If one believes the creation myth, the ideal Adam and Eve were created nude. Then God proclaimed, “It was good…except for Adam’s penis.” Nope. The story did not include a disclaimer. It seems that God was quite pleased with his handiwork. Ahem. I’m sure Adam had an uncircumcised tool that John Holmes would have envied.
This conundrum begs the question, where did all this hatred for the penis and the body originate? Art and media have displayed the nude female body for millennia. Yet, we rarely see a male penis. And when it is revealed, it is often used for shock value rather than an artistic or erotic moment.
No matter how you feel about the nude body in all its glory, there’s no denying it—it’s shocking to see a penis on the screen. Mainly because it’s only been done a handful of times over the last century of mainstream movies and TV, compared to the countless naked women we’ve seen grace our screens. Why?
Last week, I read “A Mind of Its Own (A Cultural History of the Penis)” by David M. Friedman. It was eye-opening. As you might guess, religion came along and screwed up everything. Consider this brief synopsis.
First, Christian witch hunters (Inquisitors) maimed, tortured, and murdered thousands of innocent women between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. The penis (in this case, the Devil’s) was the obsession of every Inquisitor and the “star” of every witch’s confession. Friedman says, “the driving force of these horrific deaths was an ongoing cultural obsession with the penis, the insecurities it fostered, and the perceived harm it could do.
The leaders of the Church (contrary to their holy scripture) spread the idea that the body was NOT a temple. Instead, it was a flimsy vessel for a churning stew of vile processes—sex, defecation, urination, and vomiting—which was constantly erupting. The most obscene of this effluvia was semen, and the polluted spigot through which it emerged was the penis.”
The revered church father, St. Augustine, was one of the worst culprits. For him, the cause and effect of original sin is lust, and the symptom and disease is an erection. With one stroke, this horny yet suppressed priest transformed the penis more than any man who had lived. The sacred staff of the Romans and the Greeks became the demon rod of the Christians.
The Greeks used their penis to judge proximity to the gods, large or small there was no denying the importance of the penis in Greek culture. At the gymnasiums, men would work out nude. For the Romans, all one need do is examine their adoration of the Greek God Priapus, one of the most diminutive gods but endowed with an enormous penis. They believed a man with a Priapic penis possessed exceptional strength, and Roman generals would promote soldiers based on penis size. Furthermore, the Greeks and Romans never forgot that the penis is an instrument of pleasure and a point of great pride.
But not the Christians. For the conflicted Augustine, no organ was more corrupt than the penis. In scripture, Jesus Christ praised men who became eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. Religion castrated, circumcised, mutilated, and demonized the penis.
Moreover, there is the problem of Jesus’ penis. Even though scripture records his circumcision, all the art portraying him as a child shows an uncircumcised penis. And his childhood penis was the only one uncensored in Christian art. Contemplate that for a moment. Is the penis demonic in humans but divine in Jesus? The Dutch painter Maerten van Heemskerck attempted to grapple with this inconsistency in two paintings of Jesus as an adult with an obvious erection.
White America further propagated this hatred. Friedman says, “Three hundred years of American phobias and fantasies, a history marked by lynchings, castrations, and paranoid fears of black phallic superiority, became a disturbing, unforgettable, and political work of art.” The hatred of the black man and the urban legend around the size of his penis became, in the words of Jacquelyn Hall, “the folk pornography of the Bible Belt.”
Even if a sexual encounter between a black man and a white woman was consensual, some Americans were outraged to the point of genital mutilation. Only by stripping the “beast” of his primal power could that force be transferred to the white man, where it belonged. Tragically, we see this folk pornography revealed today in the numerous cold-blooded murders of black men by law enforcers made up primarily of small white men compensating by arming themselves with big guns.
Unfortunately, in 1989, the controversial artist Robert Mapplethorpe exacerbated this stereotype with his shocking photograph (considered by many to be his masterpiece) titled “Man in Polyester Suit.” Mapplethorpe dared to portray a place of erotic delirium that was both thrilling and terrifying to white America. It is a realm that recently found its way to the vaunted dining table of a former President in the person of white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
The penis, first memorialized and idolized in Pompeii, was circumcised by the Jewish people and exorcised and mutilated by the Catholic religion. It was racialized in Nazi Germany and by Southern Baptists and White Supremacists, psychoanalyzed by Freud and his acolytes, demonized by Women Liberationists, and medicalized by the modern erection industry.
Perhaps it is time for those of us who are enthralled by the beauty and sensuality of our penis and revel in our masculine identity—yet abhor the domination of white patriarchy, refuse to be controlled by religious taboos, and despise the hatred of racists—to finally free our penis from shame, guilt, and control. And to recognize this marvelous instrument as a sign of primordial personal identity and as the spiritual image of a healthy and whole male human being.
A whole man who loves himself and loves others has no place for hatred of his body, mind, soul, spirit, and certainly not his penis. A healthy and loving erection points to a powerful inner reality at work in a man. If we dare—the penis can open the door to masculine depth and growth. When we hold our penis in our hand, we carry a storehouse of energy, a cosmic tool, and a great sword of heroism. I believe this so strongly that I have that symbolic principle permanently tattooed on my body.
My penis has been repressed, suppressed, denied, shamed, and, yes, hated by the institutions of my life: family, religion, education, and culture. In that world, my first half of life, there was no place for my penis as a cosmic image. However, in my second life, I am resolved to have it take its rightful place in my universe.
I resolve to utilize every means better to understand this mysterious yet magnificent part of my body. I will paint it, cast it, sculpt it, photograph it, meditate on it, caress it, and write about it. For fifty years, my penis was shamed and hated—if I have fifty more, I plan to free it and, above all, to LOVE it. Of course, I may be an idealist, and I suspect that many religious people will call me crazy. Still, I long for the day when both the nipple and the penis can be free—for a world where we celebrate them both as beautiful symbols of the feminine and the masculine.
