David M. Friedman - A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE PENIS

David M . Friedman

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Copyright 2001 by David M. Friedman

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Designed by Jeanette Olender

Picture research by Natalie Goldstein

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Friedman, David M., 1949

A mind of its own : a cultural history of the penis / David M. Friedman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. PenisSocial aspects. 2. PenisHistory. I. Title.

GT498.P45 F75 2001 200104528

573.656dc21

For Jack G. Friedman

eISBN 13: 978-1-4391-3608-9

ISBN 13: 978-0-6848-5320-8

A Mind of Its Own

I
The Demon Rod

Unlike her life, Anna Pappenheimers death was a public event. Residents of Munich by the thousands rubbed shoulders to witness it, forming a circle on a hill outside the citys main gate. Boys squeezed through the snorting horses that gave the chief magistrate and other dignitaries a perch above the bustling throng. Pickpockets worked their trade and more righteous entrepreneurs sold pamphlets citing the crimes and blasphemies that led this wife of an itinerant outhouse cleaner to be condemned to the fate that now awaited her. Pappenheimer probably welcomed her death: Minutes earlier the fifty-nine-year-old mother of three had been dragged from her jail cell, site of her confession, to the square in front of Town Hall, where a tub of burning coal was tended by two young men. An older man in a black hood and leather gloves stepped forward and grabbed tongs that had been thrust deep into that fiery mass. He tore open Pappenheimers shirt. He used the glowing pincers to tear off her breasts. As the crowd gasped, the screaming woman was thrown into a cart normally used to haul manure. Heralded by pealing church bells, Pappenheimers death procession set off for the hill beyond the city walls. There her limp, bloody body was tied to a chair and carried atop a large pyre. Lord Jesus, for Thee I live, said a priest. Lord Jesus, for Thee I live, echoed the faithful. The hooded man threw lit torches into the woodpile. Smoke and cinders began to rise. Dogs, excited by the smells, began to bark and leap into the air. The crowd met Pappenheimers screams with cheers. From a distance it looked like a carnival.

Anna Pappenheimer was one of thousands of women killed during the witch hunts that reached their grisly peak between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some of those killed were accused of causing crop failures, others of performing abortions. But there was one crime that virtually all the women confessed to after torture, beginning with the first documented witch to be executed in public, the Frenchwoman Angela de la Barthe, in 1275. That crime was knowledge of the Devils penis.

Pappenheimers education took place in a Bavarian barley field. A black-garbed stranger approached her there, doffed his hat, and treated the impoverished woman with courtesy. What a fine day, madam, he said. It will soon be spring, dont you think? Pappenheimer looked away. Dont pretend you do not know me, the man said. I am Lucifer, sometimes called The Evil One. Yet I can be a good friend to those who trust me. He gently stroked Pappenheimers face; soon she was feeling lust unlike any she had ever known. Pappenheimer shuddered when his penis entered her. It felt, she later told the Inquisitor, as cold as a piece of ice.

The Devils penis was the obsession of every Inquisitor and the star of nearly every witchs confession. The women invariably said it was cold but there was disagreement on other details. Some located his penis at his rear. Some said he had two, others that it was forked. Most reported it was black and covered with scales. Several said there was nothing where scrotum and testicles should be hanging. One likened the Devils penis to that of a mule, which the Evil One constantly exposed, so proud was he of its massive size and shape. The Devils ejaculate was said to exceed that of one thousand men. But others claimed his penis was smaller than a finger and not even as thick. This led a French Inquisitor to guess that Satan served some witches better than others.

These confessions say something about the fantasies of women, but they reveal much more about the anxieties of men, especially those regarding their defining organ. Five centuries ago women were not merely thought sexually insatiable; it was believed they could make a man impotent, or even make his penis disappear. The Malleus Maleficarum, the definitive guide for witch hunters published in 1486, wrote of a woman who stole dozens of penises, then hid them in a tree where they lived like birds in a nest. So tentative was mans belief in his phallic integrity during this era that some men strutted about in a codpiece, an often brightly colored cover for the crotch in mens breeches padded and molded in the shape of a permanent erection. The first piece in the arming of a warrior, Rabelais called it. The gap between what those soldiers in the battle of the sexes advertisedand what was actually therespeaks volumes about the defining issue of that conflict which, throughout history, has often been deadly for women. In 1536 King Henry VIII, owner of the largest cod in England, beheaded his second wife, Anne Boleyn, a former courtesan whom he denounced as a sorceress after he lost the interestor was it the erectile ability?to continue their sexual relations.

What can explain the victimization of Anne Boleyn, Anna Pappenheimer, and the other women, of high and low station alike, who suffered as they did? Misogyny, in all its subtle and beastly expressions, likely provides the overall answer. But a more tightly focused lens enables us to see in their deaths the predominance of one of the driving forcesthe ongoing cultural obsession with the penis, the insecurities it fostered, and the perceived harm it could do. We can see how it became, through the mix of fevered fantasy and obsessive insecurity, the very agent of the transfer of evil. In short, the demon rod.

How did the penis come to be so demonized? Today, when even married men of the cloth take erection-enhancing drugs prescribed by their physicians, the idea that man saw his defining organ as a tool of the Devil seems hard to believe. No one was born believing that. But there is something in the mind of Western man, an uneasiness about his link with his penisa word defined here not merely as the penile shaft and glans, but encompassing the testes, sperm, and all the other parts and products of the male genitaliathat made him receptive to that distortion. To tell the story of how that relationship came to be seen as corrupting, we must have a conversation with the dead. A dialogue is possible only if we understand the world as they understood it.

The priests and politicians who persecuted Anna Pappenheimer did not see the body as a temple. For them it was a flimsy vessel for a churning stew of vile processessex, defecation, urination, and vomitingwhich was constantly erupting. The most obscene of this effluvia was semen; the polluted spigot through which it emerged was the penis. These ideas, spread by the Fathers of the Church, were conceived more than a thousand years before scientists figured out the physiology of erections, more than a thousand years before a sperm cell was sighted under a microscope, more than a thousand years before there was