got the better of her. The prostitute in Tama Janowitz’s
Slaves of New York
encounters all kinds of penises including some that are ‘enchanted, dusted with pearls like the great minarets of the Taj Mahal’ – which is almost as rhapsodic. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some women view male genitals with positive distaste, like the poet Sylvia Plath: ‘old turkey neck and gizzards’; or, like Jane Ingersoll in Moody’s
Purple America:
‘the ugliest anatomical part there is, next to goiters’.
Perhaps in expressing a view somewhere between extremes Esther Vilar (
The Manipulated Man
) speaks for most of her gender in saying that ‘To a woman, the male penis and scrotum appear superfluous to the otherwise symmetrical male body’ (considering the pandemic of obesity, ‘symmetrical’ being a theoretical concept, but let that pass). Certainly virtually all women find the female body, unencumbered by external sexual plumbing, infinitely more pleasing aesthetically; as Molly Bloom muses in her pre-slumber reverie, the female statues in the museum are ‘so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf’ (
Ulysses
, James Joyce).
Men’s feelings about all this are confused and contradictory. Possessors’ affection for their penis is so great it’s unlikely were they to be asked to name either their crucial external organ or their largest that they would reply, their skin; only propriety, perhaps, prevents many from displaying a sign in their car’s rear window: IMY PENIS. Yet pride is underlain by varying degrees of anxiety. Eric Gill suffered none of this; he confided in his diary that he thought ‘A man’s penis and balls are very beautiful things.’ Others may agree and, like Sebastian in
Romeo and Juliet
, consider themself ‘a pretty piece of flesh’ (flesh, of course, a biblical euphemism). But most men probably think the journalist A.A. Gill wasn’t off the mark in describing male genitalia as ‘the gristly cruet set’ and wonder, despite their affection, whether theirs are inherently ridiculous to behold – classic Adlerian fear of mockery.
‘Does your penis horrify women?’ shouted an
FHM
magazine cover line, playing on this insecurity, a feature inside (‘Are you ugly downstairs?’) asking four women to assess their partner’s penis against others when they were all thrust through holes in a screen. If hardly scientific, the exercise showed that the women easily identified their partner’s (a small proof, tangentially, of penile individuality) and expressed affection for it – but mostly because it belonged to their partner, not because it was an attraction in itself. And while they recoiled somewhat from the three unfamiliar organs (‘like a snake that’s swallowed a football’, ‘too much skin flailing around’, ‘something in a butcher’s window’), they found all of them rather funny, ‘theirs’ included. Women do; penises per se can be seen as something the Creator doodled in an idle moment. ‘There’s nothing so ridiculous as a naked man,’ the very proper actress Jane Asher once remarked, a sentiment echoed by Debora from Derby when she appeared with her boyfriend in a television series on foreplay: ‘The mere sight of Dave’s penis’, she said, ‘has me in stitches.’
But Simone de Beauvoir (
The Second Sex
) was undoubtedly right when she observed that a penis-possessor, while regarding the idea of another man’s erection as ‘a comic parody . . . nonetheless views it in himself with a touch of vanity’. In truth, she understated the case because a penis-possessor’s erection – ‘man’s most precious ornament’ (Eric Gill again) – is his lion’s mane and his peacock’s tail, the source of his identity, the psychological and physical centre of his being, the very badge of his masculinity.
Slaves of New York
encounters all kinds of penises including some that are ‘enchanted, dusted with pearls like the great minarets of the Taj Mahal’ – which is almost as rhapsodic. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some women view male genitals with positive distaste, like the poet Sylvia Plath: ‘old turkey neck and gizzards’; or, like Jane Ingersoll in Moody’s
Purple America:
‘the ugliest anatomical part there is, next to goiters’.
Perhaps in expressing a view somewhere between extremes Esther Vilar (
The Manipulated Man
) speaks for most of her gender in saying that ‘To a woman, the male penis and scrotum appear superfluous to the otherwise symmetrical male body’ (considering the pandemic of obesity, ‘symmetrical’ being a theoretical concept, but let that pass). Certainly virtually all women find the female body, unencumbered by external sexual plumbing, infinitely more pleasing aesthetically; as Molly Bloom muses in her pre-slumber reverie, the female statues in the museum are ‘so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf’ (
Ulysses
, James Joyce).
Men’s feelings about all this are confused and contradictory. Possessors’ affection for their penis is so great it’s unlikely were they to be asked to name either their crucial external organ or their largest that they would reply, their skin; only propriety, perhaps, prevents many from displaying a sign in their car’s rear window: IMY PENIS. Yet pride is underlain by varying degrees of anxiety. Eric Gill suffered none of this; he confided in his diary that he thought ‘A man’s penis and balls are very beautiful things.’ Others may agree and, like Sebastian in
Romeo and Juliet
, consider themself ‘a pretty piece of flesh’ (flesh, of course, a biblical euphemism). But most men probably think the journalist A.A. Gill wasn’t off the mark in describing male genitalia as ‘the gristly cruet set’ and wonder, despite their affection, whether theirs are inherently ridiculous to behold – classic Adlerian fear of mockery.
‘Does your penis horrify women?’ shouted an
FHM
magazine cover line, playing on this insecurity, a feature inside (‘Are you ugly downstairs?’) asking four women to assess their partner’s penis against others when they were all thrust through holes in a screen. If hardly scientific, the exercise showed that the women easily identified their partner’s (a small proof, tangentially, of penile individuality) and expressed affection for it – but mostly because it belonged to their partner, not because it was an attraction in itself. And while they recoiled somewhat from the three unfamiliar organs (‘like a snake that’s swallowed a football’, ‘too much skin flailing around’, ‘something in a butcher’s window’), they found all of them rather funny, ‘theirs’ included. Women do; penises per se can be seen as something the Creator doodled in an idle moment. ‘There’s nothing so ridiculous as a naked man,’ the very proper actress Jane Asher once remarked, a sentiment echoed by Debora from Derby when she appeared with her boyfriend in a television series on foreplay: ‘The mere sight of Dave’s penis’, she said, ‘has me in stitches.’
But Simone de Beauvoir (
The Second Sex
) was undoubtedly right when she observed that a penis-possessor, while regarding the idea of another man’s erection as ‘a comic parody . . . nonetheless views it in himself with a touch of vanity’. In truth, she understated the case because a penis-possessor’s erection – ‘man’s most precious ornament’ (Eric Gill again) – is his lion’s mane and his peacock’s tail, the source of his identity, the psychological and physical centre of his being, the very badge of his masculinity.
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