May 29, 2007

Fascinating Stuff

(David - photo by Richard Carter)

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.

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