Joe Ciccone - The ElectroLounge

22
their bulging dicks. At best, they’re womanizers: “the philandering Pierre” in one book, Pronek
the Conqueror in another, the fornicator Pryanishnikov in Tolstoy’s story “The Devil.”
If they’re not womanizers, sexual P men are out-and-out perverts like polygamists,
prowlers, peeping Toms, pederasts, and pedophiles. Or they’re passive gay men: poofs, ponces, punks,
pansies, formerly called spintries, pogers, pathics, and prushuns. (They haunted male brothels
called spearhouses.) The title character of Portnoy’s Complaint is a compulsive masturbator. Joyce
Carol Oates’ character Quentin P. is a child molester. So is Brian Prentice in Will Self’s novel
The Butt, who horrifies the story’s decent hero Tom Brodzinski: “He found himself repeating his
companion’s name over and over in his mind: Prentice, Prentice, Prentice. . . . Until consonants
were ground down, and Tom was thinking: penis, penis, penis.”
Randy women can be P characters too. The devil in Tolstoy’s story isn’t Mr.
Pryanishnikov, it’s his friend’s mistress Stepanida Pechnikov. Until the Sexual Revolution, any
extramarital sex earned women a P. The adulteress in The Scarlet Letter (1850) is Hester Prynne.
Honor Tracy’s novel Settled in Chambers (1967) has both a Prue living in sin with a divorced
artist and a presumed adulteress named Mary Price. Too much dick, you see—but women
also get P names if they’re not getting any dick, like spinsters. As the feminist Kate Millett
asked, “Aren’t women prudes if they don’t and prostitutes if they do” You bet, and the letter
P has always been there to mock them. Ancient Greek for ‘virgin’ and ‘whore’ were parthenos
and porne; in modern French they’re pucelle and pute. Whores get the worst of it, of course.
Over the centuries, English terms for prostitutes have included public women, parnels, punks,
paphians, pinchpins, and spoffokins. Their bosses are pimps, panders, and procurers.
If you trace these chains of associations back to their source, you will see that all
of these words are essentially phallic. The chief chain of associations is a short and terrible
one that we all learn to understand quite early in life: ‘phallus‐vagina‐whore’, or prick-pussyprostitute.
Many languages besides English can reproduce this chain with P words alone, often
in several different ways: Latin penis-pudenda-prostituta, Indonesian peler‐pukas-perek, Spanish
pene-potorro-puta, or pijo-papaya‐pelandusca, and Polish penis-pochwa-prostytutka, or even
praçie-pipa-pipa (pipa being both ‘pussy’ and ‘slut’). 9 Don’t blame the letter; the fault lies in
human misogyny, which seems to be bred in the bone.
VIII. The Purple Weenie
Does every language have a P word for penis No. But those that do generally have
the same kind of line-up as English: the formal word is Latin penis, then there’s a slangy P
equivalent like prick or pecker, and then various other words with different first letters (schlong,
dick, etc.). In German, for example, the line-up is Penis, Pimmel, Schwanz. In Danish it’s penis,
pik, diller. In Hungarian it’s pénisz, pöcs, fasz. In Indonesian it’s penis, peler, burung. You get the
idea. The slangy P words are the interesting ones because they’re all different: modern Greek
poutsa, Yiddish putz, French pine or popol, Afrikaans piel, Romanian pula. Spanish is awash in
regional variants: polla, pijo, pija, pinga, pito, pico; and so is Portuguese: pau, pica, pinto, piça,
pila, picha, pichota, pistola, piroca.
English does pretty well too: prick, pecker, peter, pee-pee, and so on. For some
numbers, let’s consider Deborah Cameron’s 1992 article “Naming of Parts.” She collected
182 ‘penis’ terms from American college students of both sexes. 10 Twenty percent have P (or
sp-) onsets: that’s 37 terms, the most for any letter. (The next most frequent onsets are M, W,
The Cenacle | 84 | April 2013