Fascinating (however cringe-worthy) penis facts brought to you by super smart sounding English people.
Last November, the British Museum created a handful of YouTube “pilots” for people to vote on, and then promised to create a new series based on user interest. The best of the bunch (by a wide margin) was this six minute entry on “5 Things You Didn’t Know About Penises.”
My personal favorite part of this video was the entry about de-circumcision by the Romans (one of the earliest forms of elective cosmetic surgery) and this book that discusses it is already on my wishlist.
Speaking of wishlists, today is my birthdayyy! So in honor of that fact, please watch this video and learn some historical facts about my primary topic of research and conversation: wangs! Here’s all the links the museum provided, just in case this wasn’t enough to quench your wang-knowledge thirst:
Find out more about Ancient Greek and Roman foreskins and the ideal look of the penis in antiquity in the article “The Ideal Prepuce in Ancient Greece and Rome: Male Genital Aesthetics and Their Relation to Lipodermos, Circumcision, Foreskin Restoration,
and the Kynodesme”:
http://www.cirp.org/library/history/h…
You can read more about de-circumcision and Roman self-image in Ralph’s essay in Roman Bodies antiquity to the eighteenth century:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Roman-Bodies-…
Here is a link to the British Museum’s condom:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research…
Condoms at this time were associated with prostitutes and brothels; condoms in the Georgian period were designed to prevent disease rather than pregnancy. The print below, from 1749, shows a sailor hurling condoms and other identifiers of the prostitute’s trade from a window of a brothel on the Strand:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research…
-t
Edited to add:
Here’s the embed, in case the player up top isn’t doing its thing:
Iain
I used to work at the BM back in the 90s and the amount of weird things I learned could fill a book, for instance in the Celtic tribes bi sexuality was normal and one reason the Romans were frightened of the Celtic warriors was that they were reputed to be massively well endowed!
tylerthebadwolf
What goes on at this museum!? I can’t wait for my London trip!
James
These were good. I did not know alot of this.
tylerthebadwolf
Haha. I’m glad. Learning more about dicks every day – that’s what we’re here for.