My yes, we are interested in those aren’t we? Our own or the millions dangling around us, depending on disposition. Do they work? Do they work well? Do they preform in a timely fashion? Do they have stamina? Do they please the ones who know them best? Are they the sublime and incomparable works of Art their owners feel them to be? And are they staggeringly and gigantically huge enough?
That last question is the cultural baseline isn’t it? How big is mine? How big Is yours? How big are they all comparatively when stood in a row like a police line-up? And is big big enough? I mean… is spit-take inducingly huge really quite huge enough?
How many pieces of spam do you think, sum total, have circled the globe offering reassurances to these questions? How many products exist specifically to straighten these limp question marks into emphatic exclamation points? Pumps and pills and pills and pills and the juice of crushed animal glands, co-mingled with the powder of twice-mashed horn and poultice of thrice-pummeled hoof; all named in brutishly short syllables, all presented amid lightening bolts and greased iron and battleships and biceps. You too can be hung like a field-animal and fuck like a Norse God during war time! Act Now.
It’s amusing isn’t it?
Today we seem to view the “giant cock” as an elemental force, forged in the core of the Earth with anvil and hammer. There is the mountain looming over the valley. There is the raging storm lashing out in anger above pitched seas. There is the lion taring into a herd of slavering, fear-mad prey. And then… there is the giant cock, eternally hard, standing at noble angle, in profile against the dawn light. “Oooh say can you see...”
It’s amusing because from a cultural standpoint, “the disproportionately big dick” is not quite the icon we imagine it to be. It’s iconic certainly, no arguing that. Depictions of it have existed for about as long as iconography itself, but as to the questions of why and to what purpose? Origins and meanings? These are details largely, and in a certain sense willfully, forgotten.
At bottom every culture’s phallic symbolism involves fertility. That’s obvious. But I doubt weather at any point in prior history people have so readily confused the symbol with the object, or to put it another way– the phallus with the penis. That a man ought to actually want a cock as disproportionately gigantic as those utilized as symbols in the ancient world seems a peculiarly hilarious quirk of modernity.
The obsession with big dicks, which evidently drives the production and advertisement of all manner of apparatus and snake-oil and treatment (to say nothing of the related “substitutes” like sports cars, fire arms, yachts, preemptive wars, etc) is, strange as it sounds, less an inalienable facet of the male mind as a matter of popular taste. When approached from an historical standpoint the “giant cock” as we know it today seems little more than a men’s fashion accessory. The fashion accessory you might say.⊕
“Fashion accessory?” you exhaustedly gripe, pump-handle in hand, Yohimbe bark extract bubbling in stomach, pamphlet on Polymethyl methacrylate “girthening” surgery in the mailbox. Yes. Fashion. That’s the name for popular ideals of beauty which fluctuate over time.
Cocks were all over the place in the ancient world. In Ancient Greece and in Rome we can see the symbolic and the fashionable “ideal beauty” incarnations of the cock quite clearly because, unlike today, they did not so totally synchronize. The giant cock and the tiny cock co-existed.
The giant cock was embodied by fertility gods, a great example being Priapus–
Quote: “This god is mainly known for his huge virile member, and the size of it is so enormous that it has been called ‘column’, ‘welve-inch pole’, ‘cypress’, ‘spear’, ‘pyramid’, and many other names of the same kind referring to the dimensions of his penis. And just as Zeus shows his thunderbolt, Poseidon his trident, Athena her spear… so Priapus cannot but proudly exhibit his penis, which best represents him, and without which he is weaponless. This is the reason why his privy parts are always shameless displayed in erection.” -Carlos Parada, Greek Mythology Link.
The idea, however, that this particular giant cock, and cocks of it’s ilk, were so readily displayed because they were in some way aspirational items, or meant to promote an eroticism of some kind, could not be further from the truth.
In Rome Priapus statues were used as scarecrows, watching over vineyards and gardens, the symbolism of which had absolutely nothing to do with sexual pleasure. Aside from the common correlation in the ancient world between fertility of man and fertility of soil, these statues were meant to guard against theft, the message being– anyone who trespasses here will have their asses penetrated deeply and brutally and painfully.
The following Roman epigrams (collected in Priapeia by Smithers & Burton) illustrate this attitude in no uncertain terms:
“... If I do seize you ... you shall be so stretched that you will think your anus never had any wrinkles.”
“Why do you, watchman, hinder the thief from coming to me? Let him approach: he will return more ‘open’!”
“He who shall plunder with dishonest hand the little field committed to my charge, shall feel me to be no eunuch ...”
If a woman, man, or boy, thieve from me, she shall pay me with coynte, that with his mouth, this with arse.”
In short the giant cock of Priapus symbolized exactly what a real cock of such massive size would signal– pain, punishment, and serious threat for whosoever was made to reckon with it. You think it’s a good day at the office the first time a porn actress is faced with one of those crazily gargantuan tricks of genetics? Fumes of this outlook waft into modern times with “flipping the bird"⊕ a threatening “fuck you” with our longest finger, and in the painful term Priapism. As fascinated as we may be with size none of us want to be introduced to Priapus in the emergency room.
As for the Greeks, the giant cock, when not displayed in connection to fertility gods like Adonis and Pan was a grotesque item which fell mainly under the purview of comedy.
According to Aristotle Greek comedy, as a staged art form, actually sprung directly from the giant cock.
In the spring Greeks held Phallophoria festivals, or Phallic processions, in honor of Dionysos. During these festivals phalloi were carried through the streets, while people dressed as ithyphallic satyrs uttered crude jests and insults at one another, pranced with maenads, and sang the praises of Phales. These festivals were known as komos. The revelers themselves were referred to as komasts and their songs were termed komoedia. The huge leather phalluses (phaletarions) worn by revelers as well as their crude jests followed komoedia as it made its transition to the stage, becoming “comedy.”
Every modern comedian who shamelessly and repeatedly wields the dick joke is a perfect descendant of his comedic forefathers.
Aristotle defined the comedy of his age thusly: “Comedy is… an imitation of inferior people” It was lampoon and satire and ridicule and invective. The laughable in Greece was “a species of what is disgraceful.” Taking these attitudes into account what does it say about the giant penis itself, which was so deeply ingrained in the form?
To paraphrase Stephen Halliwell from his book The Sleep of Reason. Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece: Comedy was a genre in which the visible phallus was probably the almost invariable accouterment of male characters– a sign of comic masculinity whose presence marked a perpetual scope for indecency. The comic phallus, in all its various conditions, was itself a symbol of the institutionalized shamelessness of the genre (embodied by the “thick red-tipped dangling leather phallus, there to make the boys laugh") Its presence, attached to most if not all male characters in the genre, is a visible sign of comedy’s reduction of sexuality to a level of immodesty that is ludicrous rather than truly threatening.
So from a symbolic standpoint, the giant cock we fetishize and love so well today seems to have had three intertwined connotations in the cradle of western civilization: fertility, punishment, and ludicrousness. All sensibly direct. But what of the fashions of the time? While these massive cocks were being paraded through the streets, brandished like clubs, and bandied about en masse on stages, its weakling brother, the wee-wee, was simultaneously being immortalized in statuary and vases and mosaics.
Based on artistic evidence alone the “ideal beauty” of the age, in regards to the penis, would seem to be summed up quite succinctly in a singe hyphenated word: itsy-bitsy. Or perhaps more properly in the shorter: tiny.
Quote: “...the artistic evidence implies that over-large genitals were considered aesthetically unpleasing by the Greeks and Romans. ...the ideal type of male beauty epitomised in classical sculpture, Greek and Roman, normally depicts genitals of somewhat less than average size...certainly never more. Consequently, the exaggerated genitals of Priapus made him seem an ugly and grotesque figure. -Catherine Johns, Sex or Symbol? Erotic Images of Greece and Rome
Quote: “The Greek aesthetic prefers discreet genitals, small in size. Images on vases show this clearly. This is considered true elegance… Large genitals are not the attribute of the superman.” It is not the heros of Classical literature and art who are provided with giant cocks but rather men of decrepit old age, “monstrous creatures” like the Pygmies, slaves, and anyone whose “extraordinary sexual energy” brings them closer to animal than man. Heros, kings, and high-born were depicted with tiny penises, that was the ideal, and that was the fashion, and they liked it that way gash darn it!
Why this ought to be the case is arguable. Was it simply the natural “other side of the coin” to the prevailing notion of giant genitals as grotesque? Was it wrapped up in the aesthetic obsession with perfect proportion? Was it an artistic device employed to divert attention away from the genitals? Was it the side effect of a cultural preference for pederasty? Was it simply because artists’ models posed in chilly studios? Like the riddle of the tootsie-pop, the world may never know.
One matter of penis fashion we do do know for sure in regards to the Greeks and Romans, which is by no means unrelated, is their preference for a long prepuse or posthe or foreskin.
On ideal male beauty Aristophanes conveniently puts these words in Socrates’ mouth for us:
If you follow my recommendations,
And keep them ever in mind,
You will always have a rippling chest, radiant skin,
Broad shoulders, a wee tongue,
A grand rump and a petite posthe.
-Aristophanes, from Clouds.
“Petite posthe?"
Quote: “Here, the allusion to the posthe clearly summons up an image of the entire penis, albeit one that conforms to the aesthetic ideal seen in artistic depictions of gods and heroes. The imprecise use of the word posthe serves the humorous context because, as others have shown, the Greeks valued the longer over the shorter prepuce in relation to the length of the entire penis, and the smaller over the larger penis as a whole. Even if one were to argue that the word posthe was being used precisely here, the rules of proportion, as deduced from art, would require that a petite posthe be part of a proportionally even more petite penis… if a circumcised penis goes with a hideous face and a long and tapered prepuce goes with a handsome face, it is the long and tapered prepuce that was admired.” -Frederick M. Hodges, The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and
Rome.
So… If the aesthetic ideal was a long foreskin ⊕ and the foreskin achieves its most impressive lengths in youth (frequently representing more than three-quarters of the length of the penis) then it follows that other related outward traits would be preferred by proximity, namely- eensy-weensy-teeny-weenyness.
Sounds crazy to we pipe-swinging, purple helmeted, bronzed gods of the future, but there it is. To those on whose genius we’ve built our civilizations, we, with our preoccupations on rock-hard massiveness, would likely be seen as brutish and grotesque. Proudly carrying our pharmaceutically enhanced, vacuum lengthened, surgically “girthened,” rods and staffs into sexual battle we’d probably be laughed out of well appointed bed chambers across the Mediterranean.
Waah-waah-waaaaaaah.
Epilogue
Though I do certainly find our modern obsession with size, and all its attendant pageantry, amusing, I’d feel dishonest if I didn’t acknowledge that it’s entirely possible everything I’ve just written, though basically factual, adds up to a pile of horseshit. I admit it. The theories of scholars and historians and philosophers have the amazing ability to sound fantastic and make perfect sense but manage to simultaneously miss the mark completely. As a particularly astute Wikipedia contributor points out in the article on Priapus:
“Some scholars have suggested that in the ancient world, large penises were generally considered comical rather than attractive. However, this theory is not supported by all of the literary evidence available. For example in the Satyricon of Petronius, when the heroes arrive in Croton in Sicily, they come across a youth who is exposed and found to be very well endowed. As a result the townspeople (including women) hold him in reverence and literally trip over each other to touch his phallus for good luck. In this instance there does not seem to be any indication that the youth’s unnaturally large phallus is regarded with disgust - quite the contrary. It cannot therefore be decidedly concluded what the classical view of penis size may have been. In the case of art and sculpture it seems likely that an average or smaller size was desirable, but this does not exclude the possibility that the public, or the ‘man on the street’ held different views.”
Indeed. No matter what kind of cock artists were carving into their marble, and no matter what the learned chroniclers of history set down in their notebooks, it might be that the average joe still wanted to feel some satisfying weight in his loincloth. Or as Camille Paglia puts it in her learned way– “Most of the world has probably always esteemed a large penis.”
It’s worth noting finally that in comparison to the rest of our primate brothers we humans are well hung. Quote: “Compared to other primates, even larger primates such as the gorilla, the male human genitalia are remarkably large. The human penis is both longer and thicker than that of any other primate both in absolute terms and in relative size compared with the rest of the body.”
For this, surely, there is a reason totally unconnected to symbols and fashions?!
Hope you enjoyed.
