Hard

Continuing with excerpts from The Male Body by Susan Bordo:

The erect penis is often endowed with a tumescent consciousness that is bold, unafraid, at the ready. Gay art and literature and both straight and gay pornography are throbbing with such descriptions . . .

[A] lot of our ideas about the penis clearly come not from anatomical fact but from our cultural imagination . . . Most of our metaphors for the penis . . . turn it into some species of dildo: stiff torpedoes, wands, and rods that never get soft, always perform. These metaphors . . . may be a defense against fears of being too soft, physically and emotionally. But at the same time as these metaphors “defend” men as they joke with each other in bars or – more hatefully – act as a misogynist salve for past or imaginary humiliations, they also set men up for failure.

For men don’t really have torpedoes or rods or heroic avengers between their legs. They have penises. And penises, like the rest of the human body and unlike dildoes, feel things. . . .




- Excerpted from The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private
by Susan Brodo (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 1999), p. 45 and pp. 64-67.


See also: Soft.

Image 1: Subject and photographer unknown.
Image 2: The Leveret.
Image 2: Riley (photographer unknown).