The Penis As An Object of Beauty

by Perry Brass

    Something horrible happened to Western culture in the first 200 years after the death of Jesus. The soul, which the Jews associated only with God (Jehovah), this thing that belonged exclusively to Him, was at one moment set free and then immediately re-captured  by the Church and its often either psychotic or closetedly queer minions.

    In other words, friends, your soul was now yours, to do with as you pleased, but you could lose it at the drop of your pants. So, you had your eternal soul (and the religious wars that went with it), but it was always going to be in conflict with your body. 

    In a nutshell, any time your thoughts strayed to the region below your belly button, you were in danger of Hell, eternal fire and brimstone, etc.

    Sex became a curse; the Devil's playground. And sex, as you probably figured out, quickly dragged the rest of the body with it. The Greeks, corrupt and evil as they were (after all, they'd only brought us something called "civilization"), believed the body was beautiful. They saw the beauty of the body as part of the beauty of the soul itself, even if their version of the soul was a fairly small one that just wandered around gloomily after Death, trying to find a picnic.

     But the Greeks and other pagans of that ilk thought the body, naked, free, beautiful—well, wow! It was a darned good thing.

    They loved it. Adored it. Worshipped it, especially in the form of boy worship, something we cannot even get a handle on today. ("Boy" today = Little League Baseball.) Christianity decided that he soul was eternal, and the body, where the soul was imprisoned, was only the place where shit got manufactured, that the worms would later eat.

    So, except as something to kill, main, mutilate, spindle, torture, and degrade, the body was pretty worthless crap.

   The poor penis went into total exile.

    It became an object of such revulsion that you'd think the thing you peed with, which produced rug rats, which responded to any number of cues and stimuli and which was so amazingly sensitive to any number of injuries and insults that it might stop functioning at any time (as makers of Viagra and Cialis will tell you) was the vile thinking cap of Satan, Nicodemus, Beelzebub, Osama Bin Laden, and Rush Limbaugh all combined.

    In other words, if you truly hated it, it had to come from your dick.

    It was a sorry state of affairs.

    Your crown jewels had to be hidden under six layers of material, including a special Teflon pouch. The slightest sight of a little pecker could turn grown people to stone. Imagine Janet Jackson’s famous costume “malfunction” at the Superbowl exploded to the four-hundredth degree, and you'd get a mere inkling of the reaction if, say, Brad Pitt's delightful John Henry had somehow come a-loose in any of the scenes in Troy. (Which by the way, even gives one of my favorite categories of films, the "trash classical," such as the great Steve Reeves Hercules movies, a very bad name: Troy is a pure clinker. How could they make something so ripe with possibilities for queer delights into such a bore?)

    I mean, we might get a quick fanny shot every now and then but an actual, in-the-flesh schlong . . .  whole governments have fallen for less. I don't think that even Barack Obama could withstand the scandal of anyone seeing his "thang." Just remember what happened when Bill Clinton's little boy came close to exposure when one of his ex-girlfriends described it as "big as a roll of quarters."

    However, there is some hope on the horizon for those few wayward people whose eternal souls are in jeopardy, like myself, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Thomas Eakins, Jeff Stryyker, and a few others who believe the penis, itself, is beautiful.

    There is a glimmer of light on the horizon. This jewel of the male body, the "lingam," associated with the god Shiva—one of the primal sources of creative energy—which the Greeks believed was sacred to Herm (the phallic god), and which so many men still fear and despise with a self-rejecting intensity that should be rightly aimed at air pollution, infant mortality, and global warming—

    There is hope, gentle readers, for once again realizing the aesthetic loveliness of this often forlorn, but biologically well-designed anatomical detail.

    Although it is still hidden from view with the sustained effort with which the Bush White House concealed pictures of coffins coming home from Iraq, teens (the most important marketing target in the U.S., the "demographic" to whom our entire culture is now aimed) are starting to enjoy—and even admit enjoying—sucking it.

    Teen girls are putting this loathsome, discredited, and often unpredictable thing in their brightly lipsticked mouths, and once something gets in there, then you have to admit that at the very least it can't be anything but  . . .  cool.

    Even the august New York Times, in a not-too-long-ago "Thursday Style" piece, is starting to admit that teen "oral sex parties" are getting out of hand—the way that teen drinking parties are. In fact, drinking and cocksucking are sure working hand-in . . .

    Anyway, it’s easy to get the message: Girls are doing it all over, going down quicker than the Dow after the price of oil shoots up. And even some boys are revealing that they, too, are trying to figure out why the girls get to have all the fun—and what's so bad about putting this little gizmo in your chops and giving it a short twirl, especially if it makes some good buddy happy?

    Now, there is one potent "Get Out Of Jail Free" card here:

    The kids are telling us, just as William Jefferson Clinton did, that oral sex is not sex at all. It's just good ol'-fashioned fun, something Monica Lewinski lead the way with. And now, along with the Name-status handbag, a little midway-throating (as opposed to deep-throating) is a sure badge of being "in."

    In some ways, the Christian Right, which insists on virginity at all costs, is responsible here. The Christian Right has always had a mere glancing relationship with the truth, so defining sex as only being "missionary position" goes along with that. O.K., so Oral Sex is not sex. In fact, "Oral" is just the first name of a brand of toothbrush, which everyone knows your dentist recommends.

    Therefore, in a nutshell, "oral" and "sex" are not one and the same thing.

    Get it?

    Penises are "coming out." At teen oral sex parties. In the backseats at mall parking lots. In the backrows of Scream XVI and other wholesome kiddy movies. And so are those sweet kids having a good time sucking them.

    This definitely is going to do something good for the world. And eventually, I hope that within the next two weeks or so, we will see the incredible, singular, individual beauty of the penis. And as Whitman once sang, “the body electric,” in totality itself.

What did you think about this—isn't it time to bring the dick out of disgrace?  Email me and tell me your thoughts.


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