Gerhard’s Reviews > Phallos: Enhanced and Revised Edition > Status Update

... Delany’s interest in what one might call the beastliness of human sexuality, the ways that our sexual desires and practices represent not only our need for affection and companionship but also an unquenchable fascination with violence and degradation.

“The social sharing of pleasure should bring those who indulge it closer,” Neoptolomus tells Nivek and Osudh, as they walk back from the villa’s gate, “and not encourage the arrogance and thoughtlessness already wedged between the classes — the fear of the power of the other, the fear of the phallos.”

Over the intervening years, however, Otho has learned all of Fronin’s tricks — and then some. Neoptolomus has set aside a chamber in the barn, to which he, Nivek, Otho, Flavian, and a number of the older men retire — as well as three of the wilder young ones — along with a goat, four dogs, and a donkey.

Standing on the stones, Neoptolomus realizes: power itself is fundamentally phallic, in that it is a consensus-illusion that stands in for a material strength, many times not there.

“Oh, he is a terrible god, with spined wings, one foot human, one clawed like a carrion bird, one hard hand of a huge workman and one with a dragon’s talons. His head has horns; his maw holds the tusks of a demon. A god of fertility, death, construction, and abundance, he is also a god of lust.”