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 the  spiritual leader known as 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. Even Jesus went express from being infant to Son of Man.) Christianity decided the soul was eternal, and the body, where the soul was imprisoned, was the place where shit got manufactured, that the worms would later eat.

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

   So the poor penis went into exile.

    Scorned, it was 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 it might stop functioning at any time (as the rich makers of Viagra and Cialis can tell you) was the stinking thinking cap of Satan, Nicodemus, Beelzebub, Osama Bin Laden, as well as George Bush, Jr. 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 dear John Henry had somehow come a-loose in any of the scenes in Troy.

    I mean, we might get a quick fanny shot, but actual, in-the-flesh schlong . . .  whole established governments have fallen for less.

    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 conceals 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 working loathsomely 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?

    But, if it's good enough to stick in your mouth, it must have some endearment of its own, even if the kids still use "suck" as a grossly pejorative term, as in: "It sucks": meaning, uncool. Not  Abercrombie and Fitch. Weird. Fit only for parents.

    Which is what parents are for. They know nothing (Understandable. And oral sex is not sex.) However, this does not stop a movement, currently underground, to allow the penis to emerge finally from centuries of repression, 13-button  sailor pants, codpieces, and other concealments. Therefore, let it all hang out.

    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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