and that “it is the ideological separation of phallus from penis, produced in history, but forgotten as history, that enables the phallus [in its Lacanian and feminist senses] to do its work, that founds the Dominant Fiction.” For Boyarin, “Historicizing ‘the phallus’ thus becomes crucial to a political retrieval of the entire psychoanalytic project.”49 Paul Smith has likewise called for a renovation of the psychoanalytical by the historical: “the task of historicizing the preoedipal must take on the same importance as the task of historicizing the monolithic psychoanalytical metaphor of the phallus: the imaginary is only ever constructed through phenomenologically available matter which is variable across history, and the body itself is also variably constructed across history.”50 Given the sweeping nature of these remarks, how does one begin to imagine the Enlightenment in some grand narrative about the history of male genitalia? Late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culture certainly had its own array of symbols for the erect penis, and compared to earlier cultural formulations around the penis-phallus relationship, Enlightenment discourses are increasingly the site of a symbolic maleness recognizably modern—one in which the flaccid privy member was separated and understood as symbolically different from the stiffened yard. But in contrast to today’s current focus, the connections among symbolic, biological, and historical realms were then more palpable and not yet abstracted and rewritten within the disembodied and sometimes unreachable terrain of modern psychoanalysis or the reductionist caricatures of some feminisms.
But historicizing the symbolic phallus is only one important new line of inquiry. Another arises from the recognition that a history of penis-phallus relationships as they are variously conceptualized at different times is also an important aspect of the history of masculinity and the male body. Susan Bordo has recently warned of the consequences of using
the most abstract and attenuated forms of the phallus … such as the “phallogocentrism” that deconstructionists and feminists have claimed runs throughout Western philosophy, science, and religion…. I have avoided dealing with these kinds of arguments here (although I have made them myself in other contexts) precisely because they move discussion of the phallus so extremely far afield from the male body, and I fear they will pull me into an abstract realm where I would be vulnerable to the very disease that I would be diagnosing.51
While she does not pursue her study of male bodies outside the twentieth century, Bordo recognizes that “the symbol emerged historically … out of forms of reverence that did have reference to biology,” and that the connection of the penises of real men to the symbolic cultural level of ideas ought not to be underestimated if we want to understand the history of male flesh as it might have been occupied and experienced by men, or if we wish to understand the relationship of individual men to the cultural metaphorization of the male body: “The phallus,” she writes, “haunts the penis. Paradoxically, at the same time the penis … also haunts phallic authority, threatens its undoing.”52 As Bordo realizes, a good deal of academic discourse has demonstrated, somewhat paradoxically, how difficult it has been to keep the male body in view while studying the penis-phallus as subject.
This emergent intellectual and historical curiosity about male genitalia will perhaps reverse current academic trends, reminding us that there is a history of the relationship between the soft and hard penis—not only experiential but cultural—that the combined process of erigibility and detumescence has also been symbolized variously throughout history (as have testicles and semen), and that such investigations will have much to tell us about why male genitalia have come to play the part they have in postmodern psychoanalytical and feminist theory.
What made the penis such a metaphorically preeminent and culturally problematized physical site? For one thing, the yard was the seat of pleasure whose sensitivity made it the exterior part most experientially representative of internal reproductive physiology. Visually the penis was also a dramatic physical feature of the loins, capable of size-change, urination, and ejaculation. It was popularly viewed as the most active genital part and thus the vagaries of its condition and multiple function made it a particularly convenient vehicle for a variety of symbolic registers, despite the elaboration of the role of testes, glands, fluid systems, and micro-vessels provided by the physiologists. Moreover, the glans was understood as having a high proportion of extremely sensitive nerves, and the heightened responsiveness to stimulation helped to make the connection of the yard to the nervous system and brain a relatively easy matter.53 The ability of the limp penis to become erect could easily be metaphorized, with successful or unsuccessful tumescence having obvious implications for the male’s status within psycho-sexual, social, political, or literary contexts, as well as for the plight of male desire itself. Its diseases, too—chancres, lues, gleets, stranguries, priapisms—were easily converted into social and moral tokens, evidence of the failure of masculine will, of social or political immorality, or even of a national decline.54 Of the external organs of generation, the yard appeared to have the most complex role—and thus the greatest range for metaphorical use—and in non-medical discourses it was the penis which typically represented the reproductive system as a whole in the genitalia-mind correspondences.
To expand our answers to why the penis became so prominent a sign we must also investigate the influence of larger cultural contexts, ranging from the history of masculinity and the emergence of pornography, to legal proceedings and literary practices, and even to political and nationalistic currents. If one were to search for some master category which explained the reasons of such a convergence, one might point to the well-known historical shifting through the seventeenth century from notions of the individual as an integrated part of an organic cosmos governed by God’s will to a self increasingly defined by inner physiological and external material conditions within a mechanized cosmos. In this context of paradigmatic change, one can view the proliferation of the yard-male identity equation as a specific version of the newly quantifiable self subject to forms of mechanical measurement.
And there were other macro contexts of historical change which contributed to this convergence. For instance, the male body was being culturally repositioned as a symbolic entity in response to large-scale social shifts, with the result that the reproductively potent penis became one symbol by which several value-systems would be defined. As Michael McKeon has argued, a significant feature of attacks on aristocratic ideology through the eighteenth century was the dismantling of the notion that birth determined worth, “that honor is biologically inherited.” The dynamics of what McKeon calls “a dissection of the cadaver of male aristocracy” included three relocations relevant to my discussion: “honor” was increasingly lodged in the idea of the domestic female; the perceived sterility and effete corruption of the male aristocrat “was reembodied in the effeminate nonmale, the ‘unreproductive’ sodomite”; personal worth and internal value would now be found in the sentimental man of public virtue, “defined by his economic activity, his occupational status, and his heterosexuality.”55 To these careful assessments I would add that if an eighteenth-century norm of masculinity depended increasingly on differentiating the effete sterility of aristocrat or molly from the heterosexual male within the family unit, then one of the governing bodily signs of this new male was the reproductively potent penis which authenticated social and sexual norms at which the sodomitical aristocrat either failed or transgressed. A biological essentialism, in other words, which had once propped up an aristocratic hierarchy of worth and honor, was now rewritten as a gendered distinction among kinds of males, whose heterosexual phallicism was central to a definition of the “normal” self.56
The penis could define male identity in other ways, as well, with a non-reproductive sexual competence becoming a basic measure of a man’s personality. Leo Braudy has approached late seventeenth-century premature ejaculation poems in this way, suggesting that the period’s near obsession with the idea of impotence represents “one of the earliest modern examples of the ambiguous relation between the male sexual body and the male sense of personal identity that will become one of the main themes of writing in western literature.” The specific significance of a poem such as Rochester’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” he writes, is that “the man has become the prick,” and the larger historical import of
