Showing posts with label priapus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label priapus. Show all posts

27 Jul 2013

Phallic Tenderness



In the Classical world, the preferred size of the penis was small and delicate. The god Priapus, with his grotesquely large and ever-erect member, was regarded with mirth, not envy, and, arguably, the modern obsession with size and the desire to attain a longer, thicker, harder penis in line with the pornographic ideal is simply another sign of barbarism.

Of course, we all like to feel a penis rise against us with "silent amazing force and assertion" and to quiver as it enters into our softly-opened bodies with strange and terrible potency; penetrating with "the dark thrust of peace and a ponderous, primordial tenderness, such as made the world". But, like Connie, so too do we cherish the post-coital penis as it withdraws and returns to its flaccid and rather frail condition, with bud-like beauty and reticence.
 
See: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (CUP, 1993), pp. 173, 174.