The Penis: Not just a body part
BY CHRIS SOLOMON
``The history of the penis,'' David M. Friedman writes, ``is the history of its evolution as an idea. Over time the penis has been deified, demonized, secularized, racialized, psychoanalyzed, politicized, and, finally, medicalized by the modern erection industry.''
With those stages as his road map, Friedman leads a brisk, engaging tour of Western attitudes toward the penis over the past 3,000 years. Along the way, he visits related topics, from circumcision to penis envy to Viagra.
For the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, the penis symbolized divinity. One Dionysian festival in Alexandria had as its featured float a 180-foot golden phallus ``topped by a gold star.'' Of course, the penis also was the repository of manly attributes and power. Pederasty was a common Greek practice, Friedman writes, because it was a symbolic passing of arete, or manhood, from an elder to a youth.
Romans worshiped the penis but abhorred pederasty; the elite declared their sons off-limits by giving them lockets called ``fascinum'' which contained a replica of an erect penis. Still, writes Friedman, the Roman awe of the penis survives through the word ``fascinating.''
Shame arrived with the Christians. St. Augustine tied carnal desire to original sin and ``redefined the Western idea of the penis for the next thousand years.''
Friedman pauses before Freud, who explored ``the mysterious mental potency of the human penis,'' before moving on to feminists of the sexual revolution, who read intercourse as a power play and the penis as little more than an occupying army. Finally, we arrive at the multimillion-dollar erectile industry.
One complaint: The book is embarrassingly europhallocentric. A ``cultural history'' today shouldn't still mean Western history exclusively. Otherwise, Friedman has written a fine -- and fascinating -- overview.
Chris Solomon reviewed this book for The Seattle Times.
A MIND OF ITS OWN: A Cultural History of the Penis. David M. Friedman. Free Press. 256 pages. $26.
[I have inserted a hit tracker to see who clicks on this thread. LOL]
-- Anonymous, January 13, 2002