God's Doodle (11 page)

Modern psychiatry has for the most part turned away from phallic symbolism, deeming it subjective and unscientific, and so it may be. But for most people, at a superficial level, ‘phallic’ is a reflex descriptor for anything rigid and upright, be it flagpole or lamppost, tower block or skyscraper; the heroine of Amanda Craig’s novel
Foreign Bodies
says dubiously on seeing
an
erection for the first time: ‘It is, I suppose, the basis of a great deal of architecture.’ And phallic symbolism remains beloved by writers of high-end literature, and of course filmmakers: tumescence (trains enter tunnels, rockets shoot into space, fireworks climb into the sky, wave-peaks race towards land), ejaculation (volcanoes erupt, champagne corks pop, fireworks spray, waves pound rocks or shore), and detumescence (hot-air balloons deflate, detonated chimney stacks topple, fireworks fall, waves withdraw). But archaeologists and anthropologists are conceivably the most committed of phallic symbolists. As anthropologist Richard Rudgley admitted a few years ago in a television programme looking for secrets of the Stone Age in the ruins of a Maltese temple built three and a half thousand years ago: ‘It’s an occupational hazard. We tend to see willies pretty much everywhere.’

Without doubt the best-known phallic symbol of modern times is the cigar. Indeed Freud, a cigar smoker who despite mouth cancer refused to give them up (yes, he affably agreed with his friends, smoking them was akin to homosexual fellatio), became so tired of hearing ‘phallic’ and ‘cigar’ in conjunction that he sighed: ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’ But then, as the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky affair goes to show, sometimes it isn’t.

FLAUNT IT!

GIVEN THE ANCIENT
Greeks’ admiration for the penis, it’s unsurprising that men exercised naked in the gymnasium (
gymnos
means naked) and took part naked in athletic contests. But in the fifth century
BC
, the period of the greatest flowering of Attic culture, foreigners were astonished to see that Athenian men, when young, habitually displayed their genitals in everyday life. While older men wore a tunic (
chiton
) under winter and summer cloaks, young men did not. And the light summer cloak (
chlamys
), which came only to the thigh, was frequently lifted by normal activity (not to mention a breeze). The Athenians did consider the head of the penis to be unseemly in public, which is why young men pulled their foreskin over it and tied it with a thong or held it closed with a circular clip called a
fibula
.

Small boys everywhere can be observed regularly delighting in pulling off their clothing to display their bud of flesh; and why not? asked the sexologist Alex Comfort, ‘after all [penises] are some of the best things we’ve got’. If mature penis-possessors have an innate desire to do as little boys do,
social
convention ensures they do not, as it ensures that they refrain from the overt tactility that was also a constant feature of their earliest years (professional footballers the exception to this rule). When drunk, however, some penis-possessors have a compulsion that is irresistible. The list is long and grows. In 1581 John Harris of Layer Breton, Essex, was taken to court because he ‘behaved himself very disorderly by putting forth his privities’; in 1590 Henry Abbot of Earls Colne, Essex, also appeared before the magistrates for undoing his breeches ‘in his drunkenness claiming that his privities or prick was longer by 4 inches than one Clerke there’. In the following century Pepys recorded the trial of Sir Charles Dydley for debauchery after he had appeared drunk and naked in daylight on the balcony of a brothel,

Acting all postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined . . . saying that here he hath to sell such a powder as should make all the cunts in town run after him . . . And that being done he took a glass of wine, washed his prick in it and then drank it off: and then took another and drank the King’s health.

In our own time, the constantly inebriated actor Oliver Reed, who displayed his ‘wand of lust’ (which in moments of sobriety he admitted was nothing out of the ordinary) in bars, on planes, at parties and on television and film sets, once did so to a woman reporter who was interviewing him. In reply to her scornful: ‘Is that it?’ he said, ‘Madam, if I’d pulled it out in its entirety I’d have knocked your hat off.’ On another occasion when he exposed himself in a Caribbean bar the locals took the tattoo of an eagle’s claws on his penis for a voodoo sign and he was forced to flee.

Men with a penis of considerable size don’t need their
inhibitions
loosened by alcohol to make the fact known or to demonstrate the evidence at the drop of a trouser. James Boswell, the to-be biographer of Samuel Johnson, in London from Edinburgh for the first time in 1762 and ‘really unhappy for want of women’, picked up a girl in the Strand and took her into a dark courtyard with the intention of enjoying her ‘in armour’ (he feared the pox). But neither he nor the girl had a sheath so they only toyed with each other and in his journal Boswell recorded, ‘She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak.’ Prince Grigori Alexsandrovich Potemkin, the outstanding eighteenth-century Russian statesman and lover of the Empress Catherine, used to stride through the Winter Palace naked beneath his unbuttoned Turkish dressing gown, demonstrating that his reputation was not exaggerated; the priapic Russian holy man Grigori Rasputin, once accused in a packed Moscow restaurant of not being who he claimed to be, said ‘I will prove who I am’ and did – another whose reputation went before him.
⁷

Eric Gill, the twentieth-century artist/sculptor and another journal keeper, like Boswell recorded a prostitute’s comment about his size – in her case because ‘it was too big and hurt her’. Gill habitually wore a short stonemason’s smock without underwear and was wont, when showing visitors around his commune, to urinate in the grounds, which gave him the opportunity to display ‘the water tap that could turn into a pillar of fire’. There is an entry in his 1925 diary concerning his secretary Elizabeth Bill: ‘Talked to Eliz. B. re size and shape of penis. She measured mine with a footrule – down and up.’ So proud was Gill of his endowment that he drew it constantly, made a carving of it, and used its proportions in wood engravings of Jesus who, he said, as man ‘had to have proper genitals’. Proper genitals were what Gill gave the stone figure of the Shakespearean sprite Ariel when he carved him
(accompanying
the magician Prospero) above the entrance of the BBC’s Broadcasting House. The BBC governors, gathered to see the work unveiled, were startled when Gill removed the tarpaulin behind which he worked – and ordered the sculptor back up his ladder to cut things back.

According to the autobiography of Hollywood mermaid Esther Williams, her one-time lover Johnny ‘Tarzan’ Weissmuller was so childishly delighted to be well hung that he lost no opportunity to flash his genitalia on and off the set, as did swashbuckler Errol Flynn, whose penis was such a heavyweight that his party trick was to play the piano with it. Yet another ‘exhibitionist extraordinaire’, according to his biographer James H. Jones, was Alfred Kinsey who

seldom passed up an opportunity to show off his genitals and demonstrate his masturbatory techniques to staff members. One insider…told an interviewer that Kinsey ‘had very large genitalia, and that means both penis and balls’. The man added, ‘Several of the staff members used to say, “Maybe that’s why he whips the goddam thing out all the time to show you the urethra or the corona”.’

At least Kinsey had a quasi-scientific excuse; the American president Lyndon Johnson had no excuse at all, other than pride in his size. He loved to conduct official business while he was in the shower (his White House staff squeezed into the bathroom) and often emerged fingering the considerable presidential appendage saying, ‘Wonder who we’ll fuck tonight? . . . I gotta give Ol’ Jumbo here some exercise.’ (
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
, Robert A. Caro). Once, frustrated at a press conference at which he was being pressed as to why America was still fighting in Vietnam, Johnson pulled out his pecker (one of his favourite words), saying, ‘This is why,’ presumably because he thought it
did
his talking more coherently than he did. (If men do some of their thinking with their penis, it goes without saying that their penis talks to them, as Gray Jolliffe’s cartoon character Wicked Willie – whose exploits have sold over five million books – so cleverly shows; the additional biological impossibility is neither here nor there.)

The aforementioned Scottish actor Ewan McGregor was only marginally less inarticulate than the presidential penis when he was interviewed after playing a rocker in the film
Velvet Goldmine
. For the role he had been required to moon at the audience; for good measure during shooting he flaunted not just his posterior parts but his anterior too. Asked why he had an irresistible urge to exhibit himself McGregor said:

I don’t go round thinking: Hey, I’ve got a huge cock, go on, show me yours and we’ll compare sizes. But at the same time, when people ask me if I’d be keen to flash my willy if it was small, I always think:Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know?

Shortly after, he appeared on the cover of
Vanity Fair
, ‘kilt akimbo’, clutching a rooster – the quintessential cock o’ the north.
⁸

Accessorise – or aggrandise?

In areas of South America, Africa and across the Oceanic world, men who are otherwise naked wear penis sheaths (phallocarps, in anthropologist-speak). In some societies these are just caps over the penis head, but in others they not only cover the shaft but can extend as much as two feet, held erect by a thong around the waist or even the chest. Usually penis sheaths are made from bamboo or specially grown gourds (though in recent years old toothpaste tubes and Coca-Cola cans have extended the range) and are often bright red or yellow. Some
societies
have everyday sheaths, sheaths for festivals and sheaths for war – and sheaths for visitors. Most men possess a variety, varying in size, decoration (boar tusks, animal teeth or claws, feathers) and angle of erection, and wear them according to their mood. Penis sheaths reflect a man’s status, warn off his enemies, enhance his penis’s magic powers and, with luck, attract women to him.
⁹

These were powerful reasons why, in the 1970s when, in the interests of public modesty, the Indonesian government attempted to ban men in the highlands of Papua New Guinea from wearing their sheaths, there was fierce and ultimately successful opposition. There was another reason why the men of the Dani tribe were deeply angered: they thought their sheaths
were
modest – which caused Marie, the wife of the anthropologist Jared Diamond, to describe them on her first encounter in the 1990s as ‘The most immodest display of modesty I’ve ever seen!’

The psychologist John Carl Flugel at University College London saw all human clothing as a tug of war between ‘the irreconcilable emotions of modesty and the desire for attention’. How the dictum applies to the codpiece, once the Western world’s equivalent of the penis sheath, is open to debate. In any event, for more than a hundred years, as the Middle Ages merged with the Renaissance, the codpiece was the flamboyant focus of male attire and modesty never came into it.

Actually, the codpiece was rather more modest than what went before it – which wasn’t exactly a fashion in itself, at least at first, but the consequence of one.

The mid fourteenth century was an age when clothing changed radically, the newly popular button allowing that of both sexes to fit more tightly to the body. The waistline of men’s doublets dropped to the hips to make the body look longer and the hemline rose up the thighs to make the legs
look
longer. And herein lay the problem: men’s woollen hose consisted of two separate legs, exactly like a pair of long stockings, but attached to a waist belt or, in the newer fashion, to lacing holes on the doublet’s hem, with a space between the legs at the crotch. While the doublet had flared to the knees, men’s braies (the medieval equivalent of underpants) had been bulky; now, they were much reduced so as not to spoil the closer-fitting shape of the shorter garment. And when a man sat down or mounted a horse, his braies poked through the opening, the necessary slit in them from time to time affording a glimpse – or more – of what was within.

Most men undoubtedly took care to mind the gap and maintained their decorum, but the common-sense solution was to sew the crotch shut. Yet when this happened, as paintings of the period indicate, young bucks dispensed with their braies altogether, their hose delineating and thrusting out their genitals in a forthright manner. Chaucer put it like this in ‘The Parson’s Tale’ (related here in modern English):

Alas! Some of them show the very boss of the penis and the horrible pushed-out testicles that look like the malady of hernia in the wrapping of their hose, and the buttocks of such persons look like the hinder parts of a she-ape in the full of the moon. And moreover, the hateful proud members that they show by the fantastic fashion of making one leg of their hose white and the other red, make it seem that half of their privy members are flayed. And if it be that they divide their hose in other colours, as white and black, or white and blue, or black and red, and so forth, then it seems, by the variation of colour, that the half of their privy members are corrupted by the fire of Saint Anthony, or by cancer, or by other such misfortune.

As stretched wool has a degree of see-through, which
increases
markedly as it wears and the weave loosens, some penises, one supposes, looked like bank robbers in stocking masks. Be that as it may, young men were so pleased with themselves that they now went about in their shirtsleeves, discarding the doublet and wearing their money pouch at the front rather than at the side with their dagger swinging suggestively behind it – a pseudo-penis directing the viewer’s gaze to the genuine article.