foreigners were astonished to see that Athenian men, when young, habitually displayed their genitals in everyday life. While older men wore a tunic (
chiton
) under winter and summer cloaks, young men did not. And the light summer cloak (
chlamys
), which came only to the thigh, was frequently lifted by normal activity (not to mention a breeze). The Athenians did consider the head of the penis to be unseemly in public, which is why young men pulled their foreskin over it and tied it with a thong or held it closed with a circular clip called a
fibula
.
Small boys everywhere can be observed regularly delighting in pulling off their clothing to display their bud of flesh; and why not? asked the sexologist Alex Comfort, ‘after all [penises] are some of the best things we’ve got’. If mature penis-possessors have an innate desire to do as little boys do, social convention ensures they do not, as it ensures that they refrain from the overt tactility that was also a constant feature of their earliest years (professional footballers the exception to this rule). When drunk, however, some penis-possessors have a compulsion that is irresistible. The list is long and grows. In 1581 John Harris of Layer Breton, Essex, was taken to court because he ‘behaved himself very disorderly by putting forth his privities’; in 1590 Henry Abbot of Earls Colne, Essex, also appeared before the magistrates for undoing his breeches ‘in his drunkenness claiming that his privities or prick was longer by 4 inches than one Clerke there’. In the following century Pepys recorded the trial of Sir Charles Dydley for debauchery after he had appeared drunk and naked in daylight on the balcony of a brothel,
Acting all postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined . . . saying that here he hath to sell such a powder as should make all the cunts in town run after him . . . And that being done he took a glass of wine, washed his prick in it and then drank it off: and then took another and drank the King’s health.
In our own time, the constantly inebriated actor Oliver Reed, who displayed his ‘wand of lust’ (which in moments of sobriety he admitted was nothing out of the ordinary) in bars, on planes, at parties and on television and film sets, once did so to a woman reporter who was interviewing him. In reply to her scornful: ‘Is that it?’ he said, ‘Madam, if I’d pulled it out in its entirety I’d have knocked your hat off.’ On another occasion when he exposed himself in a Caribbean bar the locals took the tattoo of an eagle’s claws on his penis for a voodoo sign and he was forced to flee.
Men with a penis of considerable size don’t need their inhibitions loosened by alcohol to make the fact known or to demonstrate the evidence at the drop of a trouser. James Boswell, the to-be biographer of Samuel Johnson, in London from Edinburgh for the first time in 1762 and ‘really unhappy for want of women’, picked up a girl in the Strand and took her into a dark courtyard with the intention of enjoying her ‘in armour’ (he feared the pox). But neither he nor the girl had a sheath so they only toyed with each other and in his journal Boswell recorded, ‘She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak.’ Prince Grigori Alexsandrovich Potemkin, the outstanding eighteenth-century Russian statesman and lover of the Empress Catherine, used to stride through the Winter Palace naked beneath his unbuttoned Turkish dressing gown, demonstrating that his reputation was not exaggerated; the priapic Russian holy man Grigori Rasputin, once accused in a packed Moscow restaurant of not being who he claimed to be, said ‘I will prove who I am’ and did – another whose reputation went before him. 7
Eric Gill, the twentieth-century artist/sculptor and another journal keeper, like Boswell recorded a prostitute’s comment about his size – in her case because ‘it was too big and hurt her’.
chiton
) under winter and summer cloaks, young men did not. And the light summer cloak (
chlamys
), which came only to the thigh, was frequently lifted by normal activity (not to mention a breeze). The Athenians did consider the head of the penis to be unseemly in public, which is why young men pulled their foreskin over it and tied it with a thong or held it closed with a circular clip called a
fibula
.
Small boys everywhere can be observed regularly delighting in pulling off their clothing to display their bud of flesh; and why not? asked the sexologist Alex Comfort, ‘after all [penises] are some of the best things we’ve got’. If mature penis-possessors have an innate desire to do as little boys do, social convention ensures they do not, as it ensures that they refrain from the overt tactility that was also a constant feature of their earliest years (professional footballers the exception to this rule). When drunk, however, some penis-possessors have a compulsion that is irresistible. The list is long and grows. In 1581 John Harris of Layer Breton, Essex, was taken to court because he ‘behaved himself very disorderly by putting forth his privities’; in 1590 Henry Abbot of Earls Colne, Essex, also appeared before the magistrates for undoing his breeches ‘in his drunkenness claiming that his privities or prick was longer by 4 inches than one Clerke there’. In the following century Pepys recorded the trial of Sir Charles Dydley for debauchery after he had appeared drunk and naked in daylight on the balcony of a brothel,
Acting all postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined . . . saying that here he hath to sell such a powder as should make all the cunts in town run after him . . . And that being done he took a glass of wine, washed his prick in it and then drank it off: and then took another and drank the King’s health.
In our own time, the constantly inebriated actor Oliver Reed, who displayed his ‘wand of lust’ (which in moments of sobriety he admitted was nothing out of the ordinary) in bars, on planes, at parties and on television and film sets, once did so to a woman reporter who was interviewing him. In reply to her scornful: ‘Is that it?’ he said, ‘Madam, if I’d pulled it out in its entirety I’d have knocked your hat off.’ On another occasion when he exposed himself in a Caribbean bar the locals took the tattoo of an eagle’s claws on his penis for a voodoo sign and he was forced to flee.
Men with a penis of considerable size don’t need their inhibitions loosened by alcohol to make the fact known or to demonstrate the evidence at the drop of a trouser. James Boswell, the to-be biographer of Samuel Johnson, in London from Edinburgh for the first time in 1762 and ‘really unhappy for want of women’, picked up a girl in the Strand and took her into a dark courtyard with the intention of enjoying her ‘in armour’ (he feared the pox). But neither he nor the girl had a sheath so they only toyed with each other and in his journal Boswell recorded, ‘She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak.’ Prince Grigori Alexsandrovich Potemkin, the outstanding eighteenth-century Russian statesman and lover of the Empress Catherine, used to stride through the Winter Palace naked beneath his unbuttoned Turkish dressing gown, demonstrating that his reputation was not exaggerated; the priapic Russian holy man Grigori Rasputin, once accused in a packed Moscow restaurant of not being who he claimed to be, said ‘I will prove who I am’ and did – another whose reputation went before him. 7
Eric Gill, the twentieth-century artist/sculptor and another journal keeper, like Boswell recorded a prostitute’s comment about his size – in her case because ‘it was too big and hurt her’.
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