O Mundo de Claudia: Fascinating Stuff

May 29, 2007

Fascinating Stuff

In the domain of pleasures, for instance, the longer prepuce often serves as the object of erotic interest and as a signifier of the sexually attractive male, as demonstrated by the following ribald passage from the Lexiphanes of Lucian:

"Surely," I said, "you don't mean that notable Dion, that lusty, low-scrotumed, cuntish, and mastic-chewing youth who masturbates and gropes whenever he sees someone with a large penis [πεωδη] and a long prepuce [ποσθωνα]?"

Lucian is not satirizing the fact that a long prepuce should function as the visual cue that triggers Dion's erotic responses. On the contrary, he is satirizing Dion's general lack of decorum and self-control in the face of such self-evident visual stimulants. The desirability of the long prepuce, hence, remains beyond question.

The eroticization of the prepuce is also evident in the Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes, where the lusty father-in-law, pressing to his face a garment owned and worn by the young and handsome poet Agathon, exclaims: "By Aphrodite, this has a pleasant smell of [a little] prepuce [ποσθη]!" The diminutive posthion (ποσθιον), as opposed to the standard word posthe (ποσθη), is most likely used here as a term of endearment.

-- Frederick M. Hodges, The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome: Male Genital Aesthetics
and Their Relation to Lipodermos, Circumcision, Foreskin Restoration, and the Kynodesme (in the The Bulletin of the History of Medicine)

The most erudite piece I have ever read on such an entertaining subject.

Posted by claudia

Comments

>> an entertaining subject < Thanks. I enjoyed this. Foreskin Restoration is entertaining unless you're the one doing it. Then it's just a lot of drudgery to undo something that could have so easily been left undone in the first place. HIS body, HIS decision.

Posted by Ron Low at May 30, 2007 01:24 PM

Ahem. The entertaining subject wasn't exactly the foreskin restoration - nudge, nudge, wink, wink -...that sounds kind of gruesome, actually.

Posted by claudia at May 30, 2007 05:51 PM

i'd like to have a witty latin motto tattooed on mine ... but what ? ... and which way up ?

Posted by tristan at May 31, 2007 05:31 PM

Too small.

Posted by HF at June 2, 2007 08:42 PM

Tristan: "Age. Fac ut gaudeam." Around.
HF: I couldn't find Goliath's.

Posted by claudia at June 2, 2007 09:09 PM

What... er... exactly do you find the most entertaining about this subject? :)

Posted by alkam at June 4, 2007 12:29 AM