Shame, mystery, and vulnerability: a very long post about the penis and the longing for acceptance (REPRINT)

As I reduce my blogging load in the summer, I’m reprinting older pieces. This first appeared in March 2008.

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.