As I’ve mentioned before, this semester I’m teaching my Humanities course on “Beauty and the Body in the European-American Tradition” again. I’ve only taught it once before, four years ago, and frankly, it feels as if I’m teaching it for the first time. I always love the rush of a new course; as much as I enjoy my core Western Civ and Women’s Studies courses, the material is so familiar to me that I long for new challenges from time to time. “Beauty and the Body” certainly brings that.
We’re using a variety of texts in the course, including Susan Bordo’s The Male Body. Her first full chapter, famously, is about the penis. Not the phallus, mind you, that phantom symbol of patriarchy that haunts courses in psychoanalysis and literature. (In the underworld, I will be forced to sit in a Lacan seminar for four hours on Friday afternoons. Ask me how I know that this constitutes hellishness). Bordo is talking about the “real” penis, that flexible appendage which is a source of so much desire, anxiety, pleasure, distaste, and sheer bafflement. And so yesterday afternoon, we had what I rather roguishly enjoy referring to as “penis day # 1″. (My lecture schedule calls for two more over the course of the semester.) More below the cut (hah), and though there are no images, the topic is obviously a, uh, sensitive one.
Bordo writes quite consciously as a woman who grew up in a certain era (the 1960s). Though she’s one of our leading cultural theorists, especially where the body is concerned, her writing is delightfully free of jargon. And as she herself points out, a woman can write about the penis with a degree of distance (and sympathy) that a man cannot. She doesn’t claim to be an expert through personal experience; she notes that growing up without brothers and with a very modest father, she didn’t see a “real one” on a grown man (flaccid or erect) until she was well into her teens. Like many girls, she was intensely curious — a curiosity tinged with that strange mix of desire and revulsion so familiar to adolescence. Bordo blends together personal anecdote with cultural analysis, and her first full “penis chapter” is an easy read.
The point that Bordo makes obliquely, and that I make more explicitly in my lecture, is that cultures conceal what they fear. Anyone growing up in American society knows that female nudity is commonplace in art and film; full-frontal male nudity is much rarer. Though penises have begun to appear in more Hollywood productions in recent years, they are almost invariably soft ones — and the camera rarely lingers on that part of the male anatomy, as it so often does on a woman’s body.
In class, I mentioned two Oscar-nominated films of recent years that have penis sightings: “Brokeback Mountain” and “Eastern Promises.” In the former, the two lovers played so expertly by Jake Gyllenhaal and the beautiful Heath Ledger stay clothed throughout much of the film; the one nude scene we are permitted is when they leap playfully into a river. The glimpse is fleeting. The penises here are non-sexual; they represent not desire or potency but carefree boyishness. Though the actors (and the characters they portray) are adults, their genitalia only appears when they acting like children. The penises of little boys are permitted to be displayed publicly on beaches, of course, because they have no sexuality, no threat. In “Brokeback Mountain” (and most other films in which men appear fleetingly fully nude), the exposure of the penis represents puerile playfulness, not sex.
In the under-rated “Eastern Promises”, Viggo Mortensen (who received a well-earned Oscar nod) has a now-infamous naked fight scene with two Chechen mobsters in a bath house. The scene is brutally violent, and the audience is awed by the way in which this naked, unarmed protagonist fights off and ultimately kills his two dressed attackers. We are treated to a lot of Mortensen’s body (props to his nutritionist and his trainer), but the point of the nudity is unmistakable. Here, male nakedness — and especially, the soft penis — is used to represent radical vulnerability. What better way for the director to make a point about his lead character’s extraordinary skills as a fighter, a killer, and a man than to have him win a battle without any protection whatosever? The message is obvious: even when he is at the most vulnerable a man can be, the Mortensen character is formidable. It’s a memorable, if bloody scene.
Of course, it’s dangerous to make sweeping generalizations about how most men feel about their penises. We’re mostly familiar with the rough humor, and most of us can catch the anxiety that underlies all the joshing. And we’re aware that most men tend to judge their penis less upon its aesthetics than upon its function. Men are conditioned to worry far more about performance than appearance; this is the exact opposite of how we teach women to feel about their bodies. To stereotype massively, young women’s greatest anxieties revolve around the answer to the question “How do I look?” Their brothers’ fears tend to constrict around “How did it (or will it) work? How did it — I — make you feel?” It’s obvious enough that the pharmaceutical industry makes a fortune off of male anxieties about function, just as the cosmetics industry makes an even greater fortune off of female anxieties about appearance.
But this isn’t all of the picture. Long before most young men become concerned with sexual performance, they become aware of two things about their genital region: that they are particularly vulnerable to injury “down there”, and (unless they were raised in an exceptionally enlightened family) that their penises are “dirtier” than other parts. After all, when a little boy scratches his arm in public, he’s going to get a very different reaction from his parents than if he starts absent-mindedly (or deliberately) rubbing his genitals. Much of the time, the “Don’t do that, that’s dirty” will only come from mom or dad when he touches himself in one particular spot. Most little boys don’t see their testicles and their penises as entirely separate entities. By the time a boy is six or seven, he’s surely felt the sickening pain of being kicked or hit in the former; by the time he’s that same age, he’s probably learned from his family that “down there” is dirty. All of his bravado with his friends, his exuberant peeing in public places, doesn’t change the reality that he’s nearly certainly aware that this is a place where he can be hurt physically and (through the disgust all-too-often made evident by parents) emotionally. No wonder he’s going to be anxious about keeping it concealed.
I am very strong in my views about pornography, leaning towards the Robert Jensen and (oft-misrepresented) Catherine Mackinnon camp on the issue. Those of us who tend towards the zealous in our opposition to smut are often accused of misrepresenting the content of pornography. But I do not think I exaggerate when I say that a rather significant subgenre of mainstream heterosexual porn involves the “facial”, in which men ejaculate on women’s faces after intercourse or oral sex. The “facial” is a recent innovation; the “money shot” of the 1970s and 1980s usually involved men “cumming” on women’s stomachs or buttocks. Indeed, the “facial” has become such a staple of modern pornography that it may be silly to call it a subgenre; it has become the standard protocol for ending a sexual encounter on film.
The easy feminist analysis, which certainly has some weight, is that this obsession with ejaculating onto women’s faces is about degradation and a demonstration of power. There’s much to recommend that analysis. But I’m convinced there’s something else at play here: men’s desperate desire to have their bodies validated. We live in a culture in which women are trained, far more than men, to avoid what is “dirty”. In particular, we teach our young girls (and, to a lesser extent, our boys), not to put anything “dirty” in their mouths. From a feminist analysis, it’s easy to see men’s eagerness to have women take the penis into their mouths and cum onto their faces as evidence that the man wants to “dirty” the woman, marking her like a dog marks its territory. There’s no question that in pornography, there’s an ugliness to many of these sorts of scenes. But from the standpoint of those of us doing men’s work, there’s another side to the extraordinary appeal of the “blowjob and the facial”: it represents radical acceptance.
It is almost axiomatic that in our sexuality, we seek healing. To one degree or another, when we shed our clothes and tumble into bed (or onto the kitchen counter) with a new lover or a beloved spouse, we are looking not only for mutual pleasure and delight but also for reassurance that we are good, desirable, and, in a transcendent sense, clean. There’s a wonderful bit in the Vagina Monologues where a woman describes her first experience with a man who doesn’t just want to have sex with her, he wants to gaze at her with love and desire and wonder. The sense that she is beautiful — down there — is revelatory for her, and of course, his willingness to “go down” with such awe and delight shows her a new side of herself. If it is true that pornography represents fantasy, then the centrality of the “blowjob and facial” trope functions less as a way for men to work through their rage at women and more as a visceral representation that his body is not as dirty as he imagined. Rather than seeing the longing for the facial as an impulse to denigrate, it might be better to view it as a longing for validation. In other words, the penis in the woman’s mouth and the cum on her face doesn’t make her dirty — it makes him clean. It undoes the messages of his childhood.
This should not be construed as my way of pressuring women to do something they don’t want to do. Folks, no one “owes” anyone else any particular act in the bedroom (or the backseat, kitchen, etcetera). Good sex can heal old psychic injuries; indeed, that is one of its many functions. But when we pressure someone into fulfilling a fantasy primarily for our own healing, we usually end up inflicting new injuries on top of old ones. That’s no good.
We laugh about penises; we worry about penises, we medicate penises, we fantasize about penises. We don’t talk about them nearly enough, in all their splendor and fragility, in their capacity to give and receive pleasure — and their capacity to inflict many different kinds of pain. My class is not a “penis” class, but we cannot “look” at masculinity in all of its complexity without “looking” at the penis. As long as we see the penis as apart from ourselves as men, as long as we see it as an instrument and a tool, as long as we see it as essentially dirty or ugly, we will remain incomplete.
And the shame and anxiety we feel, all too often, will be displaced onto our lovers, girlfriends, and wives. Enough.
Very insightful Hugo…thank you for sharing. You make a lot of good and original points,which is refreshing.
I made a poem in response. :)
So true. In my sphere of friends, the women are eager to discuss the pleasures of intercourse, but also lament “having to” give a blowjob and the “ugliness” of their boyfriend/husband’s penis. I now identify as a lesbian (or a predominately homosexual bisexual..), but my encounters with penises have been wonderful ones. This confession seems to shock most of my female friends, especially because I’m a lesbian — and so far none have agreed or offered a more forgiving review of the penis. I don’t think pornography is all that enticing, but I can understand the point being made here, and I think the lack of accceptance of men and their penises is widespread and unfair.
One of my lovers was an artist who has sculpted the penises of some men she has known. I have never posed for same nor had an impression done (though I might hope to have in other ways made one :-), but I would be flattered to think I might be immortalised in this way.
I’m curious about why you think the “cum shots” in porn have recently migrated from the woman’s buttocks or breasts to the woman’s face, and if that isn’t more degrading somehow.
Because to me it really seems different - like, doing it on her buttocks or breasts (which are considered pretty sexual areas) is more about a sense of pride or reveling in his manliness & sexual potency, but that on her face is about a sense of control, power and degredation. Cum on one’s face can sting the eyes, get in the mouth and nose, affect/disrupt breathing, be generally annoying and (to many women) just plain gross (unappealing to say the least).
It just seems counterintuitive to want to ejaculate on the most delicate/sensitive part of a woman’s body, the one she most likely doesn’t want him to do it on and the one that would most “dirty” her, as a way of redeeming himself from the state of being “dirty.”
Your thoughts?
CaseyDancer-
Did you read the post? Hugo wrote:
“The easy feminist analysis, which certainly has some weight, is that this obsession with ejaculating onto women’s faces is about degradation and a demonstration of power. There’s much to recommend that analysis.”
So he covered that.
But no matter, the real reason for this post is that in talking at length about penises, Hugo is in essence talking about his own penis and hoping that, I quote him:
“…the shame and anxiety [I] feel, all too often, will be displaced onto [my] lovers, girlfriends, and wives [and my readers]. Enough.”
Enough, indeed. Yeesh.
One thing all my husbands have had in common was delight in the fact that I liked their penises so much. :) I know, that sounds either funny or obvious–I don’t just mean I like to have sex with a penis, though. I mean, I like penises. I like to look at them. I like to get really, really close to them because not only do I love the way they look (testicles too actually) I really, really love the way they smell and taste. It clearly enhanced the husbands’ own feelings of sexiness to have someone feel that way about that particular body part. And I always knew about that, but not until the most recent husband did I fully understand it, because the most recent one loved the look, smell and taste of my genitals as much as I loved his–not an experience I had had with the first two. Not that they thought it was g-r-o-s-s (and of course all parties under discussion here were/are at-least-once-daily showerers, lol) but they didn’t love it. And I’ll tell ya, if you think little boys are programmed to think Down There is Dirty and Gross, for little girls it’s even more heavily hammered in, and reinforced well into adulthood too. But I finally got to find out firsthand how much sexier and happier it makes you feel to have your genitals thought beautiful. :)
ds, yes I read the post and the one vague line about degredation “carrying some weight.”
My point was that I don’t really think HIS point carries much weight.
Not about the penis itself, but one ex-boyfriend of mine, when we’d first started dating and began discussing bedroom likes and dislikes, said that women who spit semen out and go on about how gross it is made him feel like he was dirty. And the way he explained how it affected him mirrored how I feel whenever a guy talks about how going down on women is gross. I actually had a guy jump up after giving oral sex a try for the very first time, yell out “Nasty! Ew!” and run to the bathroom to brush his teeth, and come back and shudder and say he was never going to do that again. It definitely started me thinking differently about how men feel about themselves and how I can be more careful about not hurting bedroom partners’ self-esteem.
jayhardy, have you talked to the men of your acquaintance who refer to oral sex as degrading - using terms like “blow me” or “cocksucker” as insults? (And think of the scene in A Few Good Men where Jack Nicholson’s character deliberately insults Demi Moore’s by bragging about how great it is to get a blowjob from your commanding officer.) I admit that I personally don’t understand women who both want to have to have sex with men yet find penises repellent, but I also don’t understand men who want their penises to be accepted and desired, yet turn around and treat blowjobs as something that degrades and dominates the person performing them.
mythago, your point is valid: as long as even men themselves perpetuate the myth that any activity in which one is engaged with the penis is a dirty activity worthy of insult, little progress will be made. I don’t deny that men play a part in the “dirtying” of the penis, but I also think few men stop to consider the inplications of this type of language (ie, degrading the oral sex act leads to women being disgusted by it, which leads to less oral sex, and who wants that?). However, I think mens’ use of words like “cocksucker” don’t have as much to do with degredation of women and the oral sex act as they do with homophobia, since such comments are usually directed at other men. That being said, directing those words at anyone, of either sex, is repulsive and I try as much as possible to avoid surrounding myself with anyone (man or woman) who regularly uses these types of demeaning labels. I won’t lie; I find myself usually surrounded by female friends and lovers because I find so many males to engage in this type of talk. However, I cannot disregard the men I think are worthy of discussions like the one Hugo begins in this post about their very real difficulties.
Thank you; that was lovely and insightful. As a wife, mother (of both an adult son and daughter) and lover, I am grateful when I read discussions of penises and sex that elevate the conversation and that help us to see each other through compassionate eyes.
I agree with Casey Dancer. I think your focus is a little off on this one Hugo. I agree with your points that the male penis is unjustifiably censored from media that readily accepts female nudity and that our society overall has a pejorative attitude towards it. There is no reason that the penis should be viewed as any dirtier part of the body than an arm or a hand (which probably has 50+ times more bacteria at any given time than the penis). However I think the overlying reasons for the discrepancies between male and female nudity is more because of a misogynistic social order than it is about perceived male dirtiness. Let me explain. Lets take the example of Viggo Mortensen. His nudity is used as an expression of vulnerability, which is quite understandable considering in our society everyone is supposed to be clothed in the public sphere, he is able to overcome this vulnerability because of his superior fighting ability. When women are nude in film, which they are to a MUCH greater extent than men, it is not an expression of vulnerability, in fact most of the time her vulnerable position because of her nudity is not even acknowledged, as it is superseded by her desirability. The fact that she is not portrayed as having the basic human emotion of vulnerability and instead only sex appeal leads us to a conclusion: that women are portrayed nude in film because they are objects and not people, and men are not readily portrayed this way in film because they are not objects, but people with emotions and legitimate concerns over being in a public situation while nude. When they are shown nude in film it is to accentuate the character’s vulnerability or his boyish nostalgia of a time before clothes were important to him. I would like to make the point that this is more about the objectification of women and the assumption of a male audience as the “norm” and a female audience as the “other” than it is about the dirtiness of male genitalia.
CaseyDancer also brought up a very valid argument concerning that porn has moved away from ejaculation on the stomach or another part of the female body (which is surely sufficient imagery of acceptance of the oft pejorative view of the penis, the close up image of his genitalia and ejaculation and acceptance of it by his partner onto her a part of her physical body) to ejaculation on the face, and it has done so quite in time with the rise in rights of women. The movement from ejaculation onto other body parts to the face is not simply a continuation of the need for genital acceptance. The face is obviously not just another body part. When we are hit or spat at, if it is done to the face as opposed to on your arm or at your feet, it is viewed as being particularly offensive and degrading. This is because the face/head is associated with autonomy and intelligence. The movement of the porn industry to the normalization of the “facial” is about the domination and shaming of women. To suggest that it is otherwise, or to downplay it as secondary to “shaming” of the penis (which as I said I’m sure DOES play a role..just not as big as the role that misogyny plays), is a little offensive and more draws much needed attention away from patriarchy and misogyny in pornography and in society in general.