Emily Willingham - Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis

In 1980, when I was still in middle school and emphatically prepubescent, I encountered my first real-life adult penis. It was summer in Texas, which meant turning to swimming pools for survival in the heat, and a much younger sibling and I were taking advantage of a small but inviting pool at my grandmothers house. On that day, a gardener was working, chopping away at the ligustrums that threatened to sully the clear blue of the pool with their leaves and tiny white pollen-laden flowers.

My grandmother, a paraplegic in a wheelchairhence the hiring of someone else to deal with the encroaching ligustrumssat at the pools edge while my sibling and I swam. She had a cordless phone (quite newfangled at the time) tucked away in her wheelchair pocket in case of emergency. About ten feet from the pool was a shack with some inner tubes and other blow-up pool toys in it. My sibling and I loved to play bumper tubes with them, so I went into the shack to grab a couple.

As I stood there dripping water in my one-piece maroon swimsuit, making my choice among the slightly deflated black rubber donuts scattered inside, I heard a hsss sound just to my right and looked in that direction. And looming there in the unscreened window of that shack, in the shadow of the overhanging ligustrums and well back from the view of anyone else, stood this gardener.

Lets call him Eddie. Eddie had his pants open and his penis out, and he was doing what I now understand was masturbating, so that it had become engorged. He gestured to me, leering and threatening, trying to get me to come over to him. Instead, I beelined straight back to the pool and into the water, where I plunged in over my head and hung there, suspended and silent, taking what had just happened from different angles in my mind, trying to understand it.

It seemed unreal. Up to that day, I had not in my twelve or so years ever seen an adult penis, much less one in that condition, much less on someone who was handling it in that way and demanding that I engage with it.

But it was real. When I surfaced, Eddie had moved to a position behind my grandmother and was continuing his threatening behavior. He had that penis out, hand on the move, looking scornfully over my grandmothers head at me. His body language was clear: he knew he was doing something bad and expected it to be terrifying.

The penis was one thing. His terrorizing behavior directed at two children and a disabled senior citizen was something else. I felt convinced that if I did anything to stop it, Eddie would do something horrible to my grandmother or my sibling, and I was not even remotely thinking that he would inflict that damage using his penis. I just knew that he knew that what he was doing with it was wrong, and that knowledge was part of his terror tool kit.

When my father arrived and took us home, I immediately reported what had happened to my mother. To my surprise, despite my fear that Eddie was going to physically harm my grandmother, my sibling, or me, everyone else was very focused on the violation of his showing his penis.

And that penis was a violation, to me personally and of the law. Obviously, that episode should not have been my introduction to the adult penis. Yet in the moment, it was the persistence of the threat he posed, with his brazen physicality and menace, that kept me in the pool, kept me from reaching for the phone. He terrorized me, not his penis.

In the end, Eddie confessed, and my parents told me that he had been sent to prison. It wasnt until about forty years later that I even tried to track down what had happened after that, with much trepidation. He seems to have repeated his offense elsewhere after he got out of jail.

Not a week of my life has gone by since that I have not recalled that episode, indelible in the hippocampus, as Christine Blasey Ford put it in her testimony about Brett Kavanaugh. I cant look at or smell a ligustrum without remembering it. But not until quite recently did I really start to think about that penis of his and how that was my introduction to this organ. And I have wondered why, even though Eddie was a large, strong man whose menacing and terrorizing behaviors were far scarier than his genitalia, his penis got all the attention. It seemed to be all anyone wanted to talk about, as though the rest of Eddie and what Eddie was capable of doing were irrelevant. The penis was important, but it wasnt everything.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, we in the United States experienced the advent of smartphones and dick pics. We had Louis C.K. and Harvey Weinstein wanking at seemingly any woman who walked through their hotel room doors, Jeffrey Epstein and his plan to seed girls with his offspring, and, lets face it, the man who moved into the White House in 2017 and thinks men can just grab women by the pussy and shove on in. That glorification of the penis takes on broader and more pervasive dimensions when its relayed by cell towers directly to our eyeballs, presented in porn and the fervid minds of some as the throbbing center of masculinity, and demands not only that we look but also that we give in to its charms or suffer the physical consequences.

The elevation of the penisof the phallusas the sine qua non of maleness and the whip and master of women, with or without consent, couldnt have happened without buy-in from a whole lot of people. Those who dont get the worship they demand form a loose collective of angry, vengeful young men whose fury sometimes explodes with all the murderous damage of a bomb. And those who decline to show the phallus sufficient deference become the targets of terror campaigns both individually and collectively.

Even when the Me Too movement, started in 2006 by Tarana Burke, built up in 2017 into a national and then global phenomenon, this use and abuse of the penis as a weapon and a threat took center stage. Yet again, the attention to the penis sidelined the (mostly) women who had been targets of assaults and affronts and reported them. Weve approached a cultural nadir (we can only hope) when a US senator refuses to believe a womans story about an alleged indecent act by a Supreme Court justice unless the woman can provide an accurate description of the justices penis for comparison to the real thing.