Yale's Phallus Cult

[Mort Zuckerman]

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Subject: Yale's Phallus Cult (sorry, bad link)

Date: Oct 18, 2008 2:09 PM

James Phillips' penis-obsession explained by a student.

The reason men are so stupid is because they're so
fond of themselves. It has otherwise been called
"cerebropenile inversion," and should be in the DSM-V
under the Attention Deficit Disorders.

http://www.actionlyme.org/YALE_PHALLUS_CULT.htm

http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24019


Myth-making men reify the almighty phallus
Claire Gordon
Guest Columnist
Published Tuesday, March 25, 2008

The Washington Monument. A Fender Stratocaster. AK-47s. Neckties.
Codpiece bayonets.
Reminders of the penis are everywhere, from Victorian novels to
skylines to fruit
bowls. According to Freud, you either have a penis or you want one. If
you drive
a Ferrari, or smoke a Presidente cigar, you probably have one, but
it’s just not
enough. The ancient Greeks honored penises with enormous effigies. The
Romans manufactured
phallic figurines to ward off the evil. There is some evidence that
every world
religion originated in penis worship, based on the belief that the
phallus created
all mankind. Our Penis, who art in heaven, is the pulsing heart, the
locus, the
apex, the alpha and omega of a man’s manliest masculine manhood. Amen.

Not just any penis, but a really big, hard penis. Society mythologizes
the penis
as a symbol of sexual potency and prowess. A bigger bulge means better
sex because
the ultimate female fantasy is a 20-minute pounding by a 10-inch man
stick. Actually,
penetration (the penis part of the sex thing) is least likely to give
sexual pleasure
to women. Masters and Johnson, in their famous 1957 study, found that
the “lowest
intensity” female sexual response “was achieved during coition.” Only
three out
of 10 women can orgasm from intercourse. The vagina is also finite. A
four-inch
penis will fill it completely. The vagina can lengthen to fit your
needs, but it
doesn’t fill its own needs by doing so.

If not from women, then why the obsession? Men. Men love penises. Big
penises. Men
made the penis god. Men pick absurdly well-endowed actors to perform
in pornos,
which are then watched by other men. The height of a woman’s sexual
pleasure doesn’t
usually come from being impaled or plundered or plowed, although the
man-made penis
myth tells us it is. Porn stars, who are pummeled by foot-longs, often
fake their
ecstatic throes. The men who direct them tell them to. But women
aren’t the only
ones deceived by the man-made penis myth, so are the man-made penis
myth-makers:
men.

80 percent of men wish they had a bigger penis. Yes, I got this
factoid from a penis-enhancement-product
Web site. But if the true statistic nears this number, that signifies
a pervasive
male body complex. While girls glance through magazines and pray for a
size two,
boys watch porn clips and long for a size eight. Some have capitalized
on this common
insecurity, filling inboxes with ads for pills and pumps that promise
inches, hotter
girlfriends and better lives. When researchers tested out a few of
these herbal
remedies they found E. coli, lead and fecal contamination present.
Over-enthusiastic
penis-pumping, Wikipedia says, can lead to unseemly blood blisters.
5,000 men a
year (this number is growing) also opt for penis-enlargement surgery,
though it
doesn’t increase the length of the penis when erect and may result in
infection,
deformation or loss of sensation.

The other male measure of manliness, besides length, is longevity. Men
have imposed
upon themselves the unrealistic expectation of hard, fast and long-
lasting penis
action. One in 10 men suffer from erectile dysfunction, and 10 to 20
percent of
these cases are the result of performance anxiety. (This percentage
grows the younger
you are.) Men often express their fear that partners will silently
judge and mentally
measure them. That’s a lot of unnecessary pressure for one organ.
Historically,
women have been unable to express their own sexual desires and,
instead, men projected
their fantasies onto the opposite sex. If fertility, creativity and
life itself
are all wrapped up in a man’s genitals, then of course, men imagined,
women must
be desperate to fill their void with hard and holy manhood. Women may
make passing
comments about a man’s dimensions or duration, but not because these
things are
necessarily important. It’s because we’ve been told they are by TV, by
Cosmo and
by men.

Men often prefer more inexperienced women who are less capable of
these imagined
bedroom comparisons. The same logic explains the peculiar and violent
male fantasy
of being a girl’s first. Female experience is undesirable because it
is feared,
and the sexual double standard is affirmed. The pressure incubated in
groups of
men can also produce a competitive machismo and a violent sexual
vocabulary of conquest.
Boys pound, bang, bone, slay, slam and score girls. Even “I fucked
her” suggests
force that’s borderline brutal and transforms the woman into a passive
receptacle.
This language dehumanizes women and, as such, creates a culture
conducive to sexual
violence.

It makes little difference to women whether your guitar is a Fender or
your gun’s
a Kalashnikov. Most women would prefer, in the words of Andrea
Dworkin, “a more
diffuse and tender sensuality that involves the whole body and a
polymorphous tenderness.”
Polymorphous tenderness sounds a lot less stressful. You don’t need
pumps or drugs
or surgery to improve your polymorphous tenderness. But instead of
tenderness, so
many women get tenderized. Thanks, patriarchy, for thoroughly
deceiving men and
women alike. The cult of the penis is a construct, a lie, a dangerous
and destructive
myth. The phallus may be God, but didn’t you hear? God is dead. Thank
god.



Claire Gordon is a sophomore in Saybrook College.