In case you wonder how I spend my evenings…

Revealing Men’s Bodies Edited by Nancy Tuana, William Cowling, Maurice Hamington, Greg Johnson, and Terrance MacMullan, published in 2002 by Indiana Press.

...the first scholarly collection that directly confronts male lived experience. ... Missing from the literature, however, is a sustained analysis of the phenomenology of male gendered bodies. Revealing Male Bodies addresses this omission by examining how male bodies are physically and experientially constituted by the economic, theoretical, and social practices in which men are immersed.

It’s a wicked fascinating series of essays based mainly on the works of Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Lacan. Most of the editors were men enrolled in a post-graduate women’s studies program at the University of Oregon.

I don’t know if I’ll post anything directly about the book but chances are the collected essays will color my writing. Merleau-Ponty, with whom I wasn’t familar, sounds particularly interesting. He seems to have argued against the Cartesian idea of the separation of the body from consciousness. This seems like a nice antedote both to the Jehova/Yaweh/Allah idea of the body as corrupt, on the one hand, and the Gnostic idea that we can escape our bodies to reveal underlying realities. I think this has particular bearing on what it means to experience small-L lust, subspace, and other sexual states. We’ll see though.

What I’m really interested in, however, are the entries on men’s and women’s perception of men’s bodies as corporeal objects. One interesting point that I must have overlooked when I was reading Freud years ago, is the generally accepted philosophical idea that “the phallus” is something distinct from “the penis.” I get it, though I’d have to get back to you if you wanted me to put it in a nutshell. I’ll just add that, based on what I’ve read so far, in addition to the phallus (a power symbol) and the penis (an occasionally impolite reproductive organ) I’d want to add “the cock” as an object of a partner’s sexual desire. I think that last bit is important because neither the scepter-like phallus or the thrusting and sometimes intrusive “you gotta help me out here” penis embodies the idea that men also have an organ that can caress and be caressed. Since of the most popular euphemisms “cock” has the fewest negative connotations (at least in sex-blogging circles) I’m going to try to use that term for this overlooked dimension of male sexuality.

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Woof! I was really just going to make this a bare list of the books I’m trying to read right now. I’ll mention in passing that the other books sitting next to me at the moment include The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality by Edmund Leites, Easton & Liszt’s The Ethical Slut, Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors, Schnarch’s Passionate Marriage, and Katie & Mitchell’s Loving What Is.