Dave Hill: FIRST PERSON
When the British High Court heard earlier this week that former airline pilot James Williams’ “life had been destroyed” by the failure of an operation to give him back a foreskin, some might have suspected a degree of overstatement. Some – but not an awful lot of men, especially if they’ve winced their way through the details.
A bid to “uncircumcise” Williams culminated in emergency surgery that allegedly left his penis in such a state that the trauma has brought on severe depressive illness. Today, Williams is separated from his wife, rarely sees his children and lives with those of his family and friends “who can bear his company”. He is suing the surgeon for 3-million; the surgeon denies negligence. But whatever the outcome of the case, the underlying message already seems clear: destroy the penis and you destroy the man.
The message is all the more resonant amid the general turbulence surrounding sexuality. Greater recognition of the sexual vulnerability of men and the devastation it can cause them is a part of this. The point of Williams’s operation had been to take the pain out of his sex life. A circumcision when he was a baby had led to uncomfortable erections and he was assured this would help. His argument appears to be that the ruin of his penis has been the ruin of his love life and thus the ruin of him, too.
Williams’s cry harmonises with the great unveiling of male sexual anxiety that has resulted from the advent of Viagra. Suddenly, everybody knows how fraught the relationship between the male and his member can be. But what has emerged from the shattering of the once stony silence on this subject? My own reactions are mixed. Certainly greater awareness of impotence is healthy. Yet my feminist schooling makes me suspicious of what looks like a preoccupation with erections to the exclusion of everything else that might be desirable for fulfilling sexual partnerships.
The erection obsession can easily obscure the political problem with penises – and I don’t mean the Bill Clinton kind. You don’t need to spend long among groups of old-fashioned men to grasp the symbolic ways in which the penis props up the approved version of male (hetero) sexuality, which in turn props up the approved version of masculinity in general and with it the whole warped, wretched, inequitable sexual status quo. In these circles, it is implicitly understood that a stiff prick signifies male power over women (`Give her one, did you?’), while the limp dick is the ultimate mark of masculine failure.
But of course we see all around us the evidence of how that status quo has become contested. Girl Power has struck such a resounding chord because it summarises an assertive female sexuality that makes demands of men rather than passively hoping for their sexual approval, as girls have always learned to do before. Perceptions of the penis have evolved along with this and popular culture has seen the trouser snake slithering into public view in ways it never used to.
This is strikingly the case in advertising. We are accustomed to products being sold using sexual images of women, but now we’ve had anti- perspirants “for men with big ticks” and rugby stars posing nude, their modesty covered only by a certain product. The interesting thing about these ads is that, unlike those that feature women, they may refer to the erotic but they depend for their effect on depicting the willy as silly. This typifies the other prevailing attitude to the penis. If it isn’t a weapon, it is an absurdity.
Of course, penises have their comic qualities. But the sexual vernacular reveals how humour can be nasty and self- loathing: “prick”, “dick”, “knobhead” are pungent terms of ridicule. Meanwhile, some allusions to the penis in the commercial media play on men’s concerns, especially about size matters. Girl Power at its least charitable, I’d have thought. So where does that leave the penis?
It’s a ticklish issue. We chaps can hardly object to female goading when women have for years put up with demeaning remarks about fat arses and flat chests. But I’m not sure this mockery is healthy. When I was younger, I worked for a while as a life model. I wouldn’t do it now. That is not simply because my body is less smooth and slender but because I’m not as confident that anyone thinking sizeist thoughts would keep them to themselves these days. (Look, it can get nippy in those studios, OK?)
More seriously, neither the acknowledgment of men’s anxieties nor the outbreak of female irreverence suggests progress towards the mature, balanced view we ought to take of the penis in its sexual role, which is to cease fetishising it as the measure of manhood, but strive to transform it into the instrument of pleasure.