The Hung and the Restless

[reasonvemotion]

A subject about men.

Reading an article about the American penis. "It once remained mostly hidden on-screen, even when female stars were totally naked. Now it's everywhere - but this new boldness may be a flag of national surrender.

The limp penis can never match up to the mystique that has kept it hidden from view for the last couple of centuries and an actor's mystique is part of his capital. Nature doesn't deal out the same pickle size to every man, and no exercise routine will enlarge or tone it if the owner feels he has been "short changed". No matter how bull-strong, the male is always apprehensively aware of how vulnerable the little guy is in a fight, the testicles even more at mercy.

"In actuality, the penis (man's hidden 'nature') cannot compare to the phallus (man's cultural power). Male sexuality, as a representational system, depends on displacing the penis with the phallus", writes Chris Straayer, author of the cinema studies text Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies. The reverse is now occurring. It's phallic authority that is being replaced by all these actual penises, male power that's being symbolically deflated."

[Kayla]

is this a falsifiable claim?

[reasonvemotion]

An excerpt from the article by James Wolcott may explain why this is happending. "Well there is a deeper anxiety, that doesnt involve sexual qualms or identity. It has become a commonplace in postmodern studies to speak of the clothed penis as the invisible signifier of the phallus.

"No one believes in the Top Gun jockstrap bravado anymore. The movie world has adopted a culture that has lost its spunk and doesnt feel like keeping up the pretense of swagger anymore. It could be said, we are pulling it out because we are packing it in."

[The Voice of Time]

why in "Philosophical Counselling" subforum?

Isn't this Gender Philosophy?

[mickthinks]

It isn't philosophy at all—it's media studies.

[reasonvemotion]

Nature doesn't deal out the same pickle size to every man

That could be a counselling issue. LOL


I have two opinions of where this post belongs. Now that is a problem.

[The Voice of Time]

A topic about a penis is very much a gender issue ^^ I can hardly think of anything more gender-ly than a person's sex, not to mention that there is no counselling "you" seek or display seeking and instead seek to discuss an objective-ish topic. It is actually important also because it tells us co-discussers what you want as answers. Counselling and gender discussion is two very different angles or points of view on the matter and would give two different sets of answers. My first thought was confusion as to what you are seeking.

[reasonvemotion]

"As expressed by James Wolcott, male sexuality, as a representational system, depends on displacing the penis with the phallus. But the reverse is occurring. It is phallic authority that's being displaced by all these actual penises, male power that's being symbolically deflated. And not just male power. I think these penises are caution flags, symbolic indicators of a national power drop that encompasses politics, economics, education - the works. America is no longer king of the world. Its self confidence is undergoings its own shrinkage. The shrugging posture American movies have adopted reflect a country and culture that does not like feel like keeping up the pretense, anymore."

You may move this post to wherever you see fit, if absolutely necessary. It encompasses male nudity as an example of a country's culture that no longer has the energy or conviction to keep up it's rigid attitudes.

[Bill Wiltrack]

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All I heard from you - keep up it's rigid





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[ami]

Penis size, like height, is probably determined by epi-genetic feed-back on hormone release associated with feelings of pride and dominance during boyhood. Clothes wearing began at the beginning of the red-ochre period about 200,000 years ago. The time was the dawn of the family-unit and market system: the end of the lion-king mode of patriarchy (one male to rule them all), called by Freud the Primal Horde, and it's displacement by the band-of-brothers system. The band-of-brothers system (Acheulean-Mousterian divide) with it's co-operative work-party social-technology rapidly overtook and displaced the lion-king system. The large penis of the dominant male created inferiority feelings in the out-caste males and submission in the females; it was clothes wearing, specifically loin-cloths and penis-gourds by males that permitted the subversion of the penis size based Primal Horde mode of economy and it's replacement with the incest and capitalism system.

Note: hominid genome is a town-and-country vehicle: the lion-king system and the band-of-brothers system with their male dominance and strict sexual ownership of women (monarchical versus pharonic-couple) are rigid, brutal and possessive social-technologies suited to times of scarcity; patriarchy being a neurosis, tends to dissolves back into non-hierarchical, communalistic, alloparenting, polysexual pre-tribalism is periods of abundance.

Note: the high pressure environment of modern America produces stress and submissiveness in all castes, therefore contemporary Americans are tending to have very small penises by historical standards; this may be part of the basis of the collapse of phalocracy and exposure of the member itself. By comparison, male body-odor which is activated by stress, once served to generate stinking outcastes, double reinforcing in-groups and out-groups in the patriarchy; by contrast, modern America is high-stress for failures and the successful alike resulting in all American males and even females wearing deodorant to conceal their odor. Height is known to be reduced by stress in childhood and adolescence presumably via epi-genetic feed-back and predictably this generation of American men is getting shorter on average than the previous.