(Treat the title as a warning — or as an invitation, whichever suits you.)
Yesterday, the posting “He said “prickles””, on prick, prickle, dick, prickly, and pickle (with notes on pickles as phallic symbols) and various combinations of these words, including prickle as a portmanteau of prick and pickle. To which Chris Hansen commented:
I can’t tell whether you’ve ever referred to a work of art I remember seeing but can’t locate online. It was a pickle jar filled with penises, and it was named “Prickles” There was vinegar in it too.
Well, yes and no. I’ve posted on an artwork of this description, but it wasn’t entitled Prickles (though it could have been).
That will take me to Peter Piper, and also to actual pickled penises.
The artwork in question, #7 in my 2/19/17 posting “Art of the penis”:
(#1) Mary Ellen Croteau’s Men I Have Known (1991), in the Latex Fantasies series
[A digression on the artist. From her website (Mary Ellen Croteau: artist and agitator):
an artist whose work directly addresses the absurdities of social norms, and lays bare the underlying bias and sexist assumptions on which our culture is constructed. She currently works with non-recycled plastic waste, in an effort to demonstrate the huge amounts of trash we are consuming and sending into the environment.
She lives and works in Chicago, IL.
(#2) CLOSE is a large self-portrait made of 7000+ plastic bottle caps. It took 7 months to build, and two years to collect enough caps. I am currently working on a series of large ecological disasters, also made of bottle caps.
[Also] a collection of Latex Fantasies, prototypes of consumer items I would like to see produced, such as a jar of pickled penises titled Men I Have Known, a big-game trophy titled Homo Erectus [an erect penis mounted as a trophy], a string of Party Lights, and a cigar box full of penises with the label It’s a Boy!
(#3) Dickhead Bobble, from Latex Fantasies
There is also a selection of jock straps titled Slight Alterations, modeled on women’s undergarments, which have been altered to fit the male anatomy. The set includes padded, underwire, sexy thong and tummy control models. They come in various sizes, from A to DD cups.
End of digression.]
Peter Piper. A famous tongue twister that is phallically overloaded: it uses phallic peter, skirts pecker and prick, and of course is about pickled peppers (chili peppers being, like pickles — pickled cucumbers — phallic symbols):
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked.
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?
Pickled pricks lurk in the background.
My variant:
Peter Pecker pricked a pack of pickled peepees
Pickling real pricks. The first story has been covered in many media outlets; here’s the version on the Vice website on 9/1/10 (Vice is an originally Canadian print magazine focused on arts, culture, and news, specializing on topics not covered by mainstream media), “The world’s biggest collection of pickled dicks”:
When I asked Vice if they’d give me some money to hire a car so I could drive nine hours north of Reykjavik to meet a man living in a fishing hamlet near the tip of the Arctic Circle who keeps the largest collection of preserved penises in the world, they frowned. Apparently they’re not a chauffeur service here to provide Icelandic dick tours. But I knew the true value of a room full of pickled schlongs to the curious and worldly Vice reader, so I decided to hitchhike. It was worth it if only for the fact I now know what happens when a whale gets a boner.
… Sigurdur Hjartarson, aka The Penis Man. He opened up his collection of bell-poles, wangs, longfellows, and dinks in Husavik in 2004 after retiring as a teacher in Reykjavik
… He’s got a grand total of 273 specimens from 92 species in his collection, which represent every mammal in Iceland and a handful of samples imported (sometimes illegally) from abroad. Sigurdur is currently working on obtaining a human cock [since supplied, in 2011] The place is also full of genital paraphernalia and a selection of members “preserved” from corpses of mythical characters like the merman.
A whimsical passion. But then on the horrific side, this story on the Queerty site, “Man Arrested After Jars and Jars Of Human Penises Discovered In His Apartment” by Graham Gremore on 8/16/14:
Brace yourself because this story is truly horrifying.
A 52-year-old man nicknamed the “Penis Collector” has been arrested by police in Slavonski Brod, a small city in eastern Croatia, on suspicion of possessing a collection of human body organs.
The man was apprehended earlier this week. When authorities entered his apartment they found jars and jars of human penises soaking in formaldehyde.
According to sources, the man, whose name has not been released, works as a registered nurse at a city hospital. He has no criminal record and has been described by some as “a family man,” though others say he is an alcoholic who often showed up to work drunk.
The penises seem to have been taken from the hospital’s morgue.
Ok, there are pickled pricks and then there are pickled pricks.
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