A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (review)

At least in print, the essential male organ seems finally to have achieved visibility in the United States, although mainstream Hollywood still resists true visual representation, in spite of the examples of Europe, Latin America, and its own neighboring porn film industry.¹ David Friedman's new book makes a large claim as a cultural history but in fact represents what might be called high journalism, neither acceptably historical nor cultural. The author, an urbane New York journalist (for Esquire, GQ, etc.) who writes with wit and bons mots, organizes his essay in terms of the old schoolroom chronology: from Mesopotamia to Greece, Rome, and the Renaissance; then to modern Western medical research, including nineteenth-century obsessions with masturbation and circumcision, especially in the United States; and finally to Freud, feminism, and Viagra.

This "history" contains all the usual suspects—Plato, Origen, Augustine, Leonardo, Vesalius, Leeuwenhoek, Krafft-Ebing, Freud and Jeffrey Masson, Whitman, Faulkner—and many others this reader had never heard of. It purports to identify major "paradigm shifts" in attitude toward the organ, from a positive, fertile "sacred staff" to a corrupt and corrupting "demon rod," with Augustine as the primary culprit. Then Leonardo plays a pivotal role in a new shift to secular appreciation and investigation, resulting first in the social-psychological perspectives of Freud and modern feminism and culminating in the technological triumph of anti-impotence pharmaceuticals. These overly simple ideological transformations are contradicted by material within the text itself, and, in any case, no explanation for these shifts, other than great men's ideas, is given. The authorities cited will be familiar to readers of this journal: for the classical world, Dover, Halperin, Percy, Winkler; for feminism, Friedan, Millett, Firestone, Dworkin (and Lorena Bobbit). Others will recognize biologists, sociobiologists, anthropologists, medical investigators, and, of course, Foucault. With so many varied ingredients, one wonders how this confection could have failed to rise.

Throughout, there is a tendency to lead with the penis, as though much of social and medical history were driven by it alone. Thus, the early Western church's dicta against coitus interruptus, anal intercourse, and oral sex and its recognition of impotence as grounds for annulment of marriage are all attributed to penile obsession rather than the obvious concern for marriage and reproduction (43-45). Sweeping and often confused statements abound. Thus, "there is little doubt that the questions raised by da Vinci concerning man's relationship with his penis are the very questions that make that relationship the most enduring mystery in every man's life. This da Vinci realized four centuries before Sigmund Freud" (60).

An interlude in the historical march through time reviews Western interest in the penis size of colonial natives from the sixteenth century onward. Says Friedman, contact with Africans "transformed the cultural role of the penis and significantly expanded its meaning as an idea," a "cultural shift" that was used to justify colonialism, castration, and slavery (105-6). The author claims that white fear of black sexual congress with white women developed only after emancipation! The perceived size difference, not race mixing per se, he maintains, motivated lynchings in the South and castrations of blacks, as "white men were sexually involved with black women" (128)! However, this digression contains a survey of later investigations and the latest data (on what whites? what blacks?), concluding with a rather insightful comment on Anita Hill versus Clarence Thomas as well as Robert Mapplethorpe. (His famous photograph, Man in a Polyester Suit, is included in the plates.)

The chapter devoted to Freud provides a reasonable summary of the evolution of his views, addressing in passing Christian views of Jewish circumcision and concluding with President Clinton's sexual tangle. "[T]he life-and-death political struggle between Bill Clinton and...