A Phallic Berlantian Mirage
Written in October 2024 for Dominic Pettman’s Eros class: Making of the Modern World (Shoutout to Dominic Pettman whose humor, kindness, and brilliance made that class one of my favorite classes of all time)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is filled with penises. Penises of all kinds.
^my own image made with AI. Notice the half leaf/half flaccid penis :)
There are the penises of Medieval Jesuses, African and Oceanic wooden ancestors, the occasional Hindu Shiva linga, and Egyptian hieroglyphs and the god Osiris [1].
But today, I want to direct our gaze toward the stony ghostlike figures erected most prominently in the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Museum-goers and art-lovers everywhere are fascinated by these penises, specifically, their size [2]. A quick google of “penises of Roman and Greek art” will rapidly lead to a plethora of articles reveling at their “smallness” which is sometimes, but not always, clarified as flaccid. The first suggested Search (The “People also ask” section…do they actually?), after googling this was: “Why do Greek and Roman statues have little willies?”
The real question, I think, is: Why would one expect these “willies” to be “big”, ie, erect?
In talking about this with my mom, she exclaimed “I’m always so surprised by just how contracted real life penises can be when cold or after activity. I don’t actually understand these statued penises as anything outside of the norm, though. Most penises are ‘small’ when flaccid.”
Because they are flaccid.
I set out, months ago now, to document each and every penis in the Met. That was the goal, though I quickly realized how outrageously ambitious this was. I barely documented even half of the penises in just two rooms that day [3]. I was inspired by Picasso’s Assholes to discover what this repeated gesture, this repeated looking and witnessing, would lead to. While Picasso’s Assholes [4] is playful, a codified comedic look at an often serious artist, my endeavor was a bit more studious. As a professional photographer and visual artist, I decided to document and record each penis with my camera. I also knew that photographing as a form of study, rather than as a way to share experience or represent a moment, would narrow and focus my gaze — a deepening of looking and remembering would occur. The images themselves I had, and still have, no real plan for.
As I stepped into the room, snacks in hand and friend in tow, I was reminded of the many conversations I’ve had with Millennial and Gen Z non-trans males as part of my gender queer research. I have learned that the first visual nude male most of these subjects remember encountering are in porn, generally digitally mediated, or, printed replications (occasionally the works themselves) of Greek and Roman statues. In reflecting on my own encounters with nudity, specifically masculine coded, I have a similar story. I remember being fascinated, driven by libidinal curiosity, and subsequent confusion, as I snuck repeated glances at the magnet my mom stuck on the fridge. It depicted Rodin’s The Kiss. Their embrace, their stony bodies, held me as tightly as they held each other. So many of our first encounters with nudity are the same.
I began my intellectually motivated documentational quest where mostly Hellenistic Greek and Roman art resides because I knew they never shied away from representing the penis (though non-representation is also interesting to me). There would be no delicately placed hands, floating fig leaves, or lightly draped fabric coyly hiding genitalia. I wanted to quickly penetrate these non-penetrative archives.
I meticulously circled each adorned pot, trying not to miss any minuscule nubs in the groins of running men, ferocious gods, or even the rarely penised chimeras [5]. I know that I must have missed some, there were simply too many.
A woman who noticed my task slyly said “that sphinx over there has something interesting.” I was excited. Did it have a penis? Rare. Sphinx’s almost always have vaginal genitalia. But no, “just,” a vagina. This, though, displays part of my curiosity in taking on this task. How would museum goers engage with my clear genitalia focus and intent? Would I feel embarrassed? Would they? Would my gaze change the pattern of their looking, would they look away and avert their eyes, or would they look closer? Inasmuch as I was asking questions about the attendee experience, I also asked questions like: How are penises depicted across time and geography? What are the contemporary interpretations, descriptions, and perspectives of these historical portrayals, symptomatic of socially and culturally?
There is a distinct contemporary preoccupation with size, particularly in how smaller, flaccid penises in Roman and Greek statues have been broadly interpreted as symbols of restraint, rationality, and the idealized masculine form in contrast to modern views on virility. Because we relate physical attributes as fragmented symbolisms of dominance, desirability, and difference, we misunderstand ancient aesthetics to reflect Phallic correlation to ideal masculinities.
Today, I will make a few rather bold claims in regard to the proliferated speculations of these ancient statued penises:
These statues, with “small willies,” do not reflect a historical reverence of the flaccid penis. They do not reflect a de-sexualized or sexualized portrayal via the penis. And neither, the flaccid or erect penis, are reflective of revered historical masculinity. Our assumption of these are rather reflective of our contemporary gaze, our narrative assumptions, from our own embodied gendered hegemonies. Not theirs.
Lauren Berlant offers some insight. “Men are also subordinated to phallic masculinity. At the same time that there seems to be conventional referential continuity between the symbolic and the fleshly sign, masculinity is constantly threatened by the fragility of their linkage….This suggests a painful contradiction within masculinity, for the very logic that authorizes the penis to be misrecognized as the Phallus or Law sentences men to experience anxieties of adequacy and dramas of failure. The price of privilege is the instability at its foundation” (pp. 56-57)[6].
Berlant expands upon Lacan’s descriptions of subconscious gendered embodiments. She points to the failure of the symbolic Phallus, often confused for the fleshly penis, to consistently or adequately reflect and be upheld by the fleshly material bodies that it represents. The link between symbol and flesh is brittle, shifting. The Symbol of the Phallus changes as gender drifts [footnote], as cultural expectations shift. She notes, as Lacan does, that this produces an immense anxiety of adequacy within the non-trans male to uphold Phallic, often masculinist, masculinities as correct “performance” is impossible to maintain.
It is this Lacanian anxiety, what we might also call patriarchal insecurity, which has led to the contemporary colloquial and academic consensus of the Greek and Roman statues’ “small penises,” and their theorized meanings.
In “When Shame and Masculinity Collude and Collide: Introduction” by Ernst van Alphen. Ernst states “But what characterizes the Greek and Roman traditions of the male nude is the penis is slightly reduced in size. This is of course a difficult issue, because of the underlying norm: what is the standard size of a penis? Unstable as penises are, opinions about what the standard size is can differ. But in art history the established idea is that classical penises are reduced in size. In general, that is correct, because in the tradition of Greek male nude impressively big penises do not exist in idealized depictions of men” (p. 37) [7]. I do not accept this. There is the occasional outlier that recognizes some of what I am about to say [8], but these are by far the outliers.
Is it really a difficult issue as van Alphen claims, except in the context of the anxious male [9] who unconsciously (or consciously) upholds masculinist, specifically Phallic, expectations? He even continues by recognizing “the penis is represented in the same casual way as knees, elbows, or noses.” He offers no support for his evidentiary claim for this size-related consensus except that it is an “established idea” and therefore is adopted. This consensus should not be given arbitrary merit, especially without further evidence and excavation. He (gender is notable here), as many, give in too easily to this canonical classical assumption especially when there is significant theoretical and statistical evidence that would point to differing conclusions.
Some of the reason(s) we are given for the “small, and smaller than average, flaccid penises” are: that the Romans and Greeks valued intellect and so excluded explicit sexual/sexualized references in revered, godlike or athletic, subjects, believing these to be in conflict [10]. These figures had transcended the banal libidinal desirous ways of being. Large penises are read to be considered “primitive” - this assumption is often rooted in a problematic racialization and reduction of hypersexualized Black bodies [11]. The statues, according to art historians, represent the ideal masculine form.
These conclusions assume a few “narrative norms.” The stony penises are “misrepresented” and misread “as the Phallus” as represented by the flaccid Phallus within an ideal form. I refer to the narrative norms mentioned by Lauren Berlant when expanding upon Lacan’s description of unconscious embodiments that “the censored material is written down in monuments like symptoms that represent on the body, in archives of memory and seemingly impersonal traces that take on uncanny value, like childhood memories, in the presumption of language, and in narrative norms. Masculinity in particular involves creating a kind of mirage…” (p 58).
Berlant speaks of the ways in which our celled, material, fleshly bodies absorb cultural and environmental data, and how this data is carried through our bodies onto the objects we interact with. So assumed are these informations and ways-of-being that we cannot see them. They become hegemonically assumed and thought. We see, hear, smell, taste all through the filter of the framed genders within the culture we inhabit.
Berlant refers to the AFK [12], or celled material body as carrying the data of our political/cultural/social/medial environments. In other words, the phenomenologies of perception (our interpretation of it, anyway) become embodied, living through our movements and thoughts. These smooth stony fleshly bodies were shaped by material fleshly bodies, and reshaped (often in cast-making), or re-cast by fleshly bodies. Kimberly Juanita Brown, in describing the Black Atlantic subject, though it’s beautiful phrasing extends to this as well, insightfully says “History is carved into the flesh of rock and concrete, forming a cast out of which the figure emerges repeatedly” [13]. To historical excavators, much of this is obvious. What can be less obvious is recognizing the hegemonic filters we use in viewing these objects as witnesses, examiners, and spectators.
Why are we so surprised to see a flaccid penis within our contemporary psyche?
Every day, as we walk to the train station, enter the platform, board the train, and walk to whatever coffee shop we work out of that day, we are surrounded by flaccidity. We cannot see this flaccidity, but it is there. These flaccid penises rub against boxers, pant legs, stick against testicles. They protrude from fleshly bodies, sometimes silhouetted through soft cotton pants, often hidden by thick pleated jeans. We go home and step into the bathroom to give our partner, who's just returned from an intensive bike ride, to give him a quick kiss in the shower. We see his penis, and it is (most often) flaccid.
It’s most common state is limp and resting. When I say “common” I refer to the state in which it inhabits the material world in a proportionate length of time. What is not common, is seeing this reflected in our visual psyche, unless one has a penis. A penised individual likely sees their own flaccid penis multiple times a day, sometimes seeing without seeing. Some may see them on their child as they change a diaper, in locker rooms as men change, or in bathrooms as folks stand to pee [14]. However, this is rarely visually represented outside of the AFK experience. I distinctly remember the scene in Perfect Days as the main character washes his body, surrounded by wrinkled and flaccid nude men. And many remember the “striking” moment when Jason Segal comedically whips his penis back and forth in Forgetting Sarah Marshall [15]. The most commonly viewed penis is, of course, erect and in porn.
Within the symbolism of the contemporary Phallus, and its erect visual circulation and proliferation, we forget the penis’ common flaccidity, we see the visual flaccid penis, and to many it says “I am small,” “I am not aroused,” “I am not sexy,” “I am not man enough,” and “I am not a man.” An erect penis, and specifically “large” ones, can say “I am confident,” “I am sexy,” “I am horny,” “I am powerful,” “I assert dominance,” and “I am MAN.” A “small” erect penis and a “small” flaccid penis, are seen as the lesser form of hegemonic heteronormative masculinity. Those reflecting on these Greek and Roman statues cannot unsee them as lesser, and so a large penis in these depictions is assumed a necessity for these sexy figures. To them, to portray smaller penises must be a censoring of eroticism. To them, a flaccid penis in these depictions therefore must represent a focus on intellect rather than lust and power. To them, it cannot say nothing. Culturally we cannot even see a flaccid penis without assuming there is something wrong or uncommon with it despite its rampant commonality.
However, these larger-than-life (well, human life anyway) statues are sexy and present a sexualized ideal, not an asexual one [16]. I was reminded of the sensuality mimicked by these statues on a bus ride between airport terminals. I gestured to my partner with an arm above my head, he laughed knowing this wordless gesture referred to his arms stretched above his head holding the rail. I referred to the endless magazine covers with men like Jacob Elordi [17] and Idris Elba holding their arms above their heads and on door frames in provocative, inviting manners. He knew I was silently calling him sexy.
These statue-makers reflect these sexual sentiments. These medusa-like monochromatic statues lounge casually, erotically on pedestals of stone, they hold arms above their heads, pulling stiff fabric around their heads, revealing muscular toned arms and torsos. Their oft unknown sculptors echo their own presumably libidinal desires with sanded silky skin and rippling marbled muscles. Some lean heavily on their hip, emphasizing the “V” of their pelvic bones. Hairless chests gleam under the museum’s skylights. Their torsos elongate and their gazes look straight ahead, ignoring me and passersby. They confidently disregard me [18]. Sometimes limbs are missing where time has aged these cast and re-cast bodies. But these statues, without a doubt, are sexy. With or without an erect penis.
Scholars, in fact, agree that these statues are sexy. But that it is a “non-explicit” or understated sexiness because of their flaccidity. The assumption that these statues are somehow "censoring" the penis, presenting it as flaccid to emphasize intellectualism or idealized masculinity, and anti-eroticism (some hypocrisy here), reveals more about our own contemporary anxieties and hyperfocus than it does about the cultures that created them. These ghostly stones are imprints and remnants of humans that once were. They grow like humanoid stalagmites from the ground, elevated so as to draw our eyes up. In many ways, these figures are like “archives of memory” represented on the body of stone. These statuesque simulations of the body mark the archives of and created by the makers, creating their own memorializations. These materially fleshly bodies (the artists and the cast-makers and all those in these processes) imbue/impose their expectations, their cultural assumptions, into its creation. It is for this reason that we so often look at objects to study a people, a time, a society. However, we presume that the symbolic Phallus was traced and rubbed upon the chiseled bodies of these statued beings by their fleshly makers and casters. We assume their creators deliberately made a statement about gender and power through the representation of the penis. We assume that the Berlantian “symptom” of the small penis reflects their gender culture. We presume that a small, flaccid penis must be a symbolic statement about intellect or virtue. This is a Berlantian mirage of the now, manufactured by our own contemporary Phalluses.
What is a “small” penis? What does “small” mean in the context of flaccidity?
Terracotta rim fragment of a kylix (drinking cup), Greek, Attic, mid-5th century BCE, On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 157
This question forces us to step back and reconsider: what is a small penis, really? Is its "smallness" merely a physical characteristic, or is it a metaphor constructed through layers of historical interpretation, influenced by how we view the body, sexuality, and power today? By asking this, we open up a broader dialogue about how cultural narratives shape our understanding of the body across different eras.
We need to revisit Ernst van Alphen. To claim these penises as noticeably flaccid, small, and potentially smaller than average “is of course a difficult issue, because of the underlying norm: what is the standard size of a penis?” [19]. Let’s pick this topic back up and re-examine the lens of contemporary biases.
Here’s what we do know about penis size:
Average penis size, flaccid and erect (which are not much correlated to each other in terms of size comparison), are incredibly variable and dependent on social, geographical, and environmental factors
Athletic activity and temperature and stress are some of many factors that render size even momentarily widely variable in the daily individuals life
When asked, most penised individuals report to believe their penis to be smaller than average
Most also notoriously self report their penis to be larger than the known average
Globally, no one has a materially accurate linguistic or literal understanding of penis size in any of its states
So not only is there the question of why we continue to fixate on the size of these statues' penises at all, more than their unusually non materially representative noses or hands [20], but also, why do we feel so intent on declaring its smallness and “smaller than average”ness when the average is unknown, and the proportions so close that we cannot be near certain.
What about the erect penis?
I don’t think we can talk about the flaccid penis during the Greek and Roman era without also looking at how, and in what contexts, the erect penis was visually exhibited. We see the erect penis in three contexts: depictions of actively occurring sex, ithyphallic representations of comedic nymphs etc, and, notably, on doorways, necklaces, and wind chimes as talismans and amulets of prosperity and good luck.
In the first context, the erect penis is simply recognized as an often active part of sex. Most often these depictions are painted on the sides of pots. The second depiction is something that is often noted as supportive of the erect penis as vulgar, anti-intellectual, foolish, violent, comedic [21]. However, there is a point that must be clarified. These penises, which are narratively stigmatized via the characters they inhabit, like those on Satyrs, are so large that they become grotesque or ridiculous. There is the exception of Priapus [22], a god of fertility. Unlike the flaccidity of the statues and runners on pots, there is no debate as to whether these penises could represent fleshly material erect penises of the time. The penises often exceed the size of the entirety of the body to which it is connected. Given the impossibility of these realities, it is not in debate, and one can reasonably conclude its moralized negative or humorous Phallic symbolism. The last example is something that is rarely looked at alongside these statues. These erect penises coexisted with these athletic monuments. The penises are contextualized in writing as talisman and omens of good fortune and prosperity, perhaps in reference to Priapus. The “normal” versus enlarged erect penis was not a sign of overt sexuality or intercourse or eros, but of prosperity. These depictions further contextualize the flaccid penis as neither sexual or asexual, simply as non-Phallic, in any regard (versus simply a “different type” of Phallicness that is prescribed to it).
Conclusion
In photographing the penises at the Met, I noticed this slippage in the continuity between the symbolic and the fleshly bodies of the penis, a dissonance that disrupts our understanding of what these statues represent. The fragility of our contemporary Phallus—rooted in masculinist anxieties about the physical size and state of the penis—blurs our ability to see the statues, rendering art historians and casual viewers alike blind to their own projections. This disconnection remains largely unacknowledged, and most continue to impose our present-day preoccupations onto these ghostly forms, presenting the flaccidity of the statues’ penises as intentional symbols of virtue. This act of projection exposes the insecurities of modern masculinity, where the symbolic Phallus holds disproportionate power over how we interpret the body. In doing this, we assume a specific kind of Phallicism—that is, we believe that the symbolic meaning we attach to the penis as Phallus in our culture must have existed in some way in theirs as well. This is a critical error.
Lauren Berlant's notes on Lacanian symbolisms sheds light on this phenomenon, highlighting the complex and discontinuous ways gender, especially masculinity, is inhabited, both historically and in contemporary culture. She articulates how these variable norms—constantly shifting and unstable—complicate any straightforward reading of gendered bodies. These statues, then, become ghostly archives not only of the cultures that produced them, but our reading of them archives our own. We look at these stony bodies and project our own troubled gendered navigation onto theirs.
What else will this photographic study of the penises at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveal?
footnotes.
[1] there are notably very few North American penile artworks or historical artifacts in and outside of the Met
[2] a few examples of countless such articles can be found:
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-ancient-greek-sculptures-small-penises
https://www.dw.com/en/why-do-ancient-statues-have-such-small-penises/a-65151780
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/79897/why-arent-classical-statues-very-well-endowed
More prominently:
Beard, Mary, and John Henderson. Classical Art: From Greece to Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Chrystal, Paul. In Bed with the Ancient Greeks. Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2016.
[3] I have not given up on this venture - but it will be after many more days to come
[4] Kyle, Jonas, Jake Shore, and Reilly Davidson. Picasso’s Assholes. Spoonbill Books, 2022.
[5] while chimeras in their earliest depictions are female/have vaginal genitalia, chimerical variations are sometimes penised
[6] Berlant, Lauren. Desire/Love. New York: Punctum Books, 2012.
[7] van Alphen, Ernst. "When Shame and Masculinity Collude and Collide: Introduction." In Shame! and Masculinity, edited by Ernst van Alphen, 1–14. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020.
[8] Rempelakos, L & Tsiamis, Costas & Poulakou-Rebelakou, Effie. Penile representations in ancient Greek art. Archivos espanoles de urologia. 66. 911-916, 2013. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259468154_Penile_representations_in_ancient_Greek_art
[9] here I use male to mean both trans and non-trans as these expectations carry into queer masculinities as well
[10] much of this is articulated in the audio guides and plaques themselves
[11] Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Holland, Sharon P. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
Willis, Deborah, and Carla Williams. The Black Male Body: A Photographic History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
[12] “AFK” refers to a term meaning “Away from keyboard.” It provides an alternate way of describing the material body that is not digital. It was created by Legacy Russell in response to the idea that digital bodies and lives are not “real.”
Russell, Legacy. Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London: Verso, 2020.
[13] Brown, Kimberly Juanita. The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
[14] though it is rude to be seen seeing
[15] after writing this, my TikTok fed me this: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTFV1oPpY/
[16] Barrow, Rosemary, and Michael Silk. Gender, Identity and the Body in Greek and Roman Sculpture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
van Alphen, Ernst. "When Shame and Masculinity Collude and Collide: Introduction." In Shame! and Masculinity, edited by Ernst van Alphen, 1–14. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020.
[17] just for fun: https://www.coupdemainmagazine.com/jacob-elordi/17517
[18] sexy
[19] van Alphen, Ernst. "When Shame and Masculinity Collude and Collide: Introduction." In Shame! and Masculinity, edited by Ernst van Alphen, 1–14. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2020.
[20] it is worth noting that there is also immense variation in nose and hand sizes, that are questionably materially reflective, ie, very little is exactly proportional whilst not being highly exaggerated
[21] Shaw, Carl. Satyric Play: The Evolution of Greek Comedy and Satyr Drama. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
[22] Rempelakos, L & Tsiamis, Costas & Poulakou-Rebelakou, Effie. Penile representations in ancient Greek art. Archivos espanoles de urologia. 66. 911-916, 2013.