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...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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....

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