Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Annals of phallicity: an elegant maypole (a week after May Day) and very big naval guns:

Two very different phallic images.

The maypole appears here without dancers or flowers or any other accompaniments — just the pole and the ribbons (in pastel colors). The origins and meanings of the maypole are much debated, but it certainly can serve as a phallic symbol.

The big guns are in half of a photograph from Kevin Bentley’s Sailor: Vintage Photos of a Masculine Icon (2000), a collection of images assembled from auctions, estate sales, antique shops, flea markets, and the like. (The left half of the photo, not reproduced here, has a third gun with a sailor in it.) Sailors posing with their ships’ guns are a common theme from wartime. As I said in an earlier posting on phallicity,

The association between men’s weaponry and their masculinity, via their penises, is subliminal, but still potent (perhaps laughably potent) in images like this.

This entry was posted on May 8, 2011 at 6:41 am and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.