After the Phallus

Most American filmgoers will remember the critically acclaimed "gross-out" comedy There's Something About Mary for the harrowing scene in which the awkward adolescent played by Ben Stiller painfully entangles his genitals in his fly. The image is memorable not only because of its gruesome detail, but because it provides a particularly hysterical instance of the American film industry's more general recent preoccupation with the penis. A new breed of young male directors has collectively assaulted the traditional protocols of how the male sexual organ is represented in mainstream film, thereby helping to inaugurate an entirely new sex/gender system in American public culture. Examples abound. American Pie, director Paul Weitz's affectionate send-up of contemporary teenage romance, opens with its male protagonist caught masturbating in front of the television by his parents; later in the same film, the same teen miraculously finds himself cavorting with a Swedish exchange student while his entire high school watches through a video-internet link-up: the young man ejaculates prematurely not once, but twice. Earlier in the same film, the same boy, after being told that "third base" feels like "warm apple pie," is caught by his father with his mother's homemade pie impaled on his penis. Boogie Nights, director Paul Thomas Anderson's lengthy retelling of the rise and fall of the porn film industry in the seventies, ends with Mark Wahlberg exposing his lengthy prosthesis; Happiness, Todd Solondtz's groundbreaking exposé of the psycho-sexual conflicts beneath what remains of the American nuclear family, includes not one but two ejaculation scenes; American Beauty, director Sam Mendes's brilliant study of suburban anomie, opens with its failed father-figure Kevin Spacey masturbating in the shower; Alexander Payne's savvy high school satire Election features an abject history teacher--played with eloquent emasculation by Matthew Broderick-- masturbating in a hotel room bathtub while preparing for a furtive rendezvous that never occurs; Mike Myers' retro-British PI Austin Powers packs a penis enlarger; Trey Parker and Matt Stone's timely and hilarious South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, features Saddam Hussein flashing a flesh-like dildo to his lover Satan.

American television, thanks to the relaxation of censorship precipitated by the emergence of the cable industry, has been just as eager to focus its attention on the organ that until recently could hardly even be represented euphemistically in the mass cultural public sphere. Seinfeld repeatedly returned to it, dedicating entire episodes to masturbation, circumcision, impotence, flashing, and "shrinkage." MTV's Singled Out allows female contestants to select their dates based on the size of their "package," and its equally popular sex-talk show Loveline involves extensive explicit discussion of everything from erectile dysfunction to premature ejaculation. Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole became the poster boy for impotence after a campaign of TV ads promoting the new drug Viagra. And Ally McBeal has striven to prove that women viewers are as interested in penis size as male viewers have traditionally been considered to be preoccupied with breasts.

The New York Times handily provided the watershed moment when it was compelled to use the word "penis" to describe Lorena Bobbitt's highly publicized peotamy of her husband John Wayne Bobbitt, who later leveraged the consequent publicity into a brief career in the video porn industry. Since then, the penis, that male appendage whose exclusion from public discussion and exposure has heretofore virtually determined the style and scope of public discourse, has somewhat suddenly taken center stage in the American cultural imaginary. It seems undeniable that this preoccupation, so often cloaked in goofball humor and satirical savvy, must indicate some larger shift in the protocols of American masculinity and patriarchal authority.

This inference is supported by the most noteworthy penis to preoccupy the public's attention in the past few years: President Clinton's. Only in America in the nineties could the president's penis provoke a constitutional crisis. And it is crucial to understand that we were fascinated not with the...