by Nancy Friday
At the opening night of Hair, in 1968, the men in the audience wore a wild variety of Nehru jackets, velvet pants, and silk scarves, along with necklaces, beads, the single earring. When I moved to London a year later, I frequented a shop on Greek Street where Thea Porter designed embroidered robes, caftans, and flowing pants of the most outrageous beauty for both men and women. In this morning’s paper, the men’s collection in Milan shows men in the same Nehru jackets, wide-legged pants. “Just as women are expected to willingly climb back onto stiletto heels and into clinging clothes,” writes the New York Times fashion editor, “men are being asked to forsake an evolution that has made suits as comfortable as sweaters.” Then she repeats something almost identical to what Hollander said, “The new male glamour features some strikingly literal appropriations of traditionally feminine allure.”
Men will not wring their hands when they stand before their mirrors, fearing they have gone to an extreme in their dress. We women have hesitated to believe too deeply in our beauty, or to use it too overtly. Men don’t fear exclusion from the gang for having used their looks to get ahead. When a man hears our whispered, “You are so handsome,” he will look into our eyes and accept the praise far more readily than we have ever believed in men’s praise or their love.
Love and beauty have a common history, which begins in the family. Today, preferable treatment given to a lovelier sibling in childhood and adolescence shapes a boy as much as it does his sister. The dance in front of the mirror is as old as time; now men reenter to dance opposite and in competition with us, the inevitable reaction to women’s move into the economic arena. “Both sexes play changing games today,” says Hollander, “because for the first time in centuries men are learning clothing habits from women, instead of the other way around.”
In my revision of the fairy tale, today’s man is the sleeping prince awaiting the kiss of the voyeuristic woman.
8
The Penis, the Shoe, and the Vagina
The Penis: Past, Present, and Future
Shortly after I began this book, a poem arrived in the mail from my aunt Pat, she who had been my heroine while growing up. It was printed on a yellowed, raggedy piece of paper torn from a volume of Cerberus, the annual collection of student stories and poems from my beloved school. I have kept the dog-eared version, an appropriate talisman on this journey, pinned over my desk these past three years, anticipating its inclusion here.
THE MAN WITH THE PAN
Once I met a man with a pan, pan, pan.
I didn’t like the man with the pan so I ran, ran, ran.
That little man ran after me
But I was so smart I climbed up a tree.
That little man came after me
But I was so smart I climbed down the tree.
I ran home but that little man didn’t come after me.
That little man was still up the tree.
NANCY FRIDAY, GRADE THREE
Several months after I’d received the poem, my family gathered for my uncle’s funeral. The night we arrived at my aunt’s big, antebellum house, we sat in a loose circle in the living room, four generations of us, for my great-aunt Marge, my grandmother’s sister, had come from her nursing home. I hadn’t been there twenty minutes when she turned to me and said, “Nancy, do you remember when you were a little girl and came running into the house saying that a man had exhibited himself to you?”
I don’t think I had seen my aunt Marge since that day to which she’d just referred, and suddenly here she was, very old, very blind, and come to tell me about the meaning of this poem I’d recently been sent. When I’d received the torn remnants of “The Man with the Pan,” I had read it with amusement, having no idea what was on my mind when, as a child, I’d written it.
Now I knew. Knew it because I was writing this book, which had penetrated the unconscious; knew it as clearly as I could now see the streets around that particular house where I used to roam in my curious way, looking for I knew not what, but always looking. This is where and when I encountered the man standing under a tree with his penis exposed. Three or four years later, when I wrote my poem, did I remember what he had done? I’ll never know. What is magical, as in fairy tales, is that the old Cerberus was found in an attic, my poem torn out and sent to my aunt, who had forwarded it to me just as I was launched into this writing.
Certainly I wouldn’t wish a Man with a Pan in any child’s life, but he did turn up in mine and earned a place in this book about men and women in our unacceptable skins, the bodies we wrap in inviting, fashionable ways, hoping that we will inspire others to see and love those “parts” we cannot bring ourselves to look at. In my mind, there is a connection, be it ever so fine, between men who carry exhibitionism into appalling antisocial behavior and those who lie in their beds across the world, their hands on their unloved penises, their minds dreaming about a woman who, for a change, would look at it, touch it, taste it, adore it.
Raised by a woman, the man grows up accepting that in women’s eyes there is nothing beautiful about the area between his legs. The sister receives the same education, leaving her to identify with mother for the rest of her life (unless a good man changes her mind), but the boy goes on to ally himself with other boys. Alas, it remains just that, men’s shared determination, in defiance of women’s opinion, to celebrate the symbol of their difference.
That men must work so hard at it says how deeply imprinted men are by that first woman’s judgment. That men forgive women our scorn of the penis, that they go even further and try to persuade us of the beauty of our own genitals is, when you think of it, quite generous. Far from showing gratitude, we women disparage men’s fondness for their penises.
Feminism should have taken up the penis years ago. Instead, fanatics like Andrea Dworkin spew such vitriol as her crazed ranting, “Violence is the male; the male is the penis; violence is the penis or the sperm ejaculated from it.”
I know they exist, but in my twenty-five years of research I have never come across a man who had sexual fantasies of exposing himself. But mention the erotic dream of a woman who loves looking at his penis, inhaling the aroma, tasting the semen that spurts from it, followed by the final benediction, swallowing it! Well, hundreds of thousands of happy male eyes light up around the world. She accepts me! that fantasy says, she loves that deepest, sweetest part of me that women have taught me is repugnant, so vile that it makes them turn away from it and me, for we are interchangeable, inseparable, me and this penis with its magic fluid that most women, alas, want only for procreation.
Ironically, mother’s guarded eye on his penis teaches the boy that it must be very important indeed, otherwise mother wouldn’t lavish so much attention on it. As in fairy tales and video games, where the thing most heavily guarded is the most valuable prize, the boy comes to believe that his penis must be quite something or mother wouldn’t protest so vehemently. In time, the forbidden is meshed with the pleasurable.
“It’s not an accident we have so many men with erectile difficulties,” says Judith Seifer, “or a loss of desire, or premature ejaculation. These are the very men who have been taught by mother that it’s not permissible to be on good terms with their penis. The parents’ way of dealing with any kind of erotic feeling or attitude is to deny or ignore it. Sex was considered nasty, dirty and a sin, or it was never discussed. By virtue of the guilt or the fear instilled in them, many of these men never go through the developmental preoccupation with their genitals that happens in puberty. These are not the kids who are masturbating, and that is exactly what ejaculatory competence takes. Practice. Starting in puberty, young boys learn that the longer they last, the more they feel. The more aroused you get before you let yourself come, the bigger your penis gets. This is the opportunity to literally take a good look at themselves, to get comfortable with how their equipment has changed and to learn how well it can serve them. Masturbation is a great teacher.”
How disturbing it must be for a man to lie naked wit
h a woman, inserting his penis into her and all the while knowing that she doesn’t like the sight of it. It is a wonder men choose to be with us at all. And we resent that they go to prostitutes who know that the mouth on the penis is what men pay to enjoy. “It is the first thing men want, oral sex,” says Norma Jean Almodovar, director of COYOTE, the prostitutes’ union in California. “After oral sex, the most popular fantasy among all men is the ménage à trois. In that order.” Two women adoring his penis! And neither of them is jealous of the other, now that is bliss!
“A lot of men, especially very powerful men, want to relinquish that power,” says Almodovar. “They want to do it in a safe situation where they can trust the person to whom they give control. They often like to be tied up and told what naughty children they are. ‘Bad boy!’ Believe it or not, there are still an awful lot of women who will not give their husbands oral sex.”
In men’s erotic fantasies nothing registers higher than oral sex. “For men, oral sex seems to relate to their view of the entire relationship and to their view of being loved,” says June Reinisch, director emerita of the Kinsey Institute. “For men it has great significance, beyond what it has for women. There is something related to the woman’s acceptance, love, and admiration of a man’s penis that he relates to an acceptance of the whole self, that all of him is appreciated and loved.”
When he was a boy and his penis erupted in the night, soiling mother’s clean sheets, his wish wasn’t that he would never climax again but that he could get away from Women’s Rules. He dreads dirtying mother’s pretty towels in the bathroom where he masturbates, but his anger at the woman he loves must be internalized, where it wars with his need of mother/women. Men’s sadomasochistic fantasies, please note, are rarely about abusing women; rather, the man debases himself at her feet, becomes her slave, and, yes, gets his dirty little orgasm too.
When men accept women’s opinion that his penis is ugly, disgusting, and unkissable, they buy our verdict, not their own. Such behavior toughens men, separates them from emotion. When a couple argues, the man will walk out the door more easily, not because he hurts less but because life under Women’s Rules has given him practice in the endurance of pain, in the prospect of a life without either beauty or feeling.
A man requires so little convincing, and he is so grateful when women beam at his elegant image. Why do we refuse to give back to men some of the pleasure they have given to us in the recognition of our beauty? Some men do carry voyeurism too far, but that is learned anger. Instead, our opinion of men’s physical appeal never gets past our angry accusation of that part of their anatomy we hate: “The penis is conceived as a weapon,” wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch, “and its action upon women is understood to be somehow destructive and hurtful.”
Whatever women may think of the penis, the fact remains that we expect men to change our low opinion of our genitals, which we see as disfigurement. Read this scene from Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune, and ask yourself how many women would give this gift to a man, this worshipful vision of his genitals:
JOHNNY: Open your robe.
FRANKIE: No. Why?
JOHNNY: I want to look at your pussy.
FRANKIE: No. Why?
JOHNNY: It’s beautiful.
FRANKIE: It is not. You’re just saying that.
JOHNNY: I think it is. I’m telling you you have a beautiful pussy—!
FRANKIE: I hate that word, Johnny!
JOHNNY: —alright, thing! And I’m asking you to open your robe so I can look at it. Just look. Fifteen seconds….
(She agrees finally, and stands there talking her head off, embarrassed while he looks, then Johnny takes her hand, kisses it, rubs his cheek against it.)
Men cannot grasp our hatred of the very parts of our body they most worship; nor does either sex appreciate how this spreads and thus spoils our assessment of our other body parts. We push away men’s hungry mouths, turn away from their eyes that would worship us, and call them pigs for wanting to look and taste. Perhaps when we first met we believed his words of adoration, but when attraction has turned into “love,” our satyr becomes our caretaker. In our married roles of Mommy/Daddy, we see the two of us as we saw our parents, who in our eyes were never sexual.
And we wonder why men go to whores to find sex without strings, without love, which men have learned ruins sex. The man had thought he could have both, but now he settles for married love and purchased sex, where he can look at a woman’s genitals and have his own tasted, for which oral satisfaction he accepts/expects punishment at the hands of the prostitute who whips him, steps on him with her high heels, spanks him for breaking Mommy’s antisex rules.
I sit here trying to imagine what it must be like to be a man, to go through life with this penis that has its own separate life, its private connection with the brain that triggers its tumescence at will. Yes, other men accept the penis, even celebrate it, but half the world despises it. And even other men disparage it when it doesn’t measure up.
Sex educator Betty Dodson says she has met very few men “who really like their cock and balls, and who really enjoy masturbating. When I published my first book, I tried to get cock drawings included to help the men along the same lines as I was trying to educate women, but the publisher wouldn’t include the drawings. It’s okay for women to be on display, but men? The salesmen refused to sell the book. Practically every man walking the planet doesn’t think his cock is adequate or big enough. I ran a few groups for men, to get them to see the beauty of their genitals, but it was just impossible to get them to have a dialogue.”
During the sixties I fell in love with a man who, when we met, had just left his restrictive wife in the suburbs. More than any man I’ve known, he celebrated sex and, in particular, his penis of a size so remarkable that when I eventually met Margot St. James, founder of COYOTE, and asked her if by chance she’d ever met my old lover, she paused only briefly. “Stan’s got the biggest cock in San Francisco,” she said.
The only story from his youth that Stan told me was that his mother destroyed the full-page advertisements for Hanes stockings that he had pinned over his bed. Was this female prohibition the beginning of my lover’s fondness for sex in near-public places where we might be discovered: on beaches, under tables in restaurants, in swimming pools? The sixties were risk-taking years. Because he was the most articulate, well read, charming, and patient man I’d ever met, a born teacher, I followed him. I longed to lose my Nice Girl rigidity. From other free spirits in those years I learned that we Finishing School graduates often make the best candidates for sexual exploration. The Edie Sedgwicks were legion. Yes, she died, but many of us knew where to draw the line.
My parting memory of Stan was of a summer day at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street, where he couldn’t stand his invisibility any longer and called out, “Look at me!” He meant his cock, his jewel, which lay flaccid beneath his khaki trouser leg but, given its size and the fact that he wore no underwear, was dramatically bold in outline. No one passing understood his plaintive lament, precisely what it was he wanted to be seen, but I did. He and I would soon part company, with gratitude on both sides, Stan to go on to teach Tantra Love on a mountaintop near San Francisco.
There were quite a number of men who abandoned their underwear—liberated their penises, so to speak—in those years, a time we associate with female exhibitionism when, in fact, men too were trying to get past the culture’s definition of masculinity, The Good Provider, just as we braless women were breaking out of our mothers’ molds. Had we women been more aware of men’s restrictive lives we might have helped ourselves in helping them. But most men were silent, so unaccustomed to complaint was the male voice, so unsympathetic were the ears of men and women. We still are. We neither want to hear their demands for rights in the nursery nor do we want to hear about their concerns regarding their penises.
Poor men. Relegated to having sex with women without
dirtying the sheets. Poor men, who would gladly gaze at our vaginas for hours, clean them with their tongues like large tomcats. When men stare at naked women in magazines, women who spread their legs and let them have a good look up close, men pay homage to the centerfolds, homage that might have been ours if we weren’t so priggish. But Nice Girls couldn’t, wouldn’t, consider letting him get close to the sewer that we have never investigated ourselves, and as for enjoying men’s sticky semen jettisoned all over us—their “homage”—please, take that ugly thing away!
“It’s remarkable how little women, even women who pose naked for magazines, know about male sexual response,” says Gay Talese. “I was at the Los Angeles mansion back in the seventies when I used to spend a lot of time with Hefner. I was looking at the latest issue of Playboy, at the very beautiful, arousing Playmate of the month and suddenly she walked into the room. I was in the library having a brandy and we sat and had a conversation. She, of course, had her clothes on, but I had a very visual sense of her from just looking at that magazine.
“I asked her if she had any idea when she was posing for this photographer what effect her poses would have upon the audience that reads Playboy, three or four million men a month.
“‘What do you mean?’ she said.
“I said, ‘Let’s be very specific.’ Remember, I was researching Thy Neighbor’s Wife at this time. I said to her that ‘the magazine is all over the country, in small towns, roadside motels, Holiday Inns, and possibly as I’m talking to you now in California, it is midnight in Newark, New Jersey, and in some Holiday Inn across the George Washington Bridge, after dinner some guy has gone up to his room with a Playboy magazine, and he’s lying in bed with an erection. He’s looking at these pictures, and he’s masturbating. He’s holding his hand on his penis, rubbing it up and down, looking at you. And he’s about to have an orgasm. He’s going to reach for a Kleenex, and he’s going to stuff his penis into that Kleenex and he’s going to come. He’s going to essentially be having sex with you.’
