What made the penis such a metaphorically preeminent and culturally problematized physical site? For one thing, the yard was the seat of pleasure whose sensitivity made it the exterior part most experientially representative of internal reproductive physiology. Visually the penis was also a dramatic physical feature of the loins, capable of size-change, urination, and ejaculation. It was popularly viewed as the most active genital part and thus the vagaries of its condition and multiple function made it a particularly convenient vehicle for a variety of symbolic registers, despite the elaboration of the role of testes, glands, fluid systems, and micro-vessels provided by the physiologists. Moreover, the glans was understood as having a high proportion of extremely sensitive nerves, and the heightened responsiveness to stimulation helped to make the connection of the yard to the nervous system and brain a relatively easy matter.53 The ability of the limp penis to become erect could easily be metaphorized, with successful or unsuccessful tumescence having obvious implications for the male’s status within psycho-sexual, social, political, or literary contexts, as well as for the plight of male desire itself. Its diseases, too—chancres, lues, gleets, stranguries, priapisms—were easily converted into social and moral tokens, evidence of the failure of masculine will, of social or political immorality, or even of a national decline.54 Of the external organs of generation, the yard appeared to have the most complex role—and thus the greatest range for metaphorical use—and in non-medical discourses it was the penis which typically represented the reproductive system as a whole in the genitalia-mind correspondences.
To expand our answers to why the penis became so prominent a sign we must also investigate the influence of larger cultural contexts, ranging from the history of masculinity and the emergence of pornography, to legal proceedings and literary practices, and even to political and nationalistic currents. If one were to search for some master category which explained the reasons of such a convergence, one might point to the well-known historical shifting through the seventeenth century from notions of the individual as an integrated part of an organic cosmos governed by God’s will to a self increasingly defined by inner physiological and external material conditions within a mechanized cosmos. In this context of paradigmatic change, one can view the proliferation of the yard-male identity equation as a specific version of the newly quantifiable self subject to forms of mechanical measurement.
And there were other macro contexts of historical change which contributed to this convergence. For instance, the male body was being culturally repositioned as a symbolic entity in response to large-scale social shifts, with the result that the reproductively potent penis became one symbol by which several value-systems would be defined. As Michael McKeon has argued, a significant feature of attacks on aristocratic ideology through the eighteenth century was the dismantling of the notion that birth determined worth, “that honor is biologically inherited.” The dynamics of what McKeon calls “a dissection of the cadaver of male aristocracy” included three relocations relevant to my discussion: “honor” was increasingly lodged in the idea of the domestic female; the perceived sterility and effete corruption of the male aristocrat “was reembodied in the effeminate nonmale, the ‘unreproductive’ sodomite”; personal worth and internal value would now be found in the sentimental man of public virtue, “defined by his economic activity, his occupational status, and his heterosexuality.”55 To these careful assessments I would add that if an eighteenth-century norm of masculinity depended increasingly on differentiating the effete sterility of aristocrat or molly from the heterosexual male within the family unit, then one of the governing bodily signs of this new male was the reproductively potent penis which authenticated social and sexual norms at which the sodomitical aristocrat either failed or transgressed. A biological essentialism, in other words, which had once propped up an aristocratic hierarchy of worth and honor, was now rewritten as a gendered distinction among kinds of males, whose heterosexual phallicism was central to a definition of the “normal” self.56
The penis could define male identity in other ways, as well, with a non-reproductive sexual competence becoming a basic measure of a man’s personality. Leo Braudy has approached late seventeenth-century premature ejaculation poems in this way, suggesting that the period’s near obsession with the idea of impotence represents “one of the earliest modern examples of the ambiguous relation between the male sexual body and the male sense of personal identity that will become one of the main themes of writing in western literature.” The specific significance of a poem such as Rochester’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” he writes, is that “the man has become the prick,” and the larger historical import of Rochester’s work as a whole is that it “helps mark a historical moment in which masculinity was becoming not the God-given portion of every male but an aspect of character primarily defined by sexual accomplishment and performance, constantly needing to be reattained.”57 While Braudy does not explore other discourses in which man-as-penis becomes a more common trope, he is right in marking this literary fashion as a historical example of new ways by which maleness would be essentialized. One might add that within the empirical culture of the new science, the medicalization of sexuality made such quantitative appreciations almost predictable. In the hands of De Graaf and other anatomists, the organs of generation and coition received the kind of empirical dissecting, inflating, mapping, and measuring never before so anatomically precise; it is therefore not surprising to discover that in a culture for which “sexuality” had been reified as a category, the quantitative and mechanical approaches of human biology would support a vocabulary of size, prowess, frequency, and potency.58
The proliferation of the penis as public subject appears in some unlikely places, as well, informing aspects of eighteenth-century English nationalism which (among other strategies) used the sexually potent English penis to valorize a national identity, morality, and even a made-in-Britain aesthetic sensibility. In writing of Fielding and popular Italian castrati such as Farinelli, Jill Campbell has examined the ways in which the castrato’s testicular loss was viewed in general as a phallic deficiency, which in turn “provided an occasion to isolate, and to literalize, to make explicit, the cultural significances of the phallus itself: in considering the nature of the castrato’s loss, the satirists at times assume the phallus to be the guarantor of everything from moral discourse to English currency to English-ness.”59 Moreover, theatrical instances of the erect, limp, or missing penis—as it is figured in Restoration stage-rakes and eunuchs—has also been explained as the metaphorical centering of political and gender anxieties following the Civil War, particularly as these upheavals might have produced a so-called “crisis” in masculinity.60
The symbolic function of the male organs of generation, and the yard in particular, can also be understood in relation to pornography and the libertine quality of Charles II’s court. As a relatively new and subversive genre initially combining political and religious satire with the more intimate narrative potential of the novel, pornography increasingly turned away from its satirical ethos toward the narrower domain of private sexual titillation in which pornographers sought for ways to raise the yards of their male readers, thus linking the imaginative act more intimately with a phallic response. Samuel Pepys would privately masturbate during his reading of L’Escole des Filles, writing in code that the salacious descriptions “did hazer my prick para stand all the while, and una vez decharger.”61 Seed and testicles do not disappear in the sexual configurations of pornography, but it is the phallus—both as the sought-after object of many erotic episodes, as well as the masturbated penis of the reader—that is privileged. The early modern “invention of pornography,” to use Lynn Hunt’s phrase, can thus be viewed as a new literary or subliterary genre devoted almost exclusively to stimulating the nervous connections between men’s brains and their pricks, although matters are somewhat more complicated than this, as we will see.
Older formulations of the penis as power, trophy, or political might can also be found in notorious anecdotes about the libertine aggression of rakes such as Rochester, or in the publicly discussed royal pintle of Charles II, whose monarchy was often figured as an endless swiving, as in Rochester’s cheeky poem, “On King Charles”: “His sceptre and his prick are of a length; / And she