Warwick’s Reviews > A History of Virility > Status Update

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.

‘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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