It's been rough readjusting to and re-engaging with day-to-day life here, even after just a week abroad.  That it was a week abroad in PARIS (not to rub it in, but it was) only makes it worse.  I was talking to a friend of mine who used to live there about the trip.  He sighed pensively and told me, "I have a very complicated relationship with Paris."  Luckily, I don't.

Like any other relationship, how complicated it is depends entirely on what you want from it.  And when what you want is whatever it has to give, well, it may sound desperate and slutty, but complicated it ain't.  And I got my fill and then some. Paris may be a lot of things, but stingy she's not.  

I was tempted for a moment when I walked out of the airport into the raw Boston winter to compare the city I live in unfavorably to the city I'd just returned from a brief, dreamy visit to, but the urge passed.  I mean, really: on what basis can you compare Boston and Paris?  The weather's about it.

Beyond that, Paris is such a singular organism, it might as well be its own species. All comparisons with wherever you're from are specious.  Yes, all "great cities" share much of the same DNA, just as humans share 60% of our DNA with bananas. And?  Your point is?

When Hemingway called Paris "a movable feast" he meant that you take it with you wherever you go.  And that's because, as you see readily in Europe, and even (in quainter and subtler ways) in places like Back Bay here in Boston, Paris is everywhere.  When you've been to Paris you understand that Paris does not so much belong to the rest of the world, as the rest of the world belongs to Paris.

Jamie, my marvelous host, kept me so busy, spoon-feeding me rich heaping servings of everything delightful, day after day, that I gave up trying to document the experience at all, aside from jotting notes about places we'd been, and snapping photos of marble phalluses whenever we came upon them.  Even that became daunting, as you can imagine.

A quick shout-out to my literary hero, Rabelais — spokesmonk for codpieces, bigger fan of big balls than AC/DC, who roughly four hundred years before Portnoy's Complaint, managed to stuff 45 obscene references to the penis and a whopping 336 (303 in a single chapter!) to testicles, in his 16th Century tome, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and who is justly immortalized on the facade of the Louvre — seems in order about now...


Aside from brushing up on my Rabelais, in preparation for my trip I had reread a thesis on the ideal prepuce in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.  Of course, I'm always interested to see how an artist dealing with the male nude handles his bits — so to speak.  It's not merely a prurient interest, either, as some of you might imagine.  What we call pornography, and how the definition of it has expanded and contracted over millennia, is only part of the story.  There is, in fact, nothing pornographic in my opinion about these little numbers from the Jardin des Tuileries, the Louvre, and Versailles...


Even this one, with its unusually distended scrotum, a slight, somewhat distractingly naturalistic touch...


...doesn't register a sigh on the erotic Richter Scale, does it?

Still, nudes are always fascinating in their own right.  There is something too tantalizing about dangling fruit, which is possibly why pants were invented in the first place.  There's an exquisite male nude at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Gaston Lachaise's eminently fondleable Statue of a Youth, whose bits are buffed to high gloss from visitors to the museum who obviously just could not resist.  But even this friendly gesture has no erotic charge.  We can stroke it all we want (theoretically — the museum has a DO NOT TOUCH sign to discourage you from doing so) — it'll never grow.

That's why we hide them away, after all.  I mean, because they do.  They're a simple, embarrassing solution to one of nature's fundamental problems — propagation.  They're practical, but they're weird.  Especially if you look at enough of them, which is arguably why you shouldn't make a hobby of it. It’s like if you say a word — any word — like, for a household item — "armchair" or "bed" for example, or "lamp" is a good one — over and over and over again. Pretty soon you’re like, that’s weird. I mean, "lamp". WTF? Why "lamp"?

I'm not talking about etymology here.  I mean, that's easy enough: lamp came into English from the French lampe that came from the Latin lampas, which is a transliteration of the Greek λαμπάς (lampas) from the verb λάμπω (lambo; to shine).  But why λάμπω in the first place?  Philosopher and Linguist John Searle thinks it's arbitrary. Simply put: "In the use of language we impose a specific function, namely, that of representing, onto marks and sounds."

Point is: You shouldn’t think about words. That’s getting the whole thing backwards. Likewise, generative organs. Carved in stone they can do no harm anyway.  Even when they represent generative functions, they aren't explicitly erotic, as we think of eroticism.  To read them as raunch is to misapprehend the essential difference between the penis and phallus, a mistake that's understandable in an age where we no longer associate our generative organs with their generative function, because we no longer have to, and in which, it follows, a whole string of associations with everything from human procreation to crop propagation have vanished from our symbolic language. 

As you can imagine, Jung had something to say about all this.  "As was customary throughout antiquity, primitive people today make free use of phallic symbols, yet it never occurs to them to confuse the phallus, as a ritualistic symbol, with the penis." (John Berger's distinction between "naked" and "nude" is along the same lines.) 

"Primitive peoples," Jung goes on,

always take the phallus to mean the creative mana, the power of healing and fertility, "that which is unusually potent". Its [mana’s] equivalents in mythology and in dreams are the bull, the ass, the pomegranate, the yoni, the he-goat, the lightning, the horse’s hoof, the dance, the magical cohabitation in the furrow, and the menstrual fluid, to mention only a few of many. That which underlies all of these images—and sexuality itself—is an archetypal content that is hard to grasp, and that finds its best psychological expression in the primitive mana symbol.

The decimation of that once-rich symbolic language is probably why we have such a hard time defining the explicitly sexual (which is so diffuse at this point that sexuality itself is an increasingly collapsible concept).  The whole train of associations that once rendered the art of antiquity readable, has collapsed into the question: "did the Greeks really have such small penises?"

In art as in life, size matters, of course. 

And it's true, these stylized depictions of the male member are wholly non-threatening to a nuclear-age audience weened on exploding monuments to the heyday of patriarchy...


The phallus is no longer associated primarily or even remotely in our minds with procreation or propagation, healing, fertility, mana — all remnants of agrarianism.  Nowadays, our great phallic monuments are mocked, their monumental scale is seen as evidence of extreme overcompensation for what we surmise those who, erm, erected them, must have lacked. 

None of this applies to the classical penis, of course, as distinct from the phallus. John Berger's observation that "Nudity is a form a dress" comes to mind when contemplating the neat little wrapped package of the typical nude.  In this context, even a hint of naked glans would be scandalous. 

You don't see many stylized circumcised numbers throughout the history of painting and sculpture, do you?  There are, of course, Platonic ideals of in-itself completeness which highly stylized, classical depictions of the human form are going for, where a circumcised penis would be not only a bizarre distraction, but would render the work "unreadable." 

Great artists like Michelangelo understood that the visual idiom of antiquity trumped any and all other narratives — why else would perhaps the most famous sculptural penis in the world, which belonged to David, a Jew (and not just any Jew, I might add), be uncircumcised?


These days, the most talked-about penis in Paris doesn't belong to a sculpture in the Tuileries Gardens, it belongs to a go-go boy at a bar in Le Marais who soaps it up in a plexiglas booth equipped with a shower head.  When I mentioned I'd been there to my friends back home they said, "oh, didja see the little guy with the big one?"  In fact, when I was there, at the bar, which was mixed, that was the hot topic of conversation, too. 

"Did you see it?" One would ask, urgently.

"I saw it!" The other would squeal.

"It was big, wasn't it?" The first would ask.

"It was so big!" The other would proudly confirm, citing a blurry cellphone picture as proof.

I paid more attention to this spectacle than to the go-go boy himself, who was, after all, just a garden-variety go-go boy.  But there were a lot of chicks there, and, wow, do they go nuts for a soaped-up naked boy in a plexiglas box.  What's up with that?  Gay guys will glance over, but get bored pretty easily.  I did. One glance into the plexiglas booth told me all I needed to know.  Cute, but not cute enough to be a tease.  And if his thingy appeared supersized, on the off-chance you got a glimpse of it, it was because he was all of 5'2".  It's relative, innit? 

I know this trick.  I dated a guy who was all of 5'6" once, and everywhere he went where he could flash it, everyone raved at how big it was.  I wasn't fooled.  Mine was actually bigger.  I'm not boasting, God knows, just making my point, which is: mine was bigger.  But then so am I.  Still, in my book, it's not the size of your thing relative to the size of you, but the size of your thing relative to the size of mine that counts.  I didn't make an issue of it while we were going out.  Only later, after he broke up with me.  As you do.

It's like the old tight tee-shirt trick.  You want people to think you're bigger than you are?  Just wear a smaller tee-shirt.  Seriously, trust me.  Like so much in life, it's totally an optical illusion. 

Anyway, a week in Paris gives you a lot to chew on, that's for sure...