I did like it, it's kind of pop history but most of the sources were primary ones, there were many times I googled to see if the source checked out and it did, BUT there were times that some shaky history was given more weight than it should have, like the thing with Pope Jean, the myth hs already been debunked but in the book there is a glimmer of doubt given that has no place in a factual history book, there were more of this that I can't remember right now.

Still i don't think the author straight up lied about anything, research was pretty throughout, he just spiced things up a bit, it's a pop science book it's supposed to be a bit salacious I suppose.

In the end I'm trying to defend the book because I enjoyed it, and I did learn a lot, nothing was talked both in deep but it was all very interesting.

My other complaint would be that sometimes the author tried to see much more meaning in some cultural aspects that anyone can objectively ascribe to older cultures or objectively recognise about contemporary culture, I would have done with a bit more of impartiality.

Still liked it, would recommend, an easy read full of interesting history, a bit biased but nothing that would fool the reader, like you know he's talking about his personal opinion sometimes.

4/5 ( )

The three star rating is in no way meant to disparage this book. This was, in fact, a fascinating and highly enlightening book. The only reason for a less than four star rating came largely from the fact that I found the final portion of the book (focusing on the the 'medicalization' of the penis and the erection industry) far more boring than the previous sections. I will say that I enjoyed the alternative view to the prevailing one - that by focusing on the ED drugs we're losing the more complex aspects of relationships and that problems may eventually arise due to it - but the mechanics and drug focus just somewhat lost me.

[b: A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis|957145|A Mind of Its Own A Cultural History of the Penis|David M. Friedman|http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347755220s/957145.jpg|942055] was an incredibly enlightening read. It traces not only the history of our understanding of such a singular organ, but arguably more importantly the changing views society had towards it over time. This results in a book that begins with the Greeks and Romans, threads through the Church and the various ways religion changed how we viewed our sexual selves, the racial, the Freudian, feminist, and eventual medical view of the penis. This book was fascinating, funny, and altogether a lens through which I never quite thought history would or could be viewed. Who doesn't giving a different perspective a try?

Ultimately this book left me with a far broader cultural understanding than I expected it to. It gave me a new way to view history, a new interest in gender studies, and a better understanding of ultimately how little the sexes understand one another. We all have a tendency to oversimplify our sexual identities, and we risk losing a part of ourselves in the process. By the end of the book, it seemed to me that a little of each perspective was the best way to view everything. It's not wholly psychological, physiological, religious, scientific, political, or racial anymore than a person is. We're left with the same mystery we started with, but there is little wrong with that. ( )

• David M Friedman, A Mind of its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, Robert Hale 2009 [2002]
• Emma LE Rees, The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History, Bloomsbury 2015 [2013]

A brace of books about the sex organs and what they mean, books that benefit enormously from being read in tandem – even though doing so does serve to erode some of the claims to uniqueness made by each of them. Both, in their own way, try to examine how and why the cultural taboos about concealing the genitals have been variously enacted, reinforced and challenged over time, and to consider how such attitudes have made individual people feel about themselves, about their bodies, and about others.

In the western world at least, the taboos about penises and vaginas became mixed up early on with religious prohibitions. This is something Friedman examines through art history, noting the abandonment of Classical nakedness in favour of a rather body-phobic tradition of fig leaves and the like.

But – in a process that is central to both books – this censorship only makes their invisible presence more powerfully felt. Rees describes this concept as ‘covert visibility’. Consider, for instance, a painting like Maerten van Heemskerck's Man of Sorrows, where the one part that's covered up ends up, in consequence, demanding all your attention (not least because this work notoriously shows Jesus in a decidedly tumescent state):

http://www.wga.hu/art/h/heemsker/1/m_sorrow.jpg

One consequence of this is the confusion over motivations when artists or writers do try deliberately to focus on the genitals. Are such efforts laudatory attempts to undo the effects of centuries of oppressive censorship, revealing the unseen? Or are they somehow perpetuating the same old stereotypes, by allowing free rein to an audience's erotic fascination?

An important representative case study for Rees is Courbet's L'Origine du monde. The painting is unromantic, demystifying, somehow honest. It works contrary to the conservative traditions that have often made women's bodies an unknown quantity even to themselves. But at the same time, by cropping out the subject's head, arms and legs, it is also seriously reductive: woman as cunt.

http://www.musee-orsay.fr/typo3temp/zoom/tmp_29ca756c07ba6a19b7953dde2a72d5f9.gi...

Friedman's book throws up a fascinating parallel. In a very interesting discussion on the way the penis has often been central to ideas of colonialism and racism, he brings in the controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, especially his collection of black male nudes, Black Book (1986).

http://blog.sfmoma.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/polyestersuit1.jpg

Here again we have a subject whose head and other extremities have been removed from frame to focus attention on the genitals. Part of the shock value here, it's suggested, comes from the fact that it was still a novel concept to present naked black men as a fitting subject for artistic photography – Friedman notes for instance that not one of the portraits in Sullivan's canonical Nude: Photographs 1850-1980 is of a black man. But at the same time, Man in a Polyester Suit is inextricably tangled up with racist stereotypes of black man = big cock.

But again – why is this image so shocking (and it is shocking)? What is it about this one body part that is so objectifying, so shameful?

For Rees, this tight, dehumanising focus is part of a tradition for what, in the context of her book, she refers to as the ‘autonomised cunt’ – the genitals considered as somehow separate from one's identity. The same is true of the penis, of course, as the title of Friedman's book reminds us. For some reason, the sex organs are a part of the body that many people feel are not quite part of themseves – that leave people, in Rees's academic jargon, ‘radically disaggregated’. She traces an interesting genealogy of independent, talking vulvas – from the magic cunts of French fabliaux (later picked up in Diderot's Les Bijoux indiscrets) all the way through to the giant talking clitoris in South Park: The Movie.

This psychological ‘disaggregation’ of the genitals is linked to another equally strong tradition of their being severed – made literally independent. Rees discusses the violently severed vulva of Eurydice Kamvisseli's f/32, as well as Charlotte Gainsbourg's terrifying homemade clitorodectomy in Lars von Trier's Antichrist. This has obvious connections with ritualised practices like female genital mutilation, which Rees mentions briefly but emotionally in her conclusion; in Friedman's book, the subject is explored in a little more detail through the tradition of castrati (many of whom were ‘fully shaved’, as it was euphemistically called: testicles crushed between stones and then the penis sliced off) as well as a brief outline of how the United States bought into circumcision as part of the nineteenth-century anti-masturbation movement.

http://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Jamie-McCartney.jpg

More parallels emerge in the modern ‘medicalisation’ of the genitals – for women, this concerns how they look, in the form of labiaplasties and so-called designer vaginas; for men, it's about new chemicals that can guarantee their performance and behaviour. I should point out that in making this comparison I am not trying to suggest equivalence – having an erection is genuinely necessary for lots of kinds of sex, whereas having some kind of Platonically ideal perfecto-cunt is not. Still, there are revealing similarities in the way that people's attitudes to their bodies have become co-opted by the medical industry. Friedman's explanation of how Viagra was developed is extraordinary. British physiologist Giles Brindley demonstrated his breakthrough in front of a packed convention in Las Vegas, with the kind of practical show-and-tell that you don't expect from a professional forum:

After calmly presenting his data from behind the podium, Brindley stepped in front of it and pulled down his pants. Moments earlier, you see, he had gone to the men's room and secretly injected himself [with papaverine]. And now, before a room full of strangers, there it was: the, uh, ‘evidence’.

The audience gasped. Brindley did not want the urologists to think he was fooling them with a silicone prosthesis, so he headed into the crowd, proof in hand, and asked them to inspect it. ‘I had been wondering why Brindley was wearing sweatpants,’ says Dr Arnold Melman…

http://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/319/7225/1596/F1.large.jpg

Despite the many points of connection, it must be said that Rees and Friedman have written very different books, which represent totally divergent choices in terms of scope and tone. Friedman works chronologically from the ancient world to the modern age, identifying various key transitional moments along the way – the Renaissance boom in anatomy, Freud, feminism, modern medicine etc. Rees's book is much shallower – it's really a study in avant-garde art and popular culture from the last sixty years, and everything before that is unfortunately corralled into an introductory chapter of ‘Antecedents’.

This is a great shame. When she suddenly dips back from Judy Chicago to consider the baroque painter Artemisia Genlieschi, you can feel the whole book acquire new depth and scope almost within the space of a couple of paragraphs. She has many interesting things to say here and her book needs much more of this stuff – I would much rather have jettisoned some of the discussion of Sex and the City in favour of more detailed examination of the so-called ‘antecedents’. And while Friedman examines Freudian theory from, as it were, the outside, Rees simply accepts the jargon of psychiatry and makes unquestioning asides about, for example, how Moby-Dick reflects castration anxiety. Her terminology is in general a bit too woolly for my liking – there is a lot of wordplay about how ‘the c-word’ is ‘the unseen-word’ or even ‘ob/seen’, all of which I found extremely tiresome. She also keeps her research restricted to the library, whereas Friedman talks to many of the people concerned, including a very sensitive and sympathetic interview with Andrea Dworkin.

I guess Friedman has a penis of his own, but it's kept very much zipped up – his narrative voice goes for a measured, detached neutrality. Rees, by contrast, regularly breaks out into first-person comments which leave some sections looking more like a political rant than a cultural history. In fact she expresses a hope that ‘political engagement’ will be one of the consequences of her book. Although I share much of her anger, I think this tone weakens, not strengthens, her argument: the fact that there is indeed much to get angry about only makes it more important (in my opinion, anyway) for the narrative voice to retain a certain objective distance. I suppose that's my journalistic background speaking.

(While I'm complaining. There is also the odd throwaway comment that rubbed me the wrong way in Rees, such as when she describes male sex toys as being ‘for people who don't get out much […] a house shared with your mother and your unfulfilled dreams for company’. No comment on the much larger, apparently sexually healthy market in dildos and vibrators.)

All the same, Rees's book grew on me a lot once I got used to it. It's misleadingly titled, but it does what it tries to do very well.

Anyway, I suspect that this tonal difference is a clue to the gendered nature of the debate. Men perhaps feel able to consider their cocks historically, objectively, whereas for many women vaginas are in important ways still a political issue. Whether this difference should be leveraged or ignored, I'm not sure. The language itself – as Rees constantly reminds us – does not help; she has to spend too much time in her introduction explaining that despite her title, she does in fact understand the difference between a vulva and a vagina in anatomical terms. Her word of choice in most of the text is cunt, which she hopes to restore to a purely denotative (she calls it ‘orthophemistic’) realm.

I feel differently; I think it's pretty cool having such a powerful word in your corner (pardon the image). I also can't help feeling that – though huge strides absolutely need to be taken, especially in certain parts of the world – still there are advantages to retaining a little taboo-ness when it comes to what's in your pants. It's possible to imagine being completely without issues or prejudices and seeing a vagina as neutrally as I see an elbow. But I'm pleased I don't. ( )

Friedman constructs a cultural history around a theme that allows him to explore European thought through an enlightening range of episodes and anecdotes from the classical period to the present. His study wends through painting and poetry, medieval theology and biblical translation, anatomical studies, racist propaganda and psychoanalysis, with nary a ribald wink or nudge.

What was for the Greeks and Romans a symbol of power and virility became an object of shame in the wake of Augustine’s Confessions. The theologian and logician Pierre Abélard is portrayed here as a kind of martyr, first challenging the Church’s demonization of the male organ, then having his own cut away as punishment. Early-modern medical science began to unravel some of the mysteries of reproduction just as European colonizers racialized the penis in order to explain the conquest and subjugation of indigenous peoples. Friedman uncovers the justificatory myth of Noah’s son Ham in medieval Jewish commentaries on the Old Testament, then traces the idea through to the fetishized photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. The penis again became idea and symbol in the phallocentric career of Sigmund Freud, who seems to have internalized the cruder bits of 19th c. European anti-Semitism. Towards the end of the book, and by no fault of Friedman’s, much of the fun and fascination in the subject has been replaced by obsessive politicizing, pathologizing, and pornification. Finally, and unfortunately, according to Friedman, the erection industry—in the form of implants, pills, etc—has reconfigured the organ, seemingly giving man more control over his own flesh-and-blood, but in the process diminishing its mystique. Whether the fate of the penis is to be lauded or lamented Friedman leaves to the reader. ( )

The first chapter of David M. Friedman’s book “A mind of its own: a cultural history of the penis” explains why it is so awkward to write a book review for it. According to St. Augustine the most evil thing a person, make that a person in “western civilization”, could have is a penis. Well, except for a vagina, unless your name is Mary and God himself certifies you a virgin. How do you write about, even speak of, the physical representation of original sin?

Somehow Friedman managed to write a very interesting book on the subject without suffering from mortal embarrassment or being struck by lightening. In the book he covers many topics, the cultural origins of circumcision, the practice of castration to preserve a singers voice, full frontal castration as practiced in some religious orders to preserve their members “purity” The substitutes that female members of those orders suffered are every bit as perverse. The perceived differences in human male’s endowments based on their ancestors continent of origin is discussed in the chapter“The Measuring Stick”. In “The Cigar” Sigmund Freud’s fixation on humanities fixation with having and or losing external genitalia are examined.

The book does present a predominantly male perspective of the topic but that is not its biggest weakness. Given what western civilization has been for the last two millennia I doubt you can find any topic where the predominance of written opinion is not from a male perspective. In chapter five, “The Battering Ram” women’s opinions and evolutionary biology take center stage.

The last chapter, “The Puncture Proof Balloon” looks at the long history of medical interventions to keep men’s little friends fully functioning. Some were particularly gruesome such as grafting sections of various large mammals testicles to a humans testicle. Only in the last few decades has there been real medicinal solutions to “ED”, erectile dysfunction, first injections into the base of the failing member, then a very well known pill.

Overall the book was extremely interesting. It did have one major failure. I am almost certain that the penis is found worldwide but the book only looked at “the West’s” cultural confusions. What about the rest of the world, China, the Middle East, Mongolia, Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas, and India? Is the culture that wrote the book on sex as socially dysfunctional over the penis as we are? Are any of them? ( )