[A Rapido TV production for World Without Walls , Channel 4, London. Produced by Peter Stuart. Directed by Peter Murphy. Aired March 1, 1994.]
After hours at a museum gallery of Greek and Roman sculpture. Next to a stately entryway of Doric pillars, we see a marble copy of Polycleitus’ Diadoumenos, a nude athlete tying on his headband. The camera pans down his body, from face to penis. To the brassy beat of Yma Sumac’s “Goomba Boomba,” a charwoman with mop and pail sashays through the gallery and flicks the statue’s genitals with three flourishes of her orange dust rag. Cut to stage set adorned with racks of church candles and a red carpet leading to an altar-like platform, above which hangs a neon-bright Pop Art painting of the abdomen and thighs of Michelangelo’s David. The background of the image is iridescent orange, the skin cobalt blue, the pubic hair green, and the penis hot-pink . CAMILLE PAGLIA , in black jacket and pants, strolls out from the shadow of a church window, steps up on the platform, and addresses the camera .
CAMILLE PAGLIA (imitating Nancy Kulp as schoolmarmish Miss Jane on The Beverly Hillbillies):
Camille Paglia: The penis. Should we keep it? Or should we cut it off and throw it away? In the thirty years since the sexual revolution, we have thought obsessively about sex but come to no answers to any important sexual question. The penis is shaping up to be the central metaphor of the gender crisis of the Nineties. In too much feminist thought of the last several decades, the penis has been defined as an instrument of intimidation, aggression, violation, and destruction. I think we’ve gotten to the point where this kind of reductive definition of male anatomy is proving unsatisfactory to women of the Nineties. It would be useful for us to go backwards in time and to review the way the penis has been symbolized through history.
Peter Webb: The phallus has had a very positive image, a very positive power in history and in prehistory, as far back as we go. And this has not in any way been demonstrably anti-women. But it has been pro . It’s been pro-fertility. It’s been a sort of talismanic image, an image to bring fertility, an image to assure good luck, an image to ward off the evil eye. And in this way, it’s had a strong role to play in all sorts of cultures that we can examine in history. Really, from prehistoric times right through. But I suppose the most interesting to evaluate is the world of Greece and Rome, where it’s quite clear that the phallus played a vital role in worship.
(Cut to a reconstruction of a priapic dance, circa 300 A.D. , from Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane. Ecstatically leaping acolytes with large phallic prostheses circle a writhing bald man in white body paint and red G-string, who obscenely laps his reddened tongue. Back to Paglia on the set.)
PAGLIA: The Greeks had a rather comical little god named Priapus, who stood for phallic erection. There was a priapic element to the behavior of Aristophanes’ comic actors on stage, some of whom had enormous leather leather penises attached to their bodies, with which they would hit each other (she demonstrates) and buffet each other about. It’s very similar to the “slapstick” of corn-media dell’arte and, later, vaudeville.
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