by Tom Hickman
Shortly after, he appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, ‘kilt akimbo’, clutching a rooster – the quintessential cock o’ the north.8
Accessorise – or aggrandise?
In areas of South America, Africa and across the Oceanic world, men who are otherwise naked wear penis sheaths (phallocarps, in anthropologist-speak). In some societies these are just caps over the penis head, but in others they not only cover the shaft but can extend as much as two feet, held erect by a thong around the waist or even the chest. Usually penis sheaths are made from bamboo or specially grown gourds (though in recent years old toothpaste tubes and Coca-Cola cans have extended the range) and are often bright red or yellow. Some societies have everyday sheaths, sheaths for festivals and sheaths for war – and sheaths for visitors. Most men possess a variety, varying in size, decoration (boar tusks, animal teeth or claws, feathers) and angle of erection, and wear them according to their mood. Penis sheaths reflect a man’s status, warn off his enemies, enhance his penis’s magic powers and, with luck, attract women to him.9
These were powerful reasons why, in the 1970s when, in the interests of public modesty, the Indonesian government attempted to ban men in the highlands of Papua New Guinea from wearing their sheaths, there was fierce and ultimately successful opposition. There was another reason why the men of the Dani tribe were deeply angered: they thought their sheaths were modest – which caused Marie, the wife of the anthropologist Jared Diamond, to describe them on her first encounter in the 1990s as ‘The most immodest display of modesty I’ve ever seen!’
The psychologist John Carl Flugel at University College London saw all human clothing as a tug of war between ‘the irreconcilable emotions of modesty and the desire for attention’. How the dictum applies to the codpiece, once the Western world’s equivalent of the penis sheath, is open to debate. In any event, for more than a hundred years, as the Middle Ages merged with the Renaissance, the codpiece was the flamboyant focus of male attire and modesty never came into it.
Actually, the codpiece was rather more modest than what went before it – which wasn’t exactly a fashion in itself, at least at first, but the consequence of one.
The mid fourteenth century was an age when clothing changed radically, the newly popular button allowing that of both sexes to fit more tightly to the body. The waistline of men’s doublets dropped to the hips to make the body look longer and the hemline rose up the thighs to make the legs look longer. And herein lay the problem: men’s woollen hose consisted of two separate legs, exactly like a pair of long stockings, but attached to a waist belt or, in the newer fashion, to lacing holes on the doublet’s hem, with a space between the legs at the crotch. While the doublet had flared to the knees, men’s braies (the medieval equivalent of underpants) had been bulky; now, they were much reduced so as not to spoil the closer-fitting shape of the shorter garment. And when a man sat down or mounted a horse, his braies poked through the opening, the necessary slit in them from time to time affording a glimpse – or more – of what was within.
Most men undoubtedly took care to mind the gap and maintained their decorum, but the common-sense solution was to sew the crotch shut. Yet when this happened, as paintings of the period indicate, young bucks dispensed with their braies altogether, their hose delineating and thrusting out their genitals in a forthright manner. Chaucer put it like this in ‘The Parson’s Tale’ (related here in modern English):
Alas! Some of them show the very boss of the penis and the horrible pushed-out testicles that look like the malady of hernia in the wrapping of their hose, and the buttocks of such persons look like the hinder parts of a she-ape in the full of the moon. And moreover, the hateful proud members that they show by the fantastic fashion of making one leg of their hose white and the other red, make it seem that half of their privy members are flayed. And if it be that they divide their hose in other colours, as white and black, or white and blue, or black and red, and so forth, then it seems, by the variation of colour, that the half of their privy members are corrupted by the fire of Saint Anthony, or by cancer, or by other such misfortune.
As stretched wool has a degree of see-through, which increases markedly as it wears and the weave loosens, some penises, one supposes, looked like bank robbers in stocking masks. Be that as it may, young men were so pleased with themselves that they now went about in their shirtsleeves, discarding the doublet and wearing their money pouch at the front rather than at the side with their dagger swinging suggestively behind it – a pseudo-penis directing the viewer’s gaze to the genuine article.
Men already had pseudo-penises on their feet, of course. You might think that the erroneous correlation between foot size and penis size is a modern one, but it isn’t: it was a popular belief at least as far back as medieval times. And when shoes called poulaines (they originated in Poland), which had toes that tapered to a point of about six inches, became a craze across Europe, they presented an opportunity that men could not resist: they packed their toes with moss or wool, increasing their length to as much as 30 inches, kept them in an upright position with silken ties or silver chains fastened to their knees, and stood on street corners waggling them at passing women. The raciest fellows painted their poulaines flesh-coloured, just in case someone didn’t get the connection.
The Church thundered about sin and proclaimed the Black Death and subsequent waves of bubonic plague (which wiped out two-thirds of Europe’s population) were heaven’s retribution for the obscenity of men’s footwear and clothing. In 1482 the Commons petitioned Edward IV that
No knight, under the estate of a Lord . . . nor any other person, use or wear . . . any Gowne, Jaket, or Cloke, but it be of such a length as it, he being upright, shall cover his privy member and buttokkes.
In a feudal world, lords were left to do as they pleased, as they were, more or less, where poulaines were concerned – Edward did limit the ‘beaks’ (points) of their footwear to no more than 24 inches, whereas those of lower standing were restricted to 12 and the masses to 6, exceeding which limits was ‘upon pain of cursing by the clergy, and by Parliament to pay twenty shillings for every pair’. Such harsh sumptuary law (under which the penalty would have been beyond the majority’s ability to pay) was intended to stop the fashion dead in its tracks and it did, though common sense must also have prevailed – poulaines might have been a gift to the genitally focused poseur but were almost impossible to walk in. Before the end of the century, they were gone
Edward had attached no penalty to his decree regarding men’s hose, but the sewed-up crotch would never have lasted anyway: men couldn’t put up with dropping their hose – first disentangling it from the waist belt under their doublet or unlacing the ties around it – every time they needed to urinate. Again common sense dictated the next fashion move: tailors inserted a simple triangle of material between the legs either stitched to the hose at the bottom angle with ties at the top two, or with ties at all three. And thus the codpiece (codd being Middle English for bag or pod) was created.
At this stage the codpiece was almost self-effacing, but not for long: men started bulking out their flap of fabric. For some, in all likelihood, it started as a joke; for those of a sizeist mentality, it became competitive. The flap evolved into a bulbous pouch, which then became increasingly padded, and more and more ornate, adorned with precious stones, strings of pearls, even little bells. Leonardo da Vinci was delighted that the penis was being given the regard he felt it was due, writing: ‘Man is wrong to be ashamed of mentioning and displaying it, always covering and hiding it. He should, on the contrary, decorate and display it with the proper gravity, as if it were an envoy.’ It was around the middle of the sixteenth century, some thirty years after his death, that the codpiece reached its height, blatantly shaped like an enormous, permanent erection – a boon, Rabelais wrote, to the ‘many young gentlemen’ whose ‘fraudulent codpieces . . . contain nothing but wind, to the great disappointment of the female sex’. After that, the only way for th
e codpiece was down. During the Elizabethan age male fashion again changed dramatically, the trunk of the hose turning into something like puffy shorts, out of which, in diminishing size, the codpiece peered, before giving a valedictory wave.
It wasn’t until the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth – the period covering the French Revolution and the English Regency – that the penis again made a fashion statement across Europe, and the Americas. Knee-length breeches, which had long replaced hose, had introduced the ‘fall front’ – rather like a little apron that dropped down from the waist – for essential access. Less material was therefore required directly at the groin, and breeches, customarily in light buckskin, became so tight that for the first time in history tailors asked their customers which side they dressed, to allow some wriggle room to one side or the other.
Ballet had recently dispensed with loose-fitting garments for both male and female so that the audience could better appreciate their artistry and athleticism. Audiences at first had been taken aback by the frank forward thrust of the males’ white tights, but had come to accept the sexual neutrality in the theatrical context (unlike the BBC governor who, in the 1930s, when ballet was first televised, suggested to the director-general that male dancers should wear two pairs of tights). Carnally minded Regency fops, however, inspired by the look, adopted flesh-coloured tights for everyday wear. A German visitor to London, quoted by Ivan Bloch in Sexual Life in England, saw that ‘from a distance I really thought some inmates of Bedlam had escaped from their keepers and had put on only shoes and coats, leaving the rest of their bodies exposed’. In the same period, the costume worn by Spanish matadors was also being pared down to the classical ‘suit of lights’, the knee-breeches, like the tights of the dancer, sculpted to the body to emphasise the wearer’s graceful virility – and the fact that, in the contest with the bull, the matador leads with more than his chin.
With the arrival of trousers as we know them in the mid 1800s, genital accentuation became less blatant but remained popular among younger men. Not without the ambivalence that characterised their age, which managed to be both libidinous and sexually repressed at the same time, many Victorian men chose to wear trousers more than necessarily delineating but then threaded a metal ‘dressing’ ring – the erroneously named ‘Prince Albert’ (see Note 9 page 108) – enabling them to anchor their penis with a ribbon or thin chain to their inside seam, thus lessening the visual impact. The Victorians passed on the taste for genital fashion flamboyance (though not for cock rings) to Edwardian dandies, after which it disappeared until the 1950s when working-class youths caricatured Edwardian styles, their trousers so tight they were obliged to walk with their penis in the upright position. ‘Held firmly in its vertical posture by the snugly clinging material,’ the anthropologist Desmond Morris wrote (Intimate Behaviour), ‘it presents a mild but distinctly visible genital bulge to the interested female eye. In this way the young male’s costume once again permits him to display a pseudo-erection . . .’
Trousers worn by (principally) young men during the 1970s were again cut high into the groin, leaving little uncertainty on the right or left issue, before styling for comfort and discretion became the norm, as it remains in the main, save for those addicted to the cowboy look, principally southern Americans of all sexual inclinations, and the gay community everywhere. Male anatomy being what it is, however, any man wearing trousers of light material and careless of the fact that when he sits the slack can become trapped beneath his buttocks may demonstrate a braggadocio he doesn’t intend – as did the broadcaster Terry Wogan while appearing in his moleskin strides on television. In the circumstances it was doubly unfortunate that he was presenting Points of View, a title on which the newspapers gleefully punned in alluding to what they called Wogan’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’.
In what manner and to what degree clothed male genitalia have been exhibited, the intention generally has been to keep things in check. But an astonishing exception came in the 1980s when athletes took to wearing Spandex, known more familiarly as Lycra. The exceedingly thin and figure-hugging material was aerodynamic, developed to help athletes improve their sporting performance. But the constraining properties were negligible: penises bobbed and weaved with merry abandon in the track events, much as they might had their possessors been naked. And the considerable self of the British Olympic-gold sprinter Linford Christie, viewed in countless television slo-mo replays, became known to the nation as ‘the lunchbox’. Several manufacturers of actual lunchboxes approached Christie to endorse their products, much to his annoyance. At the end of the 1990s when his running days were over, Christie was accused of having taken performance-enhancing drugs and instigated a libel action. During the hearing in the High Court the lunchbox was mentioned (irrelevantly to the case) and, possibly thinking it had something to do with cucumber sandwiches and unaware of what an entire nation knew, a bemused Mr Justice Popplewell sought clarification. Christie explained, adding that he was so fed up with people asking him how big his penis was he replied ‘This big’, stretching his arms to their full extent. If the learned judge wondered whether the gesture was meant only as a sarcastic response, he forbore from asking.
Christie’s exceptional case aside, man seems to have a desire to draw attention to his clothed genitals, often by insinuating that less is more. It may not be a fixation, but it is inherent. Flesh-coloured tights weren’t enough for some eighteenth-century fops: they added padding (they wore false calves too); twentieth-century pop singers likewise made a bolus of their groins, pressing a bunched handkerchief or rolled-up pair of socks into service, though the duo Wham! ingeniously used shuttlecocks. Some male catwalk models today have admitted to similar stratagems, which are no doubt employed by an unknowable number of men about their daily lives – who haven’t; made-for-purpose ‘package enhancers’ are sold by many sex outlets. In 2010 Marks & Spencer, that bastion of middle-class fashion conservatism, began to stock ‘frontal enhancement’ underpants, an ‘integral shelf’ giving a claimed ‘38% increase in outline’.
From time to time, fashion historians have suggested that the codpiece, in its comparatively honest fraudulence, is due for a comeback. The idea has crossed the mind of several anthropologists including Desmond Morris and is never far from the mind of filmmakers, who rarely envision a future world without it.
In fact, the codpiece has been back with us, in a minor way, for the last sixty years – a staple of the worldwide leather subculture, which surfaced after the Second World War, from where it passed into heavy metal and glam rock and where, admittedly taken beyond parody, it has incorporated flashing lights or emitted sparks and even flames. But the codpiece may have made a return as much as two hundred years earlier than that – it depends on how you view the sporran . . .
Until the eighteenth century (that century again) the sporran, first cousin of the medieval belt pouch and, the Highland Scot’s kilt being pocketless, an essential item of his ensemble, had been worn at the waist and to the side. Now, belatedly following the style of the Middle Ages, it was brought it to the front and dangled low. At this stage it retained its traditional characteristics: it was small, simple and made of leather; but it quickly followed the medieval pattern of increasing ostentation. By the next century it came in multifarious sizes, colours and materials, complete with swaying tassels and other decoration. Some were of animal hair – some even of whole small animals. Unlike the conventional codpiece, of course, the sporran remained uncoupled from the garment behind it: a semi-detached codpiece or, as Desmond Morris prefers, ‘a surrogate pubic area’.
Whether regarded as the one or the other, the genital significance of the sporran was given further impetus when the kilt was adopted as Scottish army uniform – and it became obligatory to wear nothing underneath. In 1815, after the victory of Waterloo in the Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent occupation of Paris, the Emperor of Russia requested that men from each of the Highland regiments should para
de before him at the Élysée Palace. As they stood to attention, the emperor fingered their kilts and sporrans as he passed them, but grew more inquisitive when he reached the gigantic figure of Cameron Sergeant Thomas Campbell, ‘and had the curiosity to lift my kilt to my navel,’ Campbell later wrote, ‘so that he might not be deceived’. So equated in the Scottish military mind with manliness was ‘going regimental’ (as it was then termed; ‘commando’ in modern parlance) that even on the Western Front during the First World War, when officers or senior NCOs inspected their men, they did so with a mirror tied to the end of a golf club or walking stick to check orders were being obeyed. As late as the 1960s barrack room mirror-checks were common. Today, kilt wearers in the civilian population, just like those in the military, regard only those who hang free as true Scotsmen.
The polymathic novelist Anthony Burgess rather agreed – though actually, when he was teaching in Malaya, he wore a sarong:
I carry a penis and a pair of testicles. These are not particularly handsome, unless stylised into the Holy Trinity or a Hindu lingam. They are inconvenient, and men’s clothing is not well designed to accommodate them. I promise myself to declare Scottish ancestry and wear a kilt.
(The Real Life of Anthony Burgess, Andrew Biswell)
The artist/sculptor Eric Gill was more vehemently anti-trousers. In a little book (Trousers and the Most Precious Ornament) published just before the Second World War he derided the garment, in which the penis was ‘trapped all sideways, dishonoured, neglected, ridiculed and ridiculous – no longer the virile member’. Mind, Gill wasn’t a codpiece man: he wanted a return to the medieval smock, which he wore himself with the precious ornament unencumbered by underwear. But Eldridge Cleaver, who was as one with Gill on the subject of trousers, which ‘castrated’ men (‘the penis’, he said with confused poetic charm, ‘is withering on the vine’), was a codpiece man, and he was responsible for one of the two more-or-less serious attempts in the last decades to return the item to the mainstream.