First, might I profess with dismay that I do not know what it is like to be a man, nor will I ever fully understand life as a man. However, what I can contribute to the ever-topical discussion of masculinity is an ode to the penis and a push to embrace the body you’ve been given, all from the mind of a feminist.
 
‘Penis’, a small segment from Robert Horrocks’ book Masculinity in Crisis, delves into the relationship between men and their ‘rhythm sticks’, emphasising the need for self-acceptance and pride. Big-headed or big-shafted, curved or straight, men we’ve seen them all. And, with about 40% of the male population with penises that don’t always function the way they should, it’s about time someone gave the little-man a lot of praise.
 
 
“The penis is the source of a man’s greatest vulnerability, and his greatest feeling of power. It is a place from where he expresses love, hate, fear, tenderness, contempt, friendship, disgust, and also a place where he can become completely expressionless, without feeling. It is used as a battering ram against women; as a weapon of revenge; as an expression of love and adoration; it is also a little boy’s willy, a dick, a shlong, the python, prick, rhythm stick, ding-a-ling. 
It can be anything. We might say: the penis is the man. One cannot talk about penises separate from their owners, just as we cannot talk about ‘sexuality’ in abstract, or talk about ‘sexual problems’ separate from the problems that people have in relationships. 
So men feel about their penises as they feel about themselves: proud, shy, afraid, disgusted, ignorant, loving, hating, angry – the whole gamut of human feeling is potentially found between a man and his penis.
Sexually a penis enables a man to penetrate deeply into a woman (or a man) and caress her (him) there. Thus the penis in this respect is bound up with relating to others: it is a means of contact. But as a baby or a boy, the male finds the penis as a source of comfort for himself, maybe a substitute for the breast, something he can manipulate at will. He discovers masturbation, which again can mean so many things to different men- comfort, company, desolation, lust, fear, love.
Thus the penis is, as it were, poised between narcissism and altruism. It can be used to relate to oneself, or to others. Quite often these two directions get confused, and one hears a woman angrily accuse a man of masturbating inside her during sex. So one can go through the motions of relating sexually but in fact remain completely in a world of one’s own. In that world, the penis may loom large as a kind of fantasy friend, or lover, or mother or father.
The penis is also concerned with performance. It gets erect, remains erect during sexual intercourse and then subsides. But what anxiety is aroused in men about this! The erection becomes a fetish, that measures one’s manhood, virility, athleticism, or whatever. How afraid many men are not to have an erection, when in fact that often signifies something emotionally important: I don’t want to make love, I don’t want to relate to you, I feel afraid, I feel childlike, and so on.
‘Keep your pecker up’ men say to each other – reflecting the desperate need to keen the damn thing erect. Never mind if you feel depressed or sad or lonely, or bored or angry or uninterested – keep the flag flying, make the python do its tricks, hoist the top-sail, expand the gland- what a mythology surrounds penis performance! Mae West celebrated and mocked it in her famous gibe: ‘Is that a six-gun in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?’”. 
 
Roger Horrocks Penis (162 – 166).
 
There is something majestic about the penis; a mix of adoration, fear and fascination that accompanies it. Indeed, Roger Horrocks recounts his own phallic experiences. From school P.E days where he and his comrades were forced to swim naked, where they’d spend the full hour comparing the circumcised with the uncircumcised (which ‘ding-a-ling’ was superior?)…to discovering a freckle on the foreskin of his penis and deciding there and then it was cancer: Embrace death now and enjoy masturbation whilst the penis is still there? 
 
The penis is “a trail blazing-experience”, a source of ready-made comfort. Though, the difficulty comes from claiming the grandeur of the penis; the fear that this in itself is sexist. Ludicrous as it might be because the act of sex is inherently at its best when enjoyed by both the man and woman. A so-called ‘animal beauty’, a power that our civilisation unrightfully shuns. After all, the penis is inescapably animal, primitive. Think with your head all day and wake up early morning and it’s hard. I bet you’re unable to think your way out of that one! 
 
Men today need to reclaim this sense of beauty and power about the penis. Accept the animal qualities within us. Freud says we all yearn for the sheer animal side of being alive, so let’s reclaim it.
 
 

Natasha Bradley

RSC’s most recent production of Troilus and Cressida has some brilliant moments but remains disappointing overall.

The main challenge of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, in my opinion, is continuity. The end of the play contains a bizarre sequence of events that the director must portray with clarity, as the audience doesn’t usually have prior knowledge of these confusing scenes. Gregory Doran’s production fails to do this. Past productions have depicted Pandarus as a syphilitic drag queen (Ian Judge, 1996), or with a giant dildo prop (Wing-Davey, 1995), emphasising his sexual obsession to make sense his final speech about ‘bequeath[ing]’ venereal ‘diseases’ to the audience. Doran’s play does not make sense of this; we see a weak, tedious old man, lacking an understanding of personal space, rather than a seedy voyeur. Why then, does he suddenly appear on stage to close the play with a rash around his mouth suggesting some sort of venereal disease, talking in such bawdy language? While the odd shade of lipstick Oliver Ford Davies’ Pandarus wears throughout does raise eyebrows, there is nothing to suggest the character’s intensely sexual interest, and thus the play lacks coherence.

Such continuity is also lacking in Andy Apollo’s Achilles due to the presentation of homosexuality. Shakespeare makes the sexual element of Achilles and Pandarus’ relationship evident as he transforms the Greeks into anti-heroes. This pandered to the contemporary audience’s opinions, as Britain in the Renaissance period favoured the Trojan side of the war, and were, of course, homophobic. Doran’s choice to set the play in a post-apocalyptic era, which the RSC seems to be doing for a fair few of its plays recently, takes out the historic homophobic dimension. Since there are no significant explicit homophobic comments in the play, the only perspective we have of homosexuality is our own 21st Century view. Modern society has started to accept and praise LGBTQ+ individuals, but that means that the dislike Shakespeare intended audiences to hold towards Achilles because of his homosexual relationship is lost. Doran does nothing to compensate for this. The ending, again, makes little sense. Throughout the play we see an Achilles presented to us in a neutral light – there is nothing that glorifies him, but equally nothing that condemns him – and then we are suddenly presented with a weak Achilles, who contradicts our every expectation. His killing of Hector, which in the play-text takes on homosexual implications, falls flat. An uninformed audience member with a basic knowledge of Homer’s version of the Trojan war would likely question why the killing had changed. In Doran’s play, we see a dramatic shift in Achilles’ character because of Doran’s inability to handle the conflicting ideas about homosexuality.

That said, the performances of Adjoa Andoh (Ulysses), Gavin Fowler (Troilus), and Amber James (Cressida) must be praised. Doran should have edited the play more drastically, cutting out the scenes that fell flat because of jokes that belong solely in Shakespeare’s age, but the dynamic acting of Andoh and the chemistry of the lovers kept the performance alive. Evelyn Glennie’s beautiful, though at times intrusive, music also breathes life into the play. Charlotte Arrowsmith as Cassandra was also striking. The first deaf actor employed to perform with the RSC, she performed incredibly and added an extra dimension to the character. Cassandra, whose prophecies of destruction are dismissed because she is female, keeps miming after her maid has stopped interpreting for her; her warnings mean nothing to them. 

Jean Honoré Fragonard. 1732-1806. Paris. Le Verrou. vers 1777. Paris. Louvre. Photo: Flickr user jean louis mazieres.

De plus, une remarque que je m’étonne que vous n’ayez pas faite, c’est qu’il n’y a rien de si difficile en amour, que d’écrire ce qu’on ne sent pas. Je dis encore d’une façon vraisemblable : ce n’est pas qu’on ne se serve des mêmes mots, mais on ne les arrange pas de même, ou plutôt on les arrange, et cela suffit.  

So writes the Marquise de Merteuil to her rival the Vicomte de Valmont on the art of seduction in Pierre Choderos de Laclos’ libertine classic Liaisons Dangereuses. She is giving him a lecture on the composition of an effective love letter; one must let the disorder of passion colour the words on the page, a language which she poetically names l’éloquence de l’amour.

Published in 1782 this work dates from before the French Revolution, and it depicts an era when the aristocracy of the Saint-Germain des Près still tumbled around in bed blissfully unaware that their heads would roll only a decade later; silk was ripped and corsets snapped in candlelight as young ladies lost their honour to hungry gentlemen behind closed curtains in loves nests know as petites maisons. 

Now this quote is a fitting entry point for two reasons; firstly because it is representative of the époque in which the myth of French seduction was codified, and secondly because it highlights the performativity of persuasion.   

During the ancien régime a set of etiquette rules that set the standard for love courting between men and women developed; this was an aristocratic ideal known as la galanterie. It builds on the medieval paradigm of courtly love in which the patriarchal roles are reversed; the lover needs to submit to his lady’s desires, however capricious they may be. In practice this meant a conversational game of eloquent coquetterie, of insistence and decline, where true emotions and intentions were hidden behind an elegant façade of linguistic mastery.  

Even though la galanterie was criticised by leading enlightenment philosophers, notably Rousseau who claimed it decadent and deceitful in Émile ou l’éducation, in reality it was praxis especially among the fashionable literary salons in Paris. As these salons were held by women it was crucial for aspiring writers to master the art of seduction in order to secure a prosperous career. Rousseau himself, despite his misogynistic writings, was in fact quite the ladies-man, which is one reason for his success. Another notorious galant was Diderot, who on the subject of women wrote: 

Quand on écrit des femmes, il faut tremper sa plume dans l’arc-en-ciel et jeter sur sa ligne la poussière des ailes du papillon ; comme le petit chien du pèlerin, à chaque fois qu’on secoue la patte, il faut qu’il en tombe des perles. 

Viewing women as souls of delight and imagination Diderot adheres that one must speak not only to them, but also about them accordingly. Overtly sexist to a contemporary reader, but perhaps not yet dismissible in a time where sexting and nudes have replaced vernacular foreplay. It must also be noted that la galanterie is a model that due to its artistic prevalence has become part of the French cultural identity, and thus its traces can still be observed today. 

Petty examples include holding doors open and pulling out chairs. But on a more serious note the history of French seduction is one reason why the #metoo-movement has met greater opposition in France over anywhere else. Seduction in the framework of galanterie is a performance in which a “no” is often employed, or perceived, as a rhetorical device. Taking this into consideration it is easy to see that consent easily becomes ambiguous. 

Applying literary models to real life is therefore not advisable. To cite another example, consider poor Emma in Madame Bovary who commits suicide as a result of this sense of loss tied up with seduction. Nevertheless, is there anything harder than resisting temptation? The French model of seduction as outlined in the 18th century is extremely problematic for various reasons, yet it still constitutes an ideal not only in France but elsewhere too. Or if not wholly an ideal, the seductive myth at least prevails. Frightening and appealing at the same time, gallantry can’t seem to leave our collective fantasy. 

Perhaps I’m just too much of a femme facile, but being flattered in French has far more devastating consequences than English wit ever will- n’est-ce pas?

By Victor Schagerlund