Status Updates From A History of Virility (Euro...

I've been approved for an ARC provided by NetGalley! I'm so happy right now! :D
A huge thanks to Warwick for recommending this book. Very excited to dive into it.

Louise Bourgeoise, Fillette, 1968. ‘The artist intended to express in this work her affection for male fragility. It is difficult, however, not to discern a certain misandry in the castrated, skinned, suspended phallus…’ Well. I don't know.

Dictateur sportif! Mussolini in Vu, January 1937, and Putin in the Monde magazine, January 2014.

Recruitment poster by Howard Chandler Christy, 1918. Now discussing virility and the requirement to get yourself killed.

Otto Dix, The Match Seller, 1920. The First World War as the event that ‘devirilizes’ the warrior stereotype built up over the past century of European militarisation – the veteran here blind, limbless, being urinated on by a dog in the street, ‘a piece of refuse left by the conflict and the defeat’.

‘A matter of dread’: the dangers of onanism

‘[Alfred de] Vigny dares to put his virility more clearly on display in his correspondence. He writes to Marie Dorval that he gets an uncontrollable erection just from thinking of her body…At the end, he cums on the letter he is writing to her and transcribes in a breathless, disjointed language the emotions he is feeling amidst the spasms, to the point of not being able to see straight.’

‘When a man says to a woman, “I love you,” he means, and she understands him perfectly to be saying, “I'm hard as a rock, I have a liter of sperm in my balls and I'm dying to discharge it into your cunt.”’ —Alfred Delvau in 1864 on different approaches to romantic relationships…

‘The cock [vit] comes in the narrator's vision [vue] and ensures her life [vie].’

Deep into some close reading of 18th century libertine fiction now. This book is Francocentric but wonderfully rich.

“…there is no stand-alone portrait in the early modern period, so far as we know, of a father with his daughter. The world of men and that of women are rigorously separated…”

On to art history now. Sex in early-modern art always showed the man as initiator: "the man governs the position of the woman […] he presses down on her with his weight".


(Rembrandt, The French Bed, 1646)

The Nordic god Frô or Freyr was originally depicted as ithyphallic:



…but by the middle ages the cock was changed to a long beard:

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“…in the history of culinary arts the fork was not used by men in Europe until the eighteenth century because of its supposed lack of virility.”

“The punishment meted out to adulterous men—epilation and the insertion of a horseradish into the anus, in addition to the loss of civil rights—shows that they are grouped together with…women, not for their sexual comportment but because they prove their inability to control desire…adultery testifies to their incapacity to conduct themselves as men…”

“The texts that propose masculine superiority are devoted much more to denigrating the feminine than to exalting masculinity […] the denigrating attitude toward women turns out to be easier to hold and to develop than the construction of a model of virility based on positive masculine values.” [As can be quickly demonstrated by perusing any "men's rights" website or discussion forum]

Aristophanes: “When a boy oiled himself, he'd never rub his body below his navel and so his balls would glisten with a soft, cool dew, much like the skin of a quince.” Thanks for that, Aristophanes.