Claude Mills, Staff Reporter
IN SOME conversation circles, just a single mention of the male sexual organ creates the sort of atmosphere where every phrase, every word, thereafter, is a double entendre waiting to be born. Women discuss the topic with high colour in their cheeks and wry smiles, and even shy men are able to broach the subject with an air of authority.
Such is the power of the penis.
There, I've said it. Penis. Some people find it hard to get that word out of their mouth because of how the world has politicised the male member. And in the last two centuries or so, the penis has got the shaft, so to speak, because of Christianity and the rise of feminists.
However, one must never take for granted the cultural significance of a penis and what it stands for, because that is almost as important to a man as what his member actually does.
Let me plunge head first (there I go again!) with the issue at hand, (jeez, I may need therapy) and look at the phallus-centric nature of so many ancient traditions.
Throughout history, the male has been revered through penis worship. The penis, which is called 'lingam' in Tantric parlance, is of course not all there is to masculinity, but it is the most salient feature that distinguishes men from women. Disembodied penises have been revered as holy relics in countries such as Polynesia, Egypt, India and Greece.
The penis, like the vagina, is a symbol of wealth and fertility. And so these lingams were often placed on altars and adorned with flowers (women, can you handle that?), placed in temples in hopes of procuring a guarantee of fertility in the season to come, and even carried through towns during festivals. Events of the same ilk also take place in modern America, during the 'Krewe du Vieux Carre' parade at the start of 'Mardi Gras', the carnival in New Orleans. And in Jamaica, craft vendors carve out wooden works of art with giant phalluses.
Ancient Greeks considered the penis a measure of a man's proximity to 'divine power'. The Osiris tradition of ancient Egypt is one such ancient tradition that involves penis worship. In the central myth, Osiris is killed and dismembered by his evil brother, Set. Osiris' wife, Isis is only able to find her husband's disembodied penis.
Even though he is dead, Osiris's penis retains its potency (was this ever in doubt?). Isis inserts the penis into herself, becomes pregnant, and gives birth to Horus, who eventually battles Set and takes vengeance for his father. Using the disembodied penis, Isis is later able to resurrect Osiris.
The Romans, whose generals were known to promote soldiers based on penis size, saw it as an indicator of earthly strength. But all those early advances were made impotent, and thanks to the spread of Christianity, the 'sacred staff' became the 'demon rod' a fearful manifestation of the devil.
Just last year, a Filipino man cut off his penis with a machete because he thought it was leading him to sin. The Christian convert claimed he had no regrets about maiming himself. His family believed that he may have been influenced by the book of Matthew 18:8 which states a limb should be cut off if it causes a person to sin. Talk about being brainwashed!
Society is preoccupied with the male member. Major billion-dollar industries are set up around the penis and the preoccupation with it: Viagra, herbal supplements that guarantee increased penile size, nuclear warheads, cigarettes and penis-lengthening machines.
Look at how many names have been developed to denote a penis: willy, john, rod, rockilla, (man)hood, pipe, tool, gun, third leg, richard, teelie, tree trunk, stump, buddy, plank, bamboo, anaconda/mamba or the one-eyed snake, to mention a few. The love and fascination accorded the penis is obvious in the power, dint and meaning of all those nicknames.
How many cute names are there for the vagina? About four, and two of them may be considered derogatory names to demonstrate cowardice or glaring personality flaws.
Society is riding a huge monster wave of phallic fixation.
In men, phallic fixation manifests itself in anxiety and guilty feelings about sex, fear of castration, and narcissistic personality. Freud believed that women never progressed past the phallic stage (ages 4 to 5) fully and will always maintain a sense of envy and inferiority. However, Freud, being the rhymes-with-fussy that he was, admitted uncertainty on the females' situation when he constructed the "penis envy" theory in the first place.
In an effort to debunk this theory, feminist writer Camille Paglia explains in her essay 'Art and Nature', that the only time women claim to be jealous of "that ugly thing is when a male friend relieves himself in an alleyway after leaving a bar, and we have to cross our legs until we get home".
Yea, whatever.
Say what you want. Everybody loves The Penis. Men like the fact that they own one, women need them for pleasure and reproduction, homosexuals adore them, and even the lesbians go out and purchase diseembodied ones every now and then.
Modern-day monuments to the sleek design of the penis include huge skyscrapers, transcontinental missiles, and rocketships. And even the cigarette is a phallic symbol. Penises are everywhere, in art, literature, movies, and fashion. However, only the penis gets blamed for all the evils of the world. It is all penis all the time, and this love-hate relationship is the ultimate penile paradox: why all the playa-hating?
After all, the penis is just a blameless instrument of reproduction. It plays a "defining role in human personality" as asserted by Freud, and is also used as a racial yardstick. A friend of mine told me that in the deep South, whites used to lynch black men, cutting their penises off, before placing them in victims' mouths like strange cigars because of their fear of awesome power of black sexuality. But that's another story.
The final insult is the objectification of the penis as a mere 'thing', a toy impervious to religious teachings, psychological insights, racial stereotypes and feminist criticism. Just a thing. This is caused in part by the arrival of Viagra, the misguided lesbian movement and feminist propaganda.
And if you doubt the power of the penis, check this. If the plural of stimulus is stimuli, so how come the plural of penis is not penii? No one wants to dilute the penis.
When you get straight to the point a la Sizzla, yes, it's good to have an appendage. (Or at least one that works!)
You can e-mail me at cmillsy@yahoo.com
