The Phallus: Power and Vulnerability

Abstract

This chapter focuses upon the cultural significance and meanings of the image of the erect penis, aka the Phallus. The authors contrast two views – from ancient history and from contemporary cinema – that show its range of meanings and significations to be both complex and revealing. In ancient history, the Phallus appears in painted, bas-relief and sculptural form, both attached to male figures and on its own, amongst the material culture of peoples all over the world – going back some 30,000 years before the present – in contexts that clearly depict it as a sacred image. Its journey as a cultural signifier through the past two thousand years, however, has been very different. It has been progressively shunned and ultimately regarded as the representation of all that is impure and even evil. Male same-sex activity, uncontroversial in antiquity, has been suppressed along with the image of the Phallus, as the focus upon the use of the erect penis only for procreative activity – and not for worship, pleasure, or anything else – has gripped those practicing the ‘religions of the book’. Then in the second half of the nineteenth century, the new scholarly pursuit of anthropology – with racial and gendered biases - set the men of the ‘white’ ‘races’ of Europe above the more ‘primitive’ ‘races’ of colonial possessions around the world. To these European thinkers the Phallus became the signifier of primitive or savage masculinity, paired in deity dualities with local goddesses representing a primitive and passive femininity. This last dual image persisted until very recent times, notably as the ‘straw man’ so vilified by second wave feminism. At the same time this new scientific view created medical classifications for non- procreative activities with the erect penis, designating same-sex activity as an illness. Such a chequered history for an image has bequeathed – for contemporary cinema – a rich and complex field to mine for culturally significant stories, as the authors show in the example of the turn-of-the-century film Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999, US), with its “respect the cock, tame the cunt” routine, providing food for thought both in its depiction of male power(lessness), and as a vivid media documentation of the issues around the notion of the Phallus in contemporary thought.