarterly and so on. Fighting off my dread of being thought sexually weird, I stepped up to the counter and bought Play girl and Inches. Play girl was supposed to be for women. As for Inches, I liked its name. I bought it even though it had a picture on the cover of a man in bright white Jockey shorts. Much as I love men, I do not understand the appeal of Jockey shorts. They remind me of my older brother—whom I love, but to whom I have never been sexually attracted—who used to wear them around the house when I thought he should be dressed. Sometimes they had mysterious stains on them.

When I got these magazines home I left them alone for a while. Enrique came over and I showed them to him. He said he couldn't look. Then later I found him slowly turning the pages of one of them, holding it at arm's length, shaking his head. "Ai, caramba, these are major pieces of meat," he said. I dipped into them. A friend loaned me some back issues of Inches and of a more specialized offshoot publication, Black Inches. They just brought out the prude in me.

Sheltered as I was, I'd never seen such a forest of dicks before. Fear came up; fear and disinclination. Most women aren't all that turned on by anonymous body parts—we respond better if there's a nice, romantic story. But here, you open a gay pinup magazine, and a naked guy you've never seen before is ogling you. He's dumb as milk, he has this awful come-on look and he's pressing his pelvis forward, presenting to you for your delectation his big, hard-as-a-ramrod cock. The covers of my magazines advertised the riches inside: "Super Top Blade Thompson's Uncut Crotch Muscle," "Rico's 10-Inch Jawbreaker" and much, much more. These were phenomena I did and did not want to know about. I sat down and looked at them, until my resistance disappeared.

I saw a man with a stockbroker's haircut and pale skin, lightly tanned all over, who had a rosy pink erection that stood straight out, curving downward ever so slightly, like a dowsing rod. A man with swarthier skin had a glistening prick of a uniform coral color. An African-American man, muscled and bronze-colored, had a thick, uncircumcised dick as dark as bittersweet chocolate. One man, called "Black Thunder," was brown all over, with a very long, wide penis that curved in the middle and had a beautiful pink head, the same color as his belly button. When I paid attention to them I began to feel a kind of affection for these penises, and even a bit of lust.

The best photographs were the ones where the men were not looking at the camera, but at their penises; their expressions were tender and amused. In one series of pictures the man seemed almost to be dancing with his penis—which was fat, veined and uncircumcised. Dancing, or playing, or letting it have its way, he was seeing what it might do when it was on its own, as if it were his pet, or his baby brother.

Those pictures are often in my mind. It seems so right when a man's penis brings out his good nature. When that happens, size is totally beside the point.



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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MILKING IT

There are also old-fashioned manual methods of penis enlargement, for those who would rather masturbate. The most intriguing of these is "jelq," practiced by the Sudanese Arabs, who are supposedly well hung as a consequence. When a boy is eight, the story goes, his father passes on to him the secrets of jelq, showing him how to take his penis between thumb and forefinger and, using medium-firm pressure and long strokes, to milk it from base to tip, hand over hand. The boy learns to stop the massage when he comes close to ejaculation, wait for the feeling to subside, then start again; he practices for a half hour a day, approaching ejaculation six or seven times. If the family has money the boy may be sent to a "mehbil," or athletic club, where an attendant, after massaging him with oil, will do the jelq for him.

Jelq is most effective when initiated during boyhood, according to Gary Griffin, MBA, the American Pied Piper for penis enlargement, but grown men can benefit from the practice, if they're willing to devote themselves to it for a year or more. Griffin, author of twelve books about the penis, describes jelq, and many other paths to enlargement, in Penis Enlargement Methods—Fact & Phallusy. In his opinion the real frontier in penis enlargement may be hypnosis and autosuggestion. When this method is perfected, if all goes well, a man may be able to imagine himself with the dick of his dreams so fervently and consistently that eventually his body will respond by growing it.



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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WEIGHING IT DOWN

I was at a party the first time I heard about penis weights. A few of us were sitting around a coffee table, balancing plates of food on our knees, and John said he had a friend who wore weights on his penis to make it bigger. Sometimes this friend wore his weights to the office. He worked, John said, as a bond trader on Wall Street.

"Wall Street—no wonder," Michael said. "They call the hotshot traders there Big Swinging Dicks."

It was hard to imagine how a man could go to the office with a weight on his penis. Eventually someone would notice it under his pants. Or somebody would bump into him and feel it—a three- pound metal ball hooked by a rope to the corona just above the head of his penis, dangling halfway down to his knees.

But maybe this man was actually wearing a Yank Super Stretcher. This is made of elastic and is advertised as something you can keep on discreetly all day long. An elastic band fits around the corona and is attached by means of elastic to another band around the thigh so that it exerts a constant pull.

The Yank, which costs only $18.50, is the most elementary of stretchers. Upscale from the Yank are several makes with a ring that fits around the base of the penis, another ring that fits over the head, and rods of adjustable length running between the two rings to keep the penis in a state of constant anxiety. Stretchers can cost as much as $900.

Men who use weights have probably been encouraged by stories brought back from India and Africa. The Indian sadhus, for example, are said to put some of their boys on a regimen of penis weight training from the age of six. By the time these boys reach manhood their penises are extraordinarily long—and correspondingly thin. The chosen adult sadhus wear their penises knotted up inside cloth baskets. They believe a lengthened penis brings a man closer to god. When it comes to sexual intercourse, they're useless.



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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PUMPING IT UP

Any man who reads men's magazines has seen ads for penis enlargement vacuum pumps, in the back of the book near the hair transplant ads. The first penis pumps were patented around 1914; they were invented to help men get and maintain erections, and even after the advent of Viagra, modern versions are still sometimes used for that purpose. Dr. Kaminetsky, many of whose patients have erection problems, showed me a vacuum pump when I visited his office. It was a clear plastic cylinder, longer and wider than any ordinary penis, open at one end and sealed at the other. A tube coming out of the sealed end was attached to a suction pump. Dr. Kaminetsky told me to put my palm over the open end of the cylinder he was holding. He pumped air out of the cylinder, and I could feel the strong pull on my palm. A penis, inserted into the tube, would be pulled in the same way: As air is pumped out the penis expands to fill the space.

A pump is a cumbersome treatment for impotence. The couple must wait until the man pumps up and removes himself from the tube before their lovemaking can proceed, and then his erection will be big and heavy rather than stiff, "like a cold sausage," as Dr. Kaminetsky put it. But a man alone with his pump can get a thrill just from watching his organ grow.

Men who pump can devote hours to the equipment, discuss the fine points with fellow pumpers, tune in to other people's experiences at various web sites on the Internet, look at pictures of other people's pumping results. And all the while the equipment, shaped somewhat like a penis, is meant to enhance their equipment, the penis itself.

This pumping is no simple operation. First of all there's the question of what kind of pump to buy: cheap or expensive, manual or electric. And then, when you use it, should the tube be filled with hot water (not if it's electric it shouldn't)? And what kind of lubricant should you use? (One man wrote to
his fellows at a pumping web site, "I use olive oil for lube. It's all natural, inexpensive, great for your skin and washes off the tubes with a drop of detergent.") And how long and at what pressure should you pump? And after you're pumped up should you keep it on while you watch TV (lots of pumpers do)? And should you ejaculate into it (you'll have to clean it)? And how long should your penis stay big after it's thoroughly pumped (several hours, some say)? And is it a good idea to tell your wife about your practice? And, most important, will pumping affect your erections? These and other questions are debated at length on the Internet.

Many pumpers trim their pubic hair before pumping —to get a good seal, some say, and also to make their penises look bigger. They use different-size cylinders: a longer, thinner one to expand length, and a shorter, wider one to expand width. Some men pump their balls. Some use a "cock cushion," a thick silicone ring placed around the base of the penis to restrict circulation and keep it from deflating totally between meetings with the vacuum tube. A man who devotes several hours a day to pumping his penis may be able to keep it in a perpetually pumped-up state. On the other hand, if he pumps too much he could lose his ability to have natural erections.

In spite of what pumpers like to believe, there is no scientific evidence that pumping permanently enlarges the penis. But in the end this detail may be unimportant. No one becomes a pumper who doesn't enjoy it. Though it is done with a goal in mind and might be thought of as exercise, pumping is also, it must be said, a form of sexual activity. That's why one manufacturer advertises "The Electric Deep Throat Developer System," with fifty "throbbing, root-milking pulses per minute . . Develop your cock to stud-like proportions and get the ultimate suck job at the same time."



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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PENIS ENLARGEMENT SURGERY

Surgery on the penis is not a new idea. Men have been circumcising and castrating each other for centuries. A seventeenth-century Chinese novel mentioned in G. L. Simons's The Phallic Mystique has a scene in which a doctor who advertises penis enlargement explains his method. The doctor does it by adding slices of erect dog penis. He harvests the dog penis when it's inside a bitch and the dog is about to ejaculate, he says. He slices the dog penis off at the root, cuts it into quarters, inserts the quarters while still warm into incisions in the patient's penis, rubs the whole thing with ointment and wraps it in bandages. Three months later the new organ is ready to go to work, with erections twenty times the size of a normal man's.

In reality you can't augment a penis by slicing it open and adding something else, without also making the owner impotent. Modern penis enlargement surgery, which offers much more modest increases, was developed out of experimental work done by pediatric urologists on infants with congenital defects. The two procedures, one to lengthen the penis, the other to add girth, were introduced to the general public in 1991. In mid-1997 one surgeon estimated that at least fifteen thousand in the U.S. had already had their penises surgically enlarged. Among these men was the comic Flip Wilson, who claimed his penis needed enlargement because he'd worn it down with overuse. In August of 1997 Wilson gave the surgery its first celebrity endorsement when he pulled it out and showed it off to the people in the control booth on Howard Stern's radio show.

Dr. Jed Kaminetsky, a urologist who was the first to perform the surgery in New York City, and who has since stopped doing it, described the odd nature of the practice to me.

"Most of the people who came to me for this surgery had average-size penises. I measured all of them, flaccid and erect, before the surgery, and I photographed them. I had a whole cabinet of photographs. We had to induce an erection so we could measure it. I stocked up on gay porn because over fifty percent of the men who came in were gay. And I had straight porn for the other men. It's much easier for a woman to go buy gay porn than it is for a straight man. I sent my wife.

"A whole series of very macho guys came to see me—Rocky, and Bruno, macho Italian guys. I saw a lot of Asians who wanted the surgery. It just runs the gamut.

"There was one guy who came to me, and his penis looked like a beer can. I don't think he was using it to have sex with anyone. He had already had three or four penile enlargements. He kept having it revised and putting more girth on it. His penis was almost as wide as it was long. It was over six inches around in its flaccid state. He asked me to do more and I had to say no.

"That was one reason I stopped doing the surgery—the patients had too much emotional baggage. Also the results aren't great. The surgery isn't perfected yet, and in the end I didn't feel comfortable doing it or recommending it be done."

Because penis enlargement surgery is not perfected, both the American Urological Association and the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons refuse to endorse it. Medical schools don't teach it and textbooks don't describe it. But there are at least thirty doctors, worldwide, who perform the surgery on an outpatient basis—at a cost of nearly $6,000 if lengthening and widening are done at the same time, and with varying degrees of success.

The standard penis lengthening procedure entails cutting the suspensory ligament that holds the penis at a particular angle to the pubic bone. Freed of this ligament, the logic goes, the penis can dangle farther down out of the body. Surgeons promise one to two and a half inches of increased length, and then prescribe the wearing of weights a few hours every day for several months, to keep the extra piece of penis from retreating back inside.

Extra girth—up to 50 percent more, some surgeons say—can be added in one of two ways. A few years ago surgeons favored liposuction. They would suction fat out of the patient's abdomen and insert it into the penis. This is the same method that is used to add pout to women's lips, and it was invented by the same man who invented lip liposuction. It has the same drawback, too—eventually some of the fat gets reabsorbed, and the procedure must be repeated.

A newer method is the dermal fat graft: The surgeon removes a strip of dermis, or skin layer, from the buttocks or thigh, and sews it into the penis. This is more permanent, but it is also a more complicated operation. Still, it's now the only widening procedure some surgeons will do. Too often when liposuctioned fat is injected into the penis it distributes itself unevenly, forming lumps. Imagine a man who used to worry that his penis was too thin. He has the surgery and now it's fatter, but lumpy. Not only is he embarrassed to have sex, he's so angry he initiates a malpractice suit. In one case I read about the doctor seemed indignant that he was being sued. Nothing was wrong, he said. The patient just needed to massage the lumps vigorously enough, and eventually everything would even out.

Lumpy penis is only one of the surgery's possible side effects. Sometimes the lengthening procedure actually ends up shortening the penis, and usually it decreases the angle of the erection. Either surgery can cause scarring, numbness, blood vessel damage and impotence. It's somewhat safer to have your penis lengthened, wait a few months and then have it widened. But proceeding that way is more expensive—lengthening alone costs close to $4,000 and widening can be as much as $5,000.

Of course, many men have had the surgery without complications, and some of them have been interviewed for magazine articles in which they say they're much happier now. Most likely they're men who had really small penises to start with, for whom an extra inch would be a big percentage gain. As for the rest, according to Dr. Kaminetsky, "You can add length, but not that much erect length, so basically it makes guys look better in the shower. Nobody I operated on was really unhappy afterward. But I don't think it changed anybody's life, I'll tell you that."



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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WOMEN TALK ABOUT PENIS SIZE

"To me, penis size isn't anywhere near as important as the size of the brain."

"Size does matter. It's been ingrained that bigger is better, and a large man seems powerful in a really primal way. I've had normal- size men, and making love with them felt nice, it just wasn't wholeheartedly satisfying. My best lover to date was about eight and a half inches. Nine is probably my cutoff. I like them to be big around, also. There's something about proportion that's important. I'm a big, broad woman. I can't date short men, either. It all comes back to power. There's this minor bit of pain that's a powerful element with a bigger man. The sensation is deeper and there's less work involved. Sex can be extremely pleasurable without a lot of movement. That space is filled."

"When I was eighteen I was pretty promiscuous, and I hooked up with this punk-rock guy and I was so into him, and the rumor had it he had this huge cock, and it was pierced and all this good shit, and I was all psyched. I got with him, and it hurt. Let me tell you, it was so big that I was like, Oh, no. It was so big it was a big problem. I thought, Damn. I was so excited, for this?"

"When you're in the heat of first love you're living in illusion, and his dick could be a pencil, it doesn't matter, because you supply all the rest. Then as you go on, if it is a pencil it matters, it really does."

"Men are so worried about length, but width is much more important. You can really feel a wide one."

"It doesn't have to be the biggest dick in the world. But if it's too small it kind of gets lost. Once you hit average, size doesn't matter from there on up. It depends on how good a lover they are." "Just for fun I called up some escort services, to find out what they were offering and how much they charged. They said all their escorts had very big penises. 'How big?' I said. They said they were at least ten inches. I said, 'Ten inches, what is that? A murder weapon?'"







Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley

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PENIS PHYSIOLOGY

Penis size and shape are hereditary, and penises are as similar on the whole as they are infinite in their variety. They are not muscles, and there's no bone in any of them.

The penis is attached to the pelvic cavity at its root, or base. Its head, the big, smooth cap on the end, is called the glans, and the rim around the base of the glans is the corona. The shaft of the penis contains three columns of spongy erectile tissue, and is encased in a loose layer of skin. In uncircumcised men this skin also covers the glans. The piece of skin that keeps the glans covered is known as the foreskin, or prepuce, and it retracts as the penis becomes erect. Circumcised men have had the foreskin removed, so that the head of the penis is uncovered at all times. The slit in the head is the opening of the urethra, a slim tube that runs from the bladder through the body of the penis to the head. The urethra carries both urine and semen to the outside world, but not simultaneously.

The penis rests on the scrotum, which contains two testicles, or balls. Both testosterone and sperm are manufactured in the testicles. Penis and testicles grow to full size during puberty. From puberty onward, the sperm factory in the testicles maintains a constant production cycle. A healthy, fertile male makes several hundred million tiny sperm each day. His penis functions as a conveyor belt. Its erection is a sign he's getting ready to discharge some of those sperm, depositing them perhaps with a fellow human and in any case clearing his own storage facility for further stockpiling.



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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THINKING WITH YOUR DICK

According to Darwinians—who use the theory of evolution to explain our behavior—humans are designed to be part monogamous, part promiscuous: The war between the sexes is more or less built into our biology. Men are nature's vehicles of sperm distribution—and they amass power in order to obtain sexual access for themselves. Sultans with harems, rich men with wives and mistresses, are merely following a biological imperative to reproduce. But women, the ones who have the babies, need to be choosier about their mates—they demand fidelity so that their young will be well fed and taken care of.

One gay man described to me what "thinking with your dick" means. "When you're stimulated, you switch into a different mode, and your dick takes over. It's a little like a horse that gets the bit in his mouth and runs. I'm talking about a completely physiological kind of thing. That's why male/male sexuality is so combustible—you've got two combustible elements. There's a lot of sex in semi-public places like men's rooms and bars. They're there, they feel like it and they do it." If this theory is correct then women, with our insistence on decorum, are the only obstacle standing between current courtship practices and a continuous, semipublic, erotic free-for-all.



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley 

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