What It Means To Be A Man

A few years back the Leopold Museum in Vienna had an exhibition entitled in German "Naked Men," which was a review of the ways in which the male body has been treated in art and photography over time.  The poster for the show was a replica of one of the exhibits, a photograph of three naked males standing clothed solely in the stockings and shoes worn by soccer players.  As if to emphasize this, each had a soccer ball between his feet, and straight up above this, dangling down (pointing down?) from their torsos in each case was a respectably large penis. And that is interesting, of course, since male genitalia are considered by some aesthetes to mar the symmetry of the male torso, deform it perhaps, although I have a woman friend who insists that it is a "marvelous punctuation to the plane of the torso." The ancient Greeks uniformly portrayed the penis in their statuary as small, a kind of aesthetic embarrassment, I should say, and indeed although the satyrs in comic theater are hugely endowed, that's just the point:  A big prick is a joke.  (Ancient Greek athletes who contested in the nude were said to strap their penis to their thigh to keep it out of the way.)  Christian art tended to limit the male nude to tubby little babies.  As for the adult male it was mostly the naked Christ on the cross with a skimpy loin cloth; Leo Steinberg wrote an interesting article on the variation in the rendering of the size of Jesus's penis in centuries of Crucifixion paintings, responsive to the changing theological argument of whether he is more god than man.  In any case, the history of the female nude in art is a consistent and well established convention, whereas a painting that involves the penis makes for a difficult sense of focus; as in real life it is difficult to take one's eyes off it. Just go into men's locker rooms and watch the rolling of the evasive eye making its way back surreptitiously to what it had been drawn to at the beginning.  No wonder that more often than not naked males tend to be portrayed from their backside.  A penis is a promise.  It delivers the goods which makes the baby.  The male who owns the penis is charged with a job.  As Karen Horney the great psychiatrist once said "In the sex act a male must perform."  No erection, no penetration, no ejaculation, no baby.  Which makes for male performance anxiety. Which brings me to consider the contemporary fixation on gender fluidity.  I don't understand it.  Some things you can't get away from, one being, I have been told over and over again all my life from my four sisters, is menstruation.   In the same way I don't understand how any person who has a piece of flesh which of its own accord hardens up at all the wrong moments (oh, those early teen dancing classes!), and in the same way softens when the demand is for solidity ("Sorry, honey, I guess I've just had too much to drink"). Think of the current controversy over men spreading their legs on crowded subway seats!  What could be more uncomfortable than to sit as one must in crowded places with one's legs squeezed, squashing the testicles in the process?  I could go on and on but the point I am making is that while a good deal of the time I am a sexless creature, just living my life ignoring my body, responsive instead to sight and sound and ratiocination, there are enough of those moments when my penis demands immediate and complete attention to remind me that I am a male and nothing else. (Except of course at my age when it is not much more than a lifeless piece of flesh as I move closer to eunuch category.) All those trans women who have had no surgery, I'm sorry, they can say they feel like a woman, think like a woman, but I say the penis says otherwise.