David M. Friedman
Author of A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis
About the Author
David M. Friedman has written for Esquire, GQ, Rolling Stone, Vogue, The Village Voice, and many other publications. He was a reporter for Newsday and the Philadelphia Day News.
Image credit: Photo by Marion Ettlinger
Works by David M. Friedman
The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever (2007) 114 copies, 2 reviews
ON kulturní historie penisu 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1949-02-06
- Gender
- male
- Occupations
- journalist
- Agent
- David Black
- Places of residence
- New York, New York, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- New York, USA
Members
Reviews
Let's just say right away that in reviewing a book like this, it's almost irresistible to make lots of stupid puns. Nevertheless, I'm going to try really hard...oops, I knew that would happen. Well, at least I got it out of the way.
Anyway. Don't be fooled by either the subject matter or the title of David Friedman's book, both of which might lead you expect a frivolous treatment of Man's favorite subject, his Area. On the contrary, Friedman gives us a thorough, well-researched, and show more thoughtful account of how and why the penis -- not only representations of the penis, but the thing itself -- has informed artistic, religious, and political history from the beginnings of Western Civilization to the 21st century. The sweep of the book is impressive, beginning in Sumer (present-day Iraq, roughly), proceeding smoothly through the Greeks, Saint Augustine, Freud, feminism, and ending with medicine's attempts to lend nature a helping hand via Viagra, shock therapy, and other treatments that might make you want to cross your legs while reading. The latter portion of the book is probably the weakest, perhaps because the subject hits Friedman, a middle-aged man who made his own foray into Viagra Land, a little close to the bone (yeah, yeah -- you try to review this book and see how well you do avoiding that stuff). Friedman also doesn't shy away from controversial topics -- namely, White culture's fascination-cum-revulsion (I swear to Christ that's the last time I'll do that) with black men's penises.
Not that Friedman doesn't have a sense of humor -- let's face it, you kind of have to have one if you're going to go on for 300 pages on penises. For example, Friedman notes that after Herr Dr. Freud's wise counsel helped Little Hans conquer his castration anxiety, the boy turns to his father and asks, "Papa, does the Professor talk to God?" Friedman then wryly notes, "That would have been a local call, of course." Friedman also takes issue with Darwin's conclusion that "promiscuous intercourse in a state of nature is highly improbable," stating in a footnote, "Obviously, Darwin died before he could see a film documentary on bonobo chimpanzees, whose seemingly inexhaustible appetite for sex is now a staple of PBS pledge-week programming."
On the whole, Friedman has written an engaging and serious book on a subject that might have wound up as a long snicker-fest in less capable hands. show less
Anyway. Don't be fooled by either the subject matter or the title of David Friedman's book, both of which might lead you expect a frivolous treatment of Man's favorite subject, his Area. On the contrary, Friedman gives us a thorough, well-researched, and show more thoughtful account of how and why the penis -- not only representations of the penis, but the thing itself -- has informed artistic, religious, and political history from the beginnings of Western Civilization to the 21st century. The sweep of the book is impressive, beginning in Sumer (present-day Iraq, roughly), proceeding smoothly through the Greeks, Saint Augustine, Freud, feminism, and ending with medicine's attempts to lend nature a helping hand via Viagra, shock therapy, and other treatments that might make you want to cross your legs while reading. The latter portion of the book is probably the weakest, perhaps because the subject hits Friedman, a middle-aged man who made his own foray into Viagra Land, a little close to the bone (yeah, yeah -- you try to review this book and see how well you do avoiding that stuff). Friedman also doesn't shy away from controversial topics -- namely, White culture's fascination-cum-revulsion (I swear to Christ that's the last time I'll do that) with black men's penises.
Not that Friedman doesn't have a sense of humor -- let's face it, you kind of have to have one if you're going to go on for 300 pages on penises. For example, Friedman notes that after Herr Dr. Freud's wise counsel helped Little Hans conquer his castration anxiety, the boy turns to his father and asks, "Papa, does the Professor talk to God?" Friedman then wryly notes, "That would have been a local call, of course." Friedman also takes issue with Darwin's conclusion that "promiscuous intercourse in a state of nature is highly improbable," stating in a footnote, "Obviously, Darwin died before he could see a film documentary on bonobo chimpanzees, whose seemingly inexhaustible appetite for sex is now a staple of PBS pledge-week programming."
On the whole, Friedman has written an engaging and serious book on a subject that might have wound up as a long snicker-fest in less capable hands. show less
The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever by David M. Friedman
Most people today know of Charles Lindbergh only that he made the first solo trans-Atlantic flight (in 1927); others, particularly those who were alive in the tumultuous days preceding World War II, remember him with disdain for his public support of Nazi Germany and his isolationist stance against America entering the conflict. Few knew that he also played a significant role in medical research of the era, which laid the groundwork for modern organ transplant techniques.
David M. show more Friedman’s The Immortalists focuses largely on that portion of Lindbergh’s life, when he worked in partnership with Dr. Alexis Carrel – a brilliant surgeon who also believed in ESP, prayer cures, euthanasia, and eugenics – the latter to be imposed by ruling councils of elders who would dispense immortality to those deemed worthy of the honor. The narrative returns to this obsession as a touchstone throughout the book, even after the partnership was interrupted by World War II, and eventually by Carrel’s death in Europe during the closing days of the conflict.
The biggest flaw in the book is that it often lacks focus. It’s unclear at times whether Friedman wanted to write a Lindbergh biography, a psychological study of a complex and often conflicted man, or a cautionary tale of the hubris of those who would play god. At times, it seems that there was an extra letter in the title – The Immoralists might have done the job just as well.
Reading it, one struggles with how to accept many facets of Lindbergh’s personality. There is the obsessive, self-confident, stubborn man with an engineering brilliance that far outshone his formal educational background. There is the intensely private man, bewildered by the cult of personality and intense public scrutiny that followed his history-making flight. There is the devastated father, convinced that media attention led to the kidnapping and murder of his firstborn child, and who fled the country with his family to protect his second son (and subsequent children) from the same fate. And there is the elite racist who felt Western civilization was in danger of being engulfed by the breeding proclivities of non-white races, and who saw as its savior the organization and scientific prowess of Hitler’s Germany. Ultimately, there is the man who underwent a shattering epiphany when he toured the rocket manufacturing facility at Nordhausen after the war, and saw firsthand the death camp that housed the laborers enslaved there by the brutal regime he had so publicly admired.
Friedman neither hero-worships Lindbergh nor excoriates his stunningly racist attitudes and the less-than-ideal state of his marriage to Anne Morrow. The most powerful moments of the book are the Nordhausen trip mentioned above, and Lindbergh’s 180-degree turnabout as he spent the last years of his life in conservation efforts. In a 1964 article for Reader’s Digest, this man who once sought the secret of immortality for the chosen few, who defended one of the most brutal regimes the world has ever known because he thought only it could save Western civilization, asked whether civilization was in fact progress. The final answer, he wrote, “will be given not by the discoveries of our science, but by the effect our civilized activities as a whole have upon the quality of our planet’s life.” show less
David M. show more Friedman’s The Immortalists focuses largely on that portion of Lindbergh’s life, when he worked in partnership with Dr. Alexis Carrel – a brilliant surgeon who also believed in ESP, prayer cures, euthanasia, and eugenics – the latter to be imposed by ruling councils of elders who would dispense immortality to those deemed worthy of the honor. The narrative returns to this obsession as a touchstone throughout the book, even after the partnership was interrupted by World War II, and eventually by Carrel’s death in Europe during the closing days of the conflict.
The biggest flaw in the book is that it often lacks focus. It’s unclear at times whether Friedman wanted to write a Lindbergh biography, a psychological study of a complex and often conflicted man, or a cautionary tale of the hubris of those who would play god. At times, it seems that there was an extra letter in the title – The Immoralists might have done the job just as well.
Reading it, one struggles with how to accept many facets of Lindbergh’s personality. There is the obsessive, self-confident, stubborn man with an engineering brilliance that far outshone his formal educational background. There is the intensely private man, bewildered by the cult of personality and intense public scrutiny that followed his history-making flight. There is the devastated father, convinced that media attention led to the kidnapping and murder of his firstborn child, and who fled the country with his family to protect his second son (and subsequent children) from the same fate. And there is the elite racist who felt Western civilization was in danger of being engulfed by the breeding proclivities of non-white races, and who saw as its savior the organization and scientific prowess of Hitler’s Germany. Ultimately, there is the man who underwent a shattering epiphany when he toured the rocket manufacturing facility at Nordhausen after the war, and saw firsthand the death camp that housed the laborers enslaved there by the brutal regime he had so publicly admired.
Friedman neither hero-worships Lindbergh nor excoriates his stunningly racist attitudes and the less-than-ideal state of his marriage to Anne Morrow. The most powerful moments of the book are the Nordhausen trip mentioned above, and Lindbergh’s 180-degree turnabout as he spent the last years of his life in conservation efforts. In a 1964 article for Reader’s Digest, this man who once sought the secret of immortality for the chosen few, who defended one of the most brutal regimes the world has ever known because he thought only it could save Western civilization, asked whether civilization was in fact progress. The final answer, he wrote, “will be given not by the discoveries of our science, but by the effect our civilized activities as a whole have upon the quality of our planet’s life.” show less
Friedman constructs a cultural history around a theme that allows him to explore European thought through an enlightening range of episodes and anecdotes from the classical period to the present. His study wends through painting and poetry, medieval theology and biblical translation, anatomical studies, racist propaganda and psychoanalysis, with nary a ribald wink or nudge.
What was for the Greeks and Romans a symbol of power and virility became an object of shame in the wake of show more Augustine’s Confessions. The theologian and logician Pierre Abélard is portrayed here as a kind of martyr, first challenging the Church’s demonization of the male organ, then having his own cut away as punishment. Early-modern medical science began to unravel some of the mysteries of reproduction just as European colonizers racialized the penis in order to explain the conquest and subjugation of indigenous peoples. Friedman uncovers the justificatory myth of Noah’s son Ham in medieval Jewish commentaries on the Old Testament, then traces the idea through to the fetishized photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. The penis again became idea and symbol in the phallocentric career of Sigmund Freud, who seems to have internalized the cruder bits of 19th c. European anti-Semitism. Towards the end of the book, and by no fault of Friedman’s, much of the fun and fascination in the subject has been replaced by obsessive politicizing, pathologizing, and pornification. Finally, and unfortunately, according to Friedman, the erection industry—in the form of implants, pills, etc—has reconfigured the organ, seemingly giving man more control over his own flesh-and-blood, but in the process diminishing its mystique. Whether the fate of the penis is to be lauded or lamented Friedman leaves to the reader. show less
What was for the Greeks and Romans a symbol of power and virility became an object of shame in the wake of show more Augustine’s Confessions. The theologian and logician Pierre Abélard is portrayed here as a kind of martyr, first challenging the Church’s demonization of the male organ, then having his own cut away as punishment. Early-modern medical science began to unravel some of the mysteries of reproduction just as European colonizers racialized the penis in order to explain the conquest and subjugation of indigenous peoples. Friedman uncovers the justificatory myth of Noah’s son Ham in medieval Jewish commentaries on the Old Testament, then traces the idea through to the fetishized photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. The penis again became idea and symbol in the phallocentric career of Sigmund Freud, who seems to have internalized the cruder bits of 19th c. European anti-Semitism. Towards the end of the book, and by no fault of Friedman’s, much of the fun and fascination in the subject has been replaced by obsessive politicizing, pathologizing, and pornification. Finally, and unfortunately, according to Friedman, the erection industry—in the form of implants, pills, etc—has reconfigured the organ, seemingly giving man more control over his own flesh-and-blood, but in the process diminishing its mystique. Whether the fate of the penis is to be lauded or lamented Friedman leaves to the reader. show less
• David M Friedman, A Mind of its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, Robert Hale 2009 [2002]
• Emma LE Rees, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, Bloomsbury 2015 [2013]
A brace of books about the sex organs and what they mean, books that benefit enormously from being read in tandem – even though doing so does serve to erode some of the claims to uniqueness made by each of them. Both, in their own way, try to examine how and why the cultural taboos about concealing the genitals show more have been variously enacted, reinforced and challenged over time, and to consider how such attitudes have made individual people feel about themselves, about their bodies, and about others.
In the western world at least, the taboos about penises and vaginas became mixed up early on with religious prohibitions. This is something Friedman examines through art history, noting the abandonment of Classical nakedness in favour of a rather body-phobic tradition of fig leaves and the like.
But – in a process that is central to both books – this censorship only makes their invisible presence more powerfully felt. Rees describes this concept as ‘covert visibility’. Consider, for instance, a painting like Maerten van Heemskerck's Man of Sorrows, where the one part that's covered up ends up, in consequence, demanding all your attention (not least because this work notoriously shows Jesus in a decidedly tumescent state):
http://www.wga.hu/art/h/heemsker/1/m_sorrow.jpg
One consequence of this is the confusion over motivations when artists or writers do try deliberately to focus on the genitals. Are such efforts laudatory attempts to undo the effects of centuries of oppressive censorship, revealing the unseen? Or are they somehow perpetuating the same old stereotypes, by allowing free rein to an audience's erotic fascination?
An important representative case study for Rees is Courbet's L'Origine du monde. The painting is unromantic, demystifying, somehow honest. It works contrary to the conservative traditions that have often made women's bodies an unknown quantity even to themselves. But at the same time, by cropping out the subject's head, arms and legs, it is also seriously reductive: woman as cunt.
http://www.musee-orsay.fr/typo3temp/zoom/tmp_29ca756c07ba6a19b7953dde2a72d5f9.gi...
Friedman's book throws up a fascinating parallel. In a very interesting discussion on the way the penis has often been central to ideas of colonialism and racism, he brings in the controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, especially his collection of black male nudes, Black Book (1986).
http://blog.sfmoma.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/polyestersuit1.jpg
Here again we have a subject whose head and other extremities have been removed from frame to focus attention on the genitals. Part of the shock value here, it's suggested, comes from the fact that it was still a novel concept to present naked black men as a fitting subject for artistic photography – Friedman notes for instance that not one of the portraits in Sullivan's canonical Nude: Photographs 1850-1980 is of a black man. But at the same time, Man in a Polyester Suit is inextricably tangled up with racist stereotypes of black man = big cock.
But again – why is this image so shocking (and it is shocking)? What is it about this one body part that is so objectifying, so shameful?
For Rees, this tight, dehumanising focus is part of a tradition for what, in the context of her book, she refers to as the ‘autonomised cunt’ – the genitals considered as somehow separate from one's identity. The same is true of the penis, of course, as the title of Friedman's book reminds us. For some reason, the sex organs are a part of the body that many people feel are not quite part of themseves – that leave people, in Rees's academic jargon, ‘radically disaggregated’. She traces an interesting genealogy of independent, talking vulvas – from the magic cunts of French fabliaux (later picked up in Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets) all the way through to the giant talking clitoris in South Park: The Movie.
This psychological ‘disaggregation’ of the genitals is linked to another equally strong tradition of their being severed – made literally independent. Rees discusses the violently severed vulva of Eurydice Kamvisseli's f/32, as well as Charlotte Gainsbourg's terrifying homemade clitorodectomy in Lars von Trier's Antichrist. This has obvious connections with ritualised practices like female genital mutilation, which Rees mentions briefly but emotionally in her conclusion; in Friedman's book, the subject is explored in a little more detail through the tradition of castrati (many of whom were ‘fully shaved’, as it was euphemistically called: testicles crushed between stones and then the penis sliced off) as well as a brief outline of how the United States bought into circumcision as part of the nineteenth-century anti-masturbation movement.
http://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Jamie-McCartney.jpg
More parallels emerge in the modern ‘medicalisation’ of the genitals – for women, this concerns how they look, in the form of labiaplasties and so-called designer vaginas; for men, it's about new chemicals that can guarantee their performance and behaviour. I should point out that in making this comparison I am not trying to suggest equivalence – having an erection is genuinely necessary for lots of kinds of sex, whereas having some kind of Platonically ideal perfecto-cunt is not. Still, there are revealing similarities in the way that people's attitudes to their bodies have become co-opted by the medical industry. Friedman's explanation of how Viagra was developed is extraordinary. British physiologist Giles Brindley demonstrated his breakthrough in front of a packed convention in Las Vegas, with the kind of practical show-and-tell that you don't expect from a professional forum:
After calmly presenting his data from behind the podium, Brindley stepped in front of it and pulled down his pants. Moments earlier, you see, he had gone to the men's room and secretly injected himself [with papaverine]. And now, before a room full of strangers, there it was: the, uh, ‘evidence’.
The audience gasped. Brindley did not want the urologists to think he was fooling them with a silicone prosthesis, so he headed into the crowd, proof in hand, and asked them to inspect it. ‘I had been wondering why Brindley was wearing sweatpants,’ says Dr Arnold Melman…
http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/319/7225/1596/F1.large.jpg
Despite the many points of connection, it must be said that Rees and Friedman have written very different books, which represent totally divergent choices in terms of scope and tone. Friedman works chronologically from the ancient world to the modern age, identifying various key transitional moments along the way – the Renaissance boom in anatomy, Freud, feminism, modern medicine etc. Rees's book is much shallower – it's really a study in avant-garde art and popular culture from the last sixty years, and everything before that is unfortunately corralled into an introductory chapter of ‘Antecedents’.
This is a great shame. When she suddenly dips back from Judy Chicago to consider the baroque painter Artemisia Genlieschi, you can feel the whole book acquire new depth and scope almost within the space of a couple of paragraphs. She has many interesting things to say here and her book needs much more of this stuff – I would much rather have jettisoned some of the discussion of Sex and the City in favour of more detailed examination of the so-called ‘antecedents’. And while Friedman examines Freudian theory from, as it were, the outside, Rees simply accepts the jargon of psychiatry and makes unquestioning asides about, for example, how Moby-Dick reflects castration anxiety. Her terminology is in general a bit too woolly for my liking – there is a lot of wordplay about how ‘the c-word’ is ‘the unseen-word’ or even ‘ob/seen’, all of which I found extremely tiresome. She also keeps her research restricted to the library, whereas Friedman talks to many of the people concerned, including a very sensitive and sympathetic interview with Andrea Dworkin.
I guess Friedman has a penis of his own, but it's kept very much zipped up – his narrative voice goes for a measured, detached neutrality. Rees, by contrast, regularly breaks out into first-person comments which leave some sections looking more like a political rant than a cultural history. In fact she expresses a hope that ‘political engagement’ will be one of the consequences of her book. Although I share much of her anger, I think this tone weakens, not strengthens, her argument: the fact that there is indeed much to get angry about only makes it more important (in my opinion, anyway) for the narrative voice to retain a certain objective distance. I suppose that's my journalistic background speaking.
(While I'm complaining. There is also the odd throwaway comment that rubbed me the wrong way in Rees, such as when she describes male sex toys as being ‘for people who don't get out much […] a house shared with your mother and your unfulfilled dreams for company’. No comment on the much larger, apparently sexually healthy market in dildos and vibrators.)
All the same, Rees's book grew on me a lot once I got used to it. It's misleadingly titled, but it does what it tries to do very well.
Anyway, I suspect that this tonal difference is a clue to the gendered nature of the debate. Men perhaps feel able to consider their cocks historically, objectively, whereas for many women vaginas are in important ways still a political issue. Whether this difference should be leveraged or ignored, I'm not sure. The language itself – as Rees constantly reminds us – does not help; she has to spend too much time in her introduction explaining that despite her title, she does in fact understand the difference between a vulva and a vagina in anatomical terms. Her word of choice in most of the text is cunt, which she hopes to restore to a purely denotative (she calls it ‘orthophemistic’) realm.
I feel differently; I think it's pretty cool having such a powerful word in your corner (pardon the image). I also can't help feeling that – though huge strides absolutely need to be taken, especially in certain parts of the world – still there are advantages to retaining a little taboo-ness when it comes to what's in your pants. It's possible to imagine being completely without issues or prejudices and seeing a vagina as neutrally as I see an elbow. But I'm pleased I don't. show less
• Emma LE Rees, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, Bloomsbury 2015 [2013]
A brace of books about the sex organs and what they mean, books that benefit enormously from being read in tandem – even though doing so does serve to erode some of the claims to uniqueness made by each of them. Both, in their own way, try to examine how and why the cultural taboos about concealing the genitals show more have been variously enacted, reinforced and challenged over time, and to consider how such attitudes have made individual people feel about themselves, about their bodies, and about others.
In the western world at least, the taboos about penises and vaginas became mixed up early on with religious prohibitions. This is something Friedman examines through art history, noting the abandonment of Classical nakedness in favour of a rather body-phobic tradition of fig leaves and the like.
But – in a process that is central to both books – this censorship only makes their invisible presence more powerfully felt. Rees describes this concept as ‘covert visibility’. Consider, for instance, a painting like Maerten van Heemskerck's Man of Sorrows, where the one part that's covered up ends up, in consequence, demanding all your attention (not least because this work notoriously shows Jesus in a decidedly tumescent state):
http://www.wga.hu/art/h/heemsker/1/m_sorrow.jpg
One consequence of this is the confusion over motivations when artists or writers do try deliberately to focus on the genitals. Are such efforts laudatory attempts to undo the effects of centuries of oppressive censorship, revealing the unseen? Or are they somehow perpetuating the same old stereotypes, by allowing free rein to an audience's erotic fascination?
An important representative case study for Rees is Courbet's L'Origine du monde. The painting is unromantic, demystifying, somehow honest. It works contrary to the conservative traditions that have often made women's bodies an unknown quantity even to themselves. But at the same time, by cropping out the subject's head, arms and legs, it is also seriously reductive: woman as cunt.
http://www.musee-orsay.fr/typo3temp/zoom/tmp_29ca756c07ba6a19b7953dde2a72d5f9.gi...
Friedman's book throws up a fascinating parallel. In a very interesting discussion on the way the penis has often been central to ideas of colonialism and racism, he brings in the controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, especially his collection of black male nudes, Black Book (1986).
http://blog.sfmoma.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/polyestersuit1.jpg
Here again we have a subject whose head and other extremities have been removed from frame to focus attention on the genitals. Part of the shock value here, it's suggested, comes from the fact that it was still a novel concept to present naked black men as a fitting subject for artistic photography – Friedman notes for instance that not one of the portraits in Sullivan's canonical Nude: Photographs 1850-1980 is of a black man. But at the same time, Man in a Polyester Suit is inextricably tangled up with racist stereotypes of black man = big cock.
But again – why is this image so shocking (and it is shocking)? What is it about this one body part that is so objectifying, so shameful?
For Rees, this tight, dehumanising focus is part of a tradition for what, in the context of her book, she refers to as the ‘autonomised cunt’ – the genitals considered as somehow separate from one's identity. The same is true of the penis, of course, as the title of Friedman's book reminds us. For some reason, the sex organs are a part of the body that many people feel are not quite part of themseves – that leave people, in Rees's academic jargon, ‘radically disaggregated’. She traces an interesting genealogy of independent, talking vulvas – from the magic cunts of French fabliaux (later picked up in Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets) all the way through to the giant talking clitoris in South Park: The Movie.
This psychological ‘disaggregation’ of the genitals is linked to another equally strong tradition of their being severed – made literally independent. Rees discusses the violently severed vulva of Eurydice Kamvisseli's f/32, as well as Charlotte Gainsbourg's terrifying homemade clitorodectomy in Lars von Trier's Antichrist. This has obvious connections with ritualised practices like female genital mutilation, which Rees mentions briefly but emotionally in her conclusion; in Friedman's book, the subject is explored in a little more detail through the tradition of castrati (many of whom were ‘fully shaved’, as it was euphemistically called: testicles crushed between stones and then the penis sliced off) as well as a brief outline of how the United States bought into circumcision as part of the nineteenth-century anti-masturbation movement.
http://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Jamie-McCartney.jpg
More parallels emerge in the modern ‘medicalisation’ of the genitals – for women, this concerns how they look, in the form of labiaplasties and so-called designer vaginas; for men, it's about new chemicals that can guarantee their performance and behaviour. I should point out that in making this comparison I am not trying to suggest equivalence – having an erection is genuinely necessary for lots of kinds of sex, whereas having some kind of Platonically ideal perfecto-cunt is not. Still, there are revealing similarities in the way that people's attitudes to their bodies have become co-opted by the medical industry. Friedman's explanation of how Viagra was developed is extraordinary. British physiologist Giles Brindley demonstrated his breakthrough in front of a packed convention in Las Vegas, with the kind of practical show-and-tell that you don't expect from a professional forum:
After calmly presenting his data from behind the podium, Brindley stepped in front of it and pulled down his pants. Moments earlier, you see, he had gone to the men's room and secretly injected himself [with papaverine]. And now, before a room full of strangers, there it was: the, uh, ‘evidence’.
The audience gasped. Brindley did not want the urologists to think he was fooling them with a silicone prosthesis, so he headed into the crowd, proof in hand, and asked them to inspect it. ‘I had been wondering why Brindley was wearing sweatpants,’ says Dr Arnold Melman…
http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/319/7225/1596/F1.large.jpg
Despite the many points of connection, it must be said that Rees and Friedman have written very different books, which represent totally divergent choices in terms of scope and tone. Friedman works chronologically from the ancient world to the modern age, identifying various key transitional moments along the way – the Renaissance boom in anatomy, Freud, feminism, modern medicine etc. Rees's book is much shallower – it's really a study in avant-garde art and popular culture from the last sixty years, and everything before that is unfortunately corralled into an introductory chapter of ‘Antecedents’.
This is a great shame. When she suddenly dips back from Judy Chicago to consider the baroque painter Artemisia Genlieschi, you can feel the whole book acquire new depth and scope almost within the space of a couple of paragraphs. She has many interesting things to say here and her book needs much more of this stuff – I would much rather have jettisoned some of the discussion of Sex and the City in favour of more detailed examination of the so-called ‘antecedents’. And while Friedman examines Freudian theory from, as it were, the outside, Rees simply accepts the jargon of psychiatry and makes unquestioning asides about, for example, how Moby-Dick reflects castration anxiety. Her terminology is in general a bit too woolly for my liking – there is a lot of wordplay about how ‘the c-word’ is ‘the unseen-word’ or even ‘ob/seen’, all of which I found extremely tiresome. She also keeps her research restricted to the library, whereas Friedman talks to many of the people concerned, including a very sensitive and sympathetic interview with Andrea Dworkin.
I guess Friedman has a penis of his own, but it's kept very much zipped up – his narrative voice goes for a measured, detached neutrality. Rees, by contrast, regularly breaks out into first-person comments which leave some sections looking more like a political rant than a cultural history. In fact she expresses a hope that ‘political engagement’ will be one of the consequences of her book. Although I share much of her anger, I think this tone weakens, not strengthens, her argument: the fact that there is indeed much to get angry about only makes it more important (in my opinion, anyway) for the narrative voice to retain a certain objective distance. I suppose that's my journalistic background speaking.
(While I'm complaining. There is also the odd throwaway comment that rubbed me the wrong way in Rees, such as when she describes male sex toys as being ‘for people who don't get out much […] a house shared with your mother and your unfulfilled dreams for company’. No comment on the much larger, apparently sexually healthy market in dildos and vibrators.)
All the same, Rees's book grew on me a lot once I got used to it. It's misleadingly titled, but it does what it tries to do very well.
Anyway, I suspect that this tonal difference is a clue to the gendered nature of the debate. Men perhaps feel able to consider their cocks historically, objectively, whereas for many women vaginas are in important ways still a political issue. Whether this difference should be leveraged or ignored, I'm not sure. The language itself – as Rees constantly reminds us – does not help; she has to spend too much time in her introduction explaining that despite her title, she does in fact understand the difference between a vulva and a vagina in anatomical terms. Her word of choice in most of the text is cunt, which she hopes to restore to a purely denotative (she calls it ‘orthophemistic’) realm.
I feel differently; I think it's pretty cool having such a powerful word in your corner (pardon the image). I also can't help feeling that – though huge strides absolutely need to be taken, especially in certain parts of the world – still there are advantages to retaining a little taboo-ness when it comes to what's in your pants. It's possible to imagine being completely without issues or prejudices and seeing a vagina as neutrally as I see an elbow. But I'm pleased I don't. show less
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- #35,031
- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 13
- ISBNs
- 24
- Languages
- 5