A Mind of lts Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, or this guy talks about penises a lot anyway.

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A Mind of lts Own: A Cultural History of the Penis. By David M. Friedman. New York: Free Press, 2001.

 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.  David Friedman's 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 purchase cialis. This "history" contains all the usual suspects:  Plato, Origen, Augustine, Leonardo, Vesalius, Leeuwenhoek, Krafft-Ebing, Freud and Jeffrey; for example, Fiona Giles, ed., Dick for a Day: What Would You Do if You Had One? (New York, 1997); Maggie Paley, The Book of the Penis (New York, 1999); Gary Taylor, Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood (New York, 2002). 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 literary journals: 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 a combination of elements including  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 on-ward. 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  lynching  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 his accusers was nothing less than a modern replay ofthe primal drama described in Totem and Taboo. . . . [C]ivilization requires sexual renunciation. Thus, for one man to act as though he has sexual access to all women without fear of challenge is to threaten the very foundation of public order. Seen in this light, Clinton's mistake was less political than psychological. Consciously or not, he allowed himself to become the target of an unconscious fantasy in which he was the primal father and, as such, had to be taken down if civilization was to endure" (191-92). (Let us forget for the moment all monarchs beginning with King David, and the droit du seigneur.) After his excursion into feminism, rape, sperm competition (in garbled form), and the relation of testosterone to aggression, the author turns to "the latest, and perhaps final chapter in the story of man's relationship with his penis."

 But first, a leap backward traces the "history" of impotence from the ancient Egyptians onward. Friedman believes that "technology has rendered nearly all previous definitions of masculinity obsolete; . . . a man is no longer measured by his physical strength" (304). Such breathtaking parochialism reminds one of the New Yorkers map of the United States. Today's "erection entrepreneurs" have created (another?) "paradigm shift and restructuring of the masculine mystique"; "[t]he penis used to have a mind of its own. Not anymore" (306-7).

Yet it was not failure to erect but independent, uncontrollable erection of "the only organ simultaneously a part of, yet apart from, the rest of the body" (62) that started this quest.

The absence of any cross-cultural data (except for Egypt, Greece, and Mesopotamia, of course) and the lack of any unifying hypothesis leave us with a chain of stories, opinions, and discoveries stitched together with a schoolboy chronology.  One example of this explanatory failure:

 The codpiece appears in a marvelous dust jacket illustration of a Renaissance man, suitably emphasized by the encircling O of the Own in the book's title. It is mentioned on page 3 as a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century indication of male anxiety. The Greek herm is discussed, along with other statuesque erections. Eldridge Cleaver's codpiece trousers are mentioned in the chapter on feminism (217) and, with them, one instance of penile display in a non human primate, the squirrel monkey (219). No New Guinea penis sheaths or the usually erect arrangements of Amazon tribesmen or any other primate penile displays that might have led to a general theory of functions are mentioned. The human manifestations are not related in any way to social circumstances of time and place that would explain their spotty distribution. If penile display is not addressed, neither are condoms and the variety of penile pleasure enhancements, old and new, nor the widely noted equation of the nose with the penis (by more than Freud's friend Fliess). The notion of semen loss (as a cause of mental or physical debility), relating the production of semen to the brain, appears in such distant forms as the Kundalini of classic Yoga, the "sperm" whale's spermaceti, and the avoidance of ejaculation prehunt, prewar, or pre-football game.

Here this concept, unlabeled, appears only as a mistaken notion of Hippocrates, Plato, and Leonardo that semen originates in the spinal marrow (22, 58-59). This volume, full of old and new personalities and stories, provides no explanatory insights but many topics for future research and useful references.

Entertaining, yes; enlightening, no.