Writing on cocks
Some coral I found, photographed and left at the beach in Anilao, Philippines.
Every New Year’s Day, some fun friends of mine host a cocktail-making competition party. It’s a casual, funny, and joie de vivre occasion in a suburban backyard. Rounds of stunning drinks circulate all day long. There are dogs. A few hangovers. A BBQ. Dips. Cheezels. The pool.
It is also highly competitive.
I’m quite insecure and clueless when it comes to making impressive food and drinks for others (I’d much rather throw a party for 80 people than cook for six at my place). So, to stand even a remote chance of winning, the times that I have gone, I’ve taken a more conceptual approach.
One year, I tried every cocktail and got completely drunk. Andy made one particularly strong drink, which kept me pretty pissed as I continued to move through sampling the others. This year, a bit worn out from December partying and wary of getting too drunk, I decided to make a mocktail (big mistake—people want alcohol) and serve it with “cock-tales”—little scrolls with stories about cocks. In the lead-up to the soirée, I tracked down blue spirulina for my drink (another mistake as I don’t think people like consuming blue) and researched what writers have said about cocks over the centuries.
After battling through the porn, I was quite surprised at how little came up in my online searches.
I tried all sorts of iterations of “writers on dicks,” “great quotes on the penis,” “cock quotes,” etc., but didn’t find much. Google Scholar was barren. For example, “the penis in literature” produced research on metastatic tumours of the penis, fractures of the penis, and the effect of penis size on partner satisfaction. (If you are wondering, the didn’t find an answer due to the “inadequacies of the existing studies”.)
“Penis in poetry” was more promising: a book on the history of the penis, scholarship on the penis poetry of Lorna Crozier, and an essay by Zairong Xiang titled “We Need to Talk About the Penis”, which proposed, “The penis, like the vagina and the anus, is but another orifice among other more visible bodily openings.”
Anyway, even though a fascinating rabbit hole of deep penis thinking loomed, I resisted and stuck to researching what authors had to say.
My blue ocktail that didn’t go down so well.
Over a few hours, I eventually patched together passages, quotes, and citations, which I printed out. Each quote was wrapped with a bow, and when someone had their blue drink, they also got a cock-tale. Even though I only got one vote at the party—a blue mocktail couldn’t compete with tropical ice blocks and one served in a sawn-off VB tin—I was pretty happy with all the writing I had found on cocks.
Thus, I present this list for anyone interested in how some writers have mused on cocks, penises, and dicks over the past 2000 years. Feel free to send any new additions!
When you got right down to it, my dick was the one organ that hadn’t presented itself to my consciousness through pain, only pleasure. Modest but robust, it had always served me faithfully. Or, you could argue, I had served it – if so, its yoke had been easy. It never gave me orders. It sometimes encouraged me to get out more, but it encouraged me humbly, without bitterness or anger. This past evening, I knew, it had interceded on Myriam’s behalf. It had always enjoyed good relations with Myriam, Myriam had always treated it with affection and respect, and this had given me an enormous amount of pleasure. And sources of pleasure were hard to come by. In the end, my dick was all I had.
Michel Houellebecq, Submission (2015)
Our penises flop up and down, and then as we pick up speed, slap left to right, back and forth—who would have thought left to right? The pain! People should not do this. Penises were not built for running.”
—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000).
She drew somewhat aside, examining his body, exploring it with her hand, fondling his penis. "How strange a man is. Poor limp helpless little thing, what good are you now?"
—EDWARD ABBEY, BLACK SUN (1971)
A cock wants a hole.
― Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau (2015)
A Roman brothel door sign from Pompeii.