It's strange that there aren't more penises in movies. I see my own penis everyday, several times. There's nothing remarkable about it. I admit to looking at it with a fond eye sometimes, imbuing its sloping pink dangle with a certain metaphysical nostalgia. Still, genitals have somehow become danger signals to many people, giant red X's that can't be looked at without tearing the moral fabric of the universe.
Penises aren't any more or less attractive than vaginas. They can have unpleasant qualities, but in terms of visual appeal I'd say they're at least an order of magnitude more attractive than the average foot. Of course anyone can go barefoot, regardless of what calloused and veiny claws they might have, but penises need to be treated like a controlled substance. Though you might have one of your own, you must be of a certain age before you're allowed to see someone else's in the media.
The videogame is not often cited as a figurehead of social progress, but I saw a trailer for a new expansion of Grand Theft Auto IV today that features a conspicuous penis appearance. Penises have appeared in games before, many of them, probably too many to recount. What's remarkable is that GTA IV is not a marginal or pornographic game. It's one of the biggest franchises in videogame history. Having a penis in GTA IV is like Harrison Ford showing his male rudder in an Indiana Jones movie.
There's nothing remotely interesting about the scene that the nudity is used in. It's filled with stereotype and cheap jokes about how gross the male genital is supposed to be. The politician, consciously delivering his orders while naked is an extension of the dick-centric machismo that thirteen year-olds have been giggling about since time began. Dick's are disgusting, but the most powerful man in the room is so confident in his position that he is unaffected by the revulsion of his audience. Their reactions, for better or worse, are immaterial. Even if he doesn't literally have the biggest dick in the room, he's still aware that he's got the biggest figurative dick.
The punchline underscores how completely absurd all of those abstract phallocentricities are when taken literally. For an organ whose size is always a point of interest, it's almost anti-climactic to come to the end of a three-minute scene only to see the flaccid, middle-aged, polygon appendage. Sometimes a penis is just a penis.
I still don't understand what's so shameful or disgusting about seeing a penis. I've met a lot of people who seem preprogrammed to scrunch up their faces and squint every time the subject arises. It's as if the existence of genitals were as repellent as boogers or cooties. The imperfections of the penis, the veins, the pubic hair, the alien skin of the scrotum, the suggestion of autonomous movement when it flexes; it's all cause for recoil.
Many men certainly have similar knee-jerk reactions to the idea of vagina. There is the idea of the vagina as the mystical honey box from which all life flows, but further talk about menstruation, queefing (or vaginal flatulence, if I might be so bold), or hairy labias are unwelcome.
If those issues exist, it seems like art would be the perfect place to exorcise them. In the same way that zombies and heartless fascists armed with nuclear warheads dance around the flickering mobile of the film world, it seems only natural that genital anxiety might be an undiscovered genre for storytellers to mine for material.
It's like we live in two different worlds: the anatomically safe one where gender is based on personality stereotype and facial features, and then a kinky underworld where the ugly grammatical points of our bodies rub against each other in the darkness. It's always surprising to me when I go into the bathroom at work and unzip my pants for a piss and don't see that dangerously unpredictable underworld come rushing out like the ghosts inside Pandora's box.
Instead, it's just another body part, a mistranslation, a lost remnant from a parallel universe where feelings don't have to be kept separate from the vessels that transport them.
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Love Machine: On Your Own, or Moving On
Love Machine: Going to Bed Angry
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Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?