A MIND OF ITS OWN: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE PENIS - DAVID FRIEDMAN

Not sure when/how I first came across this one. Obviously, the penis is a perennially interesting topic, one of the most fascinating (fascinating itself is an english word that comes from a latin word, fascinum, that denotes a phallic amulet) and universal subjects available. On one level, the book provided a lot of interesting information and pretty good theorizing. Friedman runs through a history that stretches back from ancient Egypt’s Osiris up to Viagra and the medicalization of impotence. There’s lots of Freud, as you might imagine, and lots of interesting little myths and factoids about different ways the penis has been conceptualized and thought of across time. The topic really lends itself into broader discussions of sexuality and masculinity and Friedman manages to touch on lots of these topics without getting too bogged down on any one subject or time period. That being said, there is too much Freud, I get that the man was obsessed, even haunted by the penis, but still, there are other angles. The most engaging part concerned the intersection of race and the penis in the United States which is predictably dark. There is a mind-bendingly psychotic anecdote about Europeans being weirded out in the antebellum South by Black servers wearing shirts and no pants so you could see their dicks (imagine being so insane and perverted that you’re freaking out an 1800’s European). There is lots of talk about how castrations figured into lynchings (which that book, At The Hands of Persons Unknown, went into in depth). There is a really compelling section where the male subjects of Mapplethorpe’s Black male nudes talk about what a racist weirdo he was and how he made them feel like “animals in a zoo.” I’m a Mapplethorpe fan and I’ve seen his work in some major museum exhibitions and had never heard the opinions of these men before. Overall, tho, this book was missing two things. First, any sort of non-Western perspective. It claims to be a social history but we only get Western antiquity, Europe and the United States. It would have been great to get a, say, ancient Chinese or South Asian take on what the penis symbolizes and means or how those cultures deal with masculinity. We got the European and colonial take on the Black penis, how did the African cultures of the time feel about it? Additionally, it would have been nice to get a trans chapter. I get that the book was published before the recent explosion of trans visibility but now that we have many more visible men without penises and women with penises it would have been good to get a trans perspective about the culture significance of this organ. Overall, reasonably interesting. 69 Phalluses