← Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
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- [00:00]
Kate Lister
Hello everyone, it's me, your host, Kate Lister. I'm just jumping in before the episode.
- [00:05]
Caroline Vought
To ask you for a little favor.
- [00:08]
Kate Lister
If you are enjoying betwixt, and I hope that you are, we'd love it if you could vote for us for the Listeners Choice Awards at the British Podcast Awards. If you follow the link in the show notes, it should take you to the place you need to go and it would mean the world to us. We were shortlisted last year and the one before that and the one before that. We were so close and it just made us want it even more. I think we can do it this year. Right, on with the show.
- [00:38]
BetterHelp
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- [01:20]
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- [01:51]
Holly Fry
Tells a story Join me, Holly Fry, and a slate of incredible guests as we are all inspired by their journeys with psoriasis. Along with these uplifting and candid personal histories, we take a step back into the bizarre and occasionally poisonous history of our skin and how we take care of it. Whether you're looking for inspiration on your own skincare journey or are curious about the sometimes strange history of how we treat our skin, you'll you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on our skin. Listen to our skin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:30]
Kate Lister
Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister, you've come back. Oh, I'm so pleased that you have. You came back despite being warned that the show is going to contain rude content. You absolute trooper.
- [02:43]
Caroline Vought
Well, I have to tell you again.
- [02:44]
Kate Lister
I'm afraid this is an adult podcast.
- [02:46]
Caroline Vought
Booking by adults to other adults about.
- [02:47]
Kate Lister
Adulty things and adulty from arrangement subjects. And you should be an adult too. But if it didn't stop you last time, it's not going to stop you this time. Right, on with the show. Take him in. Betwixt us, there he stands, 10 foot 5 of rippling muscles, abundant curls, and, well, a bottom that you could bounce a penny off, quite frankly. This is quite clearly a statue of a man who has never missed leg day, or arm day, or back day, or toe day. Here he is, leaning on a club draped with the skin of a lion he's just killed. This is Hercules, the Greek demigod, carved from marble and shown to be at the end of his 12 labors. But let's wander around to the front, shall we? His eyes are downcast, he looks exhausted. He has a magnificent beard, to be sure. And if we thought he looked henched from the back. Just look at those arms and those abs. And if we go down a little bit further, well.
- [03:51]
Caroline Vought
Oh.
- [03:51]
Kate Lister
Oh, well, that's just rather disappointing, isn't it? All those rippling abs and pecs and glistening masculinity, and the artist has decided to go with a rather modest manhood. Hmm. What is going on here?
- [04:09]
Carrie Voot
What are you a funny man?
- [04:10]
Caroline Vought
Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
- [04:14]
Kate Lister
I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
- [04:29]
Unknown
Goodness.
- [04:30]
Kate Lister
What beautiful Dan? Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the the History of Sex Scandal in Society with me, Kate Lister. When you imagine a male nude statue from the ancient world, the odds are that we're all thinking of the Greeks, or people influenced by the Greeks. Just it's mostly Greek themed. They have dominated the field with their bulging muscles and power stances. But while the ancient Greek influence extends far beyond these marble bodies, there is one thing that doesn't seem to extend very far at all. Aha. Their members. Willies, dicks, pricks, wieners, todgers. No matter what you call them, our society is obsessed with them. And for us, however unfair it may be, and it is unfair, we are convinced that bigger is better. We talk about big Dick energy and what that means, and all Porn stars have penises that you could club something to death with. But that wasn't the case in the ancient world. So why were the penises on ancient statues so small? And when did the trend change? In this episode, I am rolling up my sleeves, and I'm gonna find out with a fabulous Carrie Voot. Carrie is a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, no less, and she joined me to discuss this very topic on the new history hit documentary Dicking about, which you can now watch on History Hit tv. But for now, pants down, measuring tapes out. Let's get on with it.
- [06:09]
Caroline Vought
Well, hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Caroline Vought. How are you doing?
- [06:16]
Unknown
I'm really well, thank you.
- [06:18]
Caroline Vought
Well, thank you so much for coming back to talk to us. And we've spoken off the podcast as well. We've spoken as part of the new history hit documentary Dicking About.
- [06:30]
Unknown
We have. And huge fun it was, too.
- [06:34]
Caroline Vought
It was so much fun. This is a question that I'm sure every classics professor has been asked, every art curator has been asked, every classicist museum curator has been asked, why are the penises on the statues so small? I'm sure you've been asked that before.
- [06:51]
Unknown
I've been asked it a lot. It's the question I usually get asked when I go out to schools to give schools talks. The first hand will go up and you know what they're gonna ask. Yeah. I mean, you know, your guess is as good as mine, but my sense is that it's aesthetic, that by the time you get to the 5th century BC, which is the sort of body types that we're talking about. When we think about Greek sculpture, why do we think about the ones conceived of in that period? Well, because they're the ones that are what we now call naturalistic.
- [07:22]
Caroline Vought
Okay.
- [07:22]
Unknown
You know, they look like they're trying to look like a real body.
- [07:27]
Caroline Vought
I always think of them as naked. Were they naked more than usual? People were naked. Is that just in my fervid imagination?
- [07:35]
Unknown
They weren't naked walking around the streets doing their shop? You know, that wasn't what they were doing. But, you know, you think of them as not wearing any clothes because so many of their statues show them not wearing any clothes, or at least the male ones do. Right. And that's something we can go on to talk about in a bit, I suppose. As for whether they had no clothes on in real life, sure, when they got in the shower, they had no clothes on, but the difference is that they did athletics without any clothes on.
- [08:01]
Caroline Vought
That is an interesting twist, isn't it?
- [08:04]
Unknown
It's an interesting twist. And you know why they did athletics without any clothes on? Your guess is as good as mine. The ancient texts actually really sort of worry about it themselves. Right. They knew that they didn't always perform athletics without clothes. If you read the Iliad, for example, there are athletic games associated with funerals, and it's, you know, they're not romping around naked. But by the time you get to, you know, the classical period, they are all of these stories as to kind of why that might be the case as they try and come to terms with their own cultural practice. And one of the best stories is that, you know, there's a runner running around and his loincloth falls off and he trips on it. And so it's a sort of health and safety issue that you have to remove your clothes. But I think it must be about, in some senses, not having anything to hide, making everybody equal in the eyes of spectators. But for whatever reason it starts, it becomes very much defining of what it means to do Greek athletics and what it means to be Greek, as opposed to a non Greek, a foreigner, a barbarian in the eyes of the Greeks. So it becomes a marker of civilization.
- [09:15]
Caroline Vought
I mean, we still have lots of debates that go on around what's appropriate to wear at the gym today. I see those all the time. And to think that the Greeks would just. No, we're just in the buff. I mean, they weren't mixed sexual, though, were they? Their gyms?
- [09:27]
Unknown
No, no. I mean, if you think about the Olympic Games, it's just male competitors.
- [09:31]
Caroline Vought
Yeah.
- [09:31]
Unknown
And they didn't have their bits flopping around. They used to tie them up.
- [09:36]
Caroline Vought
Right. Okay.
- [09:37]
Unknown
What that looked like in practice, we're not really sure. But there are some representations of that on Greek vase painting, for example. And actually there's a brilliant bronze sculpture of a boxer survives from Rome that shows his genitals sort of tucked in that kind of way.
- [09:54]
Caroline Vought
So were the girls, when they were doing their. I don't even if they did exercises, would they have been naked? Or was this very much all boys together? That it was men watching? It was men competing. This is a macho environment.
- [10:06]
Unknown
Yeah. No, this is boys together. There is some evidence for female running races, for example.
- [10:12]
Caroline Vought
You wouldn't want to run in the nip, would you? That would be awful.
- [10:15]
Unknown
The women, certainly, if they were doing exercises, were not doing that without any clothes on.
- [10:20]
Caroline Vought
No, no. You need some kind of support. That would just be crazy. So the Greeks have got a culture of nudity and then there's nude bathing and they love a statue being nude as well. And it seems to me to be a very macho society. They really like looking at men naked. Maybe they don't.
- [10:39]
Kate Lister
Maybe I've.
- [10:39]
Caroline Vought
Maybe that's unfair of me, but it seems like a very macho thing they do.
- [10:43]
Unknown
I mean, you know, if you think about early art that was made in the Aegean, for example, already in 2800 BC through to 2000 BC, then you get figurines of men and women without any clothes on.
- [10:59]
Caroline Vought
How very exciting.
- [11:00]
Unknown
But by the time you get to, you know, 700 BC or just after 650, you're getting monumental sculptures. So sculptures that are life size or larger than life size, and those show usually the men without clothes and usually the women with clothes, or the women always with clothes, the men usually without clothes. That's not to say that we don't have, at that period, figurines that show women without any clothes on. There's a little ivory, for example, that was found in a tomb in Athens that dates to end of the 8th century BC, but by the time you're getting into the 7th century, you've already got what looks like a kind of formula. Men appear in freestanding, monumental marble form, showing off their prowess, their virtue, by virtue of being without clothes. Whereas the women's goodness lies in their adornment, in their drapery, in the hours that they spent with the curling tongs, doing their hair and putting on their jewellery.
- [12:06]
Caroline Vought
And when they did start doing big old nude statues of women, it does sort of seem like the Greeks lost it, that they couldn't handle that very well.
- [12:15]
Kate Lister
Or at least that's.
- [12:16]
Caroline Vought
Or it was written down about the statue. Is it Aphrodite of Cnidos?
- [12:19]
Unknown
Yeah. So, according to the mythology, I suppose the first freestanding monumental female nude is this statue of Aphrodite that winds up in a sanctuary in Knidos, which is Asia Minor, modern Turkey. And the stories about that statue make it clear that she was really shocking to everybody on the ground at that time. So shocking that one city says, look, we don't want this.
- [12:50]
Caroline Vought
Oh, did they?
- [12:51]
Unknown
And Knidos decide that to take the risk, and they do, and they put her in their sanctuary and she becomes a Mediterranean wide pinup. Now, of course, there have been representations of women without clothes on before this point, as I said, in miniature form. That's not at all uncommon. There are also, you know, representations of women without clothes on or goddesses without clothes on. From beyond the Greek world. And even in monumental form in Greece, there's been a kind of game of concealment and revealment going on with the female body for a couple of centuries prior to the Aphrodite of Knidos being unveiled in around 350 BC. You know, some of the sexiest statues, I think, that survived from antiquity of the female form are images that date to the classical period, so the 5th century BC. Oh, and show sort of an Amazon with one breast bed. Or they show children of Niobe. So mythological figures in distress being shot with arrows by Apollo and Artemis because their mum's done something terrible. So they get. The mum's been boastful, so they get it in the neck. And their distress is shown by the fact that their clothes are falling from their bodies. It isn't just that all women are bundled up and then the female form is. The Aphrodite of Konidos is suddenly without her clothes. There's been this sort of ongoing sort of suggestive kind of thing going on.
- [14:22]
Caroline Vought
One of my favorite stories about the Aphrodite of Kanaidos is that some bloke broke into wherever she was being held and said that he left a stain upon her and then was discovered and threw himself off the cliffs, for shame of it. Yeah, That's a hell of a story sneaking into.
- [14:38]
Unknown
It's a story that's reported in more than one ancient city source. And, you know, kind of when you first think about that story, you think, hang on a minute, you know, this first ever monumental, freestanding female nude is a representation of a God. So these stories seem a bit odd because so powerful is the male gaze that that statue attracts that it becomes so penetrative that the guy in question actually kind of gets confused and thinks that what he's looking at is. Is not a goddess, but a girl and isn't stone, but flesh and actually tries to make love to it.
- [15:16]
Caroline Vought
Yes.
- [15:17]
Unknown
And as you say, then has only one option left, really, and that's to throw himself into the sea. And of course, Aphrodite is born from the sea. So, you know, maybe this is to die by suicide, but maybe it's actually the only way in which he can effectively commune with Aphrodite is by entering the waves. And I think, you know, to go back to that kind of the sense of what seems wrong with this story is that the human male seems to have the power over this God. But ultimately, as you know, he does end up in the water and he ends up dead and she is the goddess of sex. She's the goddess of love. She's the goddess of desire. She's got to make you want her.
- [15:55]
Caroline Vought
She does. That's kind of her whole deal, I suppose, isn't it?
- [15:59]
Unknown
You've got to feel either shame, embarrassment, or you've got to feel turned on, or she's not doing her job properly. And you're in a culture in which you know that if you just happen to come across a goddess without any clothes on because she's taking a bath with her nymphs or whatever, and she doesn't want to be seen, then God help you. You know, you get turned into a stag and ripped apart by your own hunting dogs. If you're acting and you've just seen Diana. So all the time that you're looking and lusting, you know that you're in really dubious water.
- [16:28]
Caroline Vought
And that's why we can't have nice things. Let's talk about the male statues. I'm not aware of any stories of anybody becoming so overcome with lust that they try and make love to one of these male statues.
- [16:40]
Unknown
Not make love to, but by the time you get into the Roman Empire, Roman emperors are really kind of interested in Greek material culture of the kind that has been flowing into Rome with those conquests for the last couple of centuries. And the emperor Tiberius, who's the second of the Roman emperors, the one that succeeds Augustus, he becomes obsessed, according to the ancient literature, with an ancient Greek statue of an athlete.
- [17:10]
Caroline Vought
Oh, really?
- [17:10]
Unknown
That stood outside a bathhouse in Rome. And he becomes so obsessed with it, the text says, he falls in love with it, that he removes it or has it removed and taken to his bedroom.
- [17:24]
Caroline Vought
I stand corrected.
- [17:26]
Unknown
You're left to imagine what he does with this statue or wants to do with this statue in his bedroom. But before he can do anything, presumably, there's a big public outcry because funnily enough, they loved it too, and they want it back.
- [17:37]
Caroline Vought
Oh, my goodness. Yeah. These people are so crazy.
- [17:44]
Kate Lister
I love it.
- [17:45]
Caroline Vought
The nude statues. One of the things that I was really quite taken aback by when we were looking around the Sculpture Museum in Cambridge is just how ripped those men are. I mean, we talk about Body Beautiful today, and they looked exactly like the ideal male body form that you get on the front of Men's Health magazines. They're every bit as jacked and pumped and ripped as some guy that's been on protein shakes and low carb for the last six months.
- [18:13]
Unknown
Some of them are, yeah. I mean, the statues that we were looking At. We were looking at a statue by an artist, Polykleitus. He made a bronze sculpture of a spear carrier, a man carrying a spear, in about 450 BC. It doesn't survive anymore, but we have Roman marble versions of it. We were looking at that. We were also looking at a statue of a very similar kind of date of a discus thrower, the original of which was again, made in bronze by Myron. And they are exactly as you describe. Right. So they've got really beautiful, kind of stereotypically beautiful, in our eyes, male bodies that look like they've been working out quite a lot by the time you get to the Hellenistic period. So a couple of centuries later, the Farnese Hercules is like them on steroids. You know, his muscles are just absolutely massive. So those kind of images do promote this sense of gym culture, really. But I was going to say there are a variety of masculine bodies, even within monumental sculptural form. So not all of them look like that. Some of them are much slimmer, don't look quite as kind of jacked. They give maybe a slightly sort of false impression in some senses.
- [19:30]
Caroline Vought
Yeah. What do you think that the Greeks saw when they looked at that kind of body? Do you think it's very similar to what we see? Because I think that there's still this narrative around that kind of body we associate with control, with willpower, with discipline. I mean, we channel it all into health, but really that's what it is. It's about, look at me, look how many cakes I didn't eat and how many heavy things I picked up. That's really what that body's doing.
- [19:55]
Unknown
Yeah. No, I mean, I think the Greeks would have understood it, in terms of control, to be a Greek man in the 5th century BC. Yeah. You were lucky enough to have been born a boy and not a girl, but you're not born a man. And you have to work at it, and you have to work on it in such a way that publicly you are affirmed in your masculinity by what you do and critically, by what you don't do. And, you know, you need to be sufficiently in control of yourself to walk this fine line between being always performatively active and never passive. Because if you're passive, that renders you an object and makes you potentially feminine and more shock horror. Yeah. But not so overly active as to be hubristic, so as to kind of, you know, challenge the good gods or anything like that. Or to be so overly active that you are out of control, so animalistic. And that's the fine line you walk. And. And the next question becomes, how do you represent that? And they do it with the kind of bodies that we've just been talking about.
- [21:14]
Caroline Vought
I'll be back with Carrie after this short.
- [21:23]
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- [21:57]
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- [22:38]
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What is dedication?
- [22:39]
Carrie Voot
The thing that drives me every day as a dad is Dariana. We call them Dae Dae for short. Every day he's hungry for something, whether it's attention, affection, knowledge. And there's this huge responsibility in making sure that when he's no longer under my wing that he's a good person. I want him to be able to sit back one day and go, we worked together. We did a good job.
- [23:00]
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
That's dedication. Find out more@fatherhood.gov brought to you by the U.S. department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council.
- [23:07]
Unknown
Okay, close your eyes.
- [23:09]
BetterHelp
Exhale.
- [23:10]
Unknown
Feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [23:16]
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- [23:28]
Unknown
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- [23:31]
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- [23:44]
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- [23:48]
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- [24:20]
Caroline Vought
So let's move on then, to the million dollar question. The body beautiful is clearly very important to these people, men and women. But men in particular are portrayed in certain ways, and it does seem to be about control and about beauty. And then we've got the willies, these beautiful, like, abs, six packs, eight packs rippling, and, you know, flexing biceps, and then these rather diminutive little packages that are there. So I suppose my first question is going to be, is it even true that they are smaller than average, or is it just something that we are maybe used to seeing huge penises in pornography? Are they actually smaller than standard?
- [25:02]
Unknown
Well, I mean, given that a statue like Polyclotus's spear carrier, at least in the marble versions that survive, they're bigger than life size, right? So they're about 2 meters tall. Something like the Farnese Hercules is 3 meters tall. So you need their genitals to be proportionately bigger in proportion. And actually they're not. Right? They are small and they're neat. But then that neatness is what's kind of crucial. It goes back to what we were saying about control. You know, the last thing you would want your image to look like was turned on. Right?
- [25:39]
Caroline Vought
That's true.
- [25:40]
Unknown
Look as though it's actually firmly in control of itself and all of its bits. And it's also got to be beautiful to look at. It's got to work symmetrically to satisfy the gaze and what you need that image to do. And I think that's why these genitals are small. The kinds of images in that particular period that have large genitals tend to be associated with creatures like satyrs. And satyrs are only half men. They're otherwise half horse. And they sort of walk the boundary between civilized and completely uncivilized behavior. They get to do things visually that mortals aren't normally depicted doing. And they have usually erect, large penises that wouldn't look out of place on a horse.
- [26:35]
Caroline Vought
They could do big penises when they wanted to. And you see them cropping up, if you excuse the expression, like all over the place. I know it's not the Greeks, but if you like the Romans, they loved a penis. They're all over Pompeii and they're massive, those ones.
- [26:48]
Unknown
They are. They're all over Pompeii. Yeah, they're on. I mean, what's interesting about Pompeii is they're hanging outside from door frames. They're depicted outside of doors almost kind of to mark the threshold, but also kind of ward off bad spirits. They're seen as lucky.
- [27:04]
Caroline Vought
A lucky dick.
- [27:05]
Unknown
Yeah. And, you know, you get sex scenes on the walls of really quite beautifully decorated houses at Pompeii.
- [27:12]
Caroline Vought
That's so different from our modern perspective, isn't it? It's the fact when you go into, like, what is effectively a family home and there's just this huge erotic fresco on the wall of where the family would have been sat, it's like watching pornhub with your grandma. It's just so like the. What were they seeing when they looked at it? They can't have been seeing what we're seeing.
- [27:32]
Unknown
No, they certainly weren't. I mean, you know, I used to have a teacher here who said even if you could take you back to Pompeii and a TARDIS when you got out, you wouldn't understand anything it was that you were looking at because your vision is so kind of culturally contin in terms of where those sorts of pictures were. You get kind of really quite beautifully erotic scenes in corridor spaces. But the kind of. The more graphic sex scenes tend to be in bedrooms, so they're not in the dining room. For example, in the dining room at Pompeii, you might have pictures of a sort that you also wouldn't want in the dining room now, because they're often extremely violent, but they're not sex scenes.
- [28:10]
Caroline Vought
So we've got big penises kind of associated with good luck and warding bad things off, but also associated with animal lusts. I've heard a few other theories as to why the Greeks would make their packages so small. And I'll put them to you and you can tell me what you think of it. One of them, and this is quite a dark one, is that it's about representing a juvenile body. Because we know that the Greeks did have this culture of where an older man would take on a young teen boy as an apprentice, and there would be a sexual element to that. What do you think about that theory that what we're looking at is sort of children's bodies?
- [28:49]
Unknown
It depends. I mean, on Greek pots of the 6th and 5th centuries BC, you do indeed find young bodies depicted with genitals that suit the kind of putative age of that body. And you often find those bodies with older bearded men, sometimes Even in the 6th century, in what are obviously court scenes. So those bodies do exist. The sculptures, though, that we were talking about before Polykleitus spear carrier, for example. That's not a little boy's body.
- [29:24]
Caroline Vought
No, the Farnese Hercules, huge beard.
- [29:26]
Unknown
The Farnese Hercules certainly isn't right. These are. I mean, the Fanasi Hercules is an interesting one because, of course, he's son of Zeus, but he's got a mortal mum and, you know, he has to kind of. It's only by virtue of his labours that he winds up on Olympus. So is he a God? Is he a man? Is a real kind of moot question with him. But Polykleitos spear carrier, you know, if you look at his face, he looks about 18, 19, if you look at his body, looks more like 30, 35. But he doesn't look prepubescent. So that just doesn't work as a theory for those.
- [29:58]
Caroline Vought
No. And you've got, in a lot of examples that we were looking at this very neat little manscape that they've got of pubic hair, this very little delicate triangle that's almost just like pointing down in most of them.
- [30:09]
Unknown
Yeah, well, again, that's about nature versus culture. You know that in nature, hair grows everywhere.
- [30:16]
Caroline Vought
Yeah.
- [30:16]
Unknown
And, you know, just as I said, you might have been lucky enough to be born a boy, but you're not born a man. You have to work at being a man. You have to work at being cultured and a cultured body and a completely sort of wild body. A cultured body is one where it's preened and plumped at the gym and it might also be plucked. And so, you know, I think manscaping is the right kind of verb there.
- [30:41]
Caroline Vought
Another theory is that it's about making sure that these images aren't sexual. And I suppose if you had a great big swinging penis hanging off it, it would land differently.
- [30:52]
Unknown
It certainly would land differently, yes. I'm not sure, though, that by giving statues small genitals, you necessarily make them non sexy. You might make them non sexual. But erotics and pornography, they can be different categories. I mean, the power of desire is that it's always something that you're reaching towards and actually that you may not ever kind of consummate. And so I think a lot of these statues are. They're erotic. They have the potential to stimulate desire in their beholder. And the ones that are made in the 5th century BC, they combine those small genitals and that really beautiful chiseled form, very often with a gaze that doesn't look out but looks down to the ground. And the moment you turn your head and look down to the ground, that's we read that as Coyote, and we read it as flirtatious. And it's a sort of a means of asking or inviting the viewer to stare and become the active partner that we were talking about before. So desire is very much on the cards here. You're being asked to kind of excite them.
- [32:04]
Caroline Vought
Maybe that's it. Yeah. Like a tease thing. On a very practical level, it was suggested that they're small because big penises snap off easily. Statues.
- [32:15]
Unknown
That's also true. Right. If you go to museums today, you will see that anything that's made of marble in figurative form quite often has lost its penis, has lost its nose and has lost its arms. And that's because, you know, if a statue falls over, those are the first bits to take the hit. And so, yes, I mean, if a statue had a huge penis, then it would indeed snap off. It's also not very practical. Marble is extremely expensive material. You don't want to have too much wastage.
- [32:45]
Caroline Vought
No. And a myth has sort of sprung up that that was the Victorians going around chiselling all of the penises off statues because they were so shocked by it. But I was put straight on that by people in the British Museum who were like, no, they just snapped off.
- [32:58]
Unknown
That's right. I mean, that's not to say that censorship didn't happen, not just in the Victorian period, but, you know, way before that, too. But yes, I mean, unfortunately, there's a much more boring reason as to why a lot of statues no longer have their bits.
- [33:10]
Caroline Vought
So for your money, then, this is about portraying neatness and about preserving the lines of the male body and sort of not getting distracted by an appendage.
- [33:21]
Unknown
Yes, but it's also about control. I mean, the Greeks really put a premium on what they called encrateia, the need for self mastery. This wasn't. There was. This is not the same as self denial. It's about kind of putting yourself in situations that might kind of, you know, get you to act in ways that are uncivilized, but making sure that you don't. And, you know, when you look at these statues, yes. They look like they've spent hours and hours romping around to get the body shapes that they do, but they also look as though they're very much in control of their self in other ways. And I think it is about that, really.
- [33:56]
Caroline Vought
Why did it continue, do you think? Because control's a big one for the Greeks. But we can see these smaller packages being repeated for centuries after Renaissance art. We've got quite Little diddly ones there. Michelangelo's David, he's again quite coy.
- [34:13]
Unknown
Well, I mean, I think Rome has to take the hit for that in that, you know, if you ask what a Roman body looks like, well, Roman bodies representationally would traditionally be clothed. You think about Roman bodies, you think about togas or you think about armor. And actually the Romans thought that they didn't like the idea of Greek nudity. They didn't like the idea of a culture that spent all of its time in the gym. But then the Romans had an inferiority complex when it came to the Greeks. Rome was a late comer to the Mediterranean stage.
- [34:46]
Caroline Vought
Culture vultures.
- [34:47]
Unknown
Greek culture was absolutely where it was at. And as we've already talked about, you know, the Romans, they expand into Greece. They bring back all of this beautiful Greek art, a lot of it without clothes. And it goes on display in their porticos and in their temples. They get attracted by it, they want to own it, they adapt it, they copy it it, they commercialize it, they buy it on the art market, they put it in their villa gardens next to their swimming pools and in their own gymnasia. Roman emperors, when they want to show themselves to be virtuous, performatively male in the right kinds of ways, are sometimes depicted with togas. But increasingly, as the empire progresses, are given heroic Greek style bodies, some of which will have no clothes on. You know, Greece is part of the Roman Empire. You've got to appeal to those viewers too. And of course, you know, how does the 15th century experience antiquity? It does it through Rome, it doesn't do it through Greece, but it's rediscovering all of this visual heritage and that's then dictating what its heritage looks like. So, you know, if you want to paint an image of Venus in the 1500s, then it's no surprise that it should look like the Aphrodite of Knidos that we were just talking about that had been so copied by the Romans in so many different forms.
- [36:13]
Caroline Vought
I'll be back with Carrie after this short break.
- [36:22]
BetterHelp
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- [37:03]
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
What is dedication?
- [37:05]
Carrie Voot
The thing that drives me every day as a dad is Dariana. We Call him Day Date for short. Every day he's hungry for something, whether it's attention, affection, knowledge. And there's this huge responsibility in making sure that when he, he's no longer under my wing, that he's a good person. I want him to be able to sit back one day and go, we worked together. We did a good job.
- [37:25]
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
That's dedication. Find out more@fatherhood.gov brought to you by the U.S. department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council.
- [37:46]
Caroline Vought
As a counterpoint, I know we were talking about, you know, the penises, but I'm always interested. Did the Greeks do anything with vulvas? They just seem to have been hidden away for, like in art, like sort of mainstream art rather than pornography for an awfully long time.
- [38:01]
Unknown
Yeah. I mean, you do occasionally get some sort of demarcation with a little line gesture. Yeah. In pot painting and actually in figurines. But you're absolutely right that in monumental freestanding form, like the Aphrodite of Kmidos, she is without genitals in a sense. Of course, most of it was painted in antiquity. It's a bit unclear whether paint was used on some of these bodies. We have got some really exquisite terracotta figurines. There's one I can think of in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It actually comes from Egypt, but it shows an Aphrodite esque body with pubic hair. It's beautifully painted. But you know, I think you're absolutely right. That Aphrodite of Knidos, I think it'd be unlikely for her to have had any pubic hair that we were talking about manscaping before. But the need to pluck and preen the female body was there in antiquity already. Women were deemed to be wilder than men. And so you put their naked female form on display and there's even more of an imperative to kind of control it in some senses.
- [39:15]
Caroline Vought
So as a final question then, and we're into the realms of speculation here, I guess, because we'll never know it exactly, a narrative has arisen in popular culture looking at the genitals on these statues and sort of said that people back in the ancient world preferred a smaller penis. And then that's immediately contrasted with our modern obsession, our Freudian obsession with bigger is better, bigger, powerful. You know, we want it as big as King Kong's little finger and all of that nonsense. Do you think that like looking at those statues we could extrapolate anything about the lived experience of your day to day person? Do we Even have enough evidence to be able to say something like that is that they preferred smaller penises.
- [39:54]
Unknown
I don't think you can say that. I mean, they prefer them representationally in art, yeah. But in life, I can't think of any Greek sources off the top of my head, but I can think of Roman ones where, you know, people are talking about juvenile and satirical poets like this, talking about dick size in the bath, for example. And so the size of a penis was not a non question in antiquity. It is still a live question. And I think for all that, the Greeks might want to think of themselves as civilized and controlled and neat and that, you know, it's the barbarian other or it's the animal world or it's satyrs that have penises that can't be kept under control. Actually, you know, life isn't as easy as those binaries suggest. And they knew that as well as we do.
- [40:41]
Caroline Vought
Oh, Kerry, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much. And if people know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
- [40:48]
Unknown
Well, I don't have any website present really, so you just have to find me on the Cambridge University webpage.
- [40:55]
Caroline Vought
Fabulous. Thank you so much. You have been marvelous.
- [40:58]
Unknown
Thanks, Kate.
- [41:03]
Kate Lister
Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Carrie for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to email us your feedback on tiny penises, then you could email us@betwixtoryhit.com if you've enjoyed this, go to History, hit TV and watch our documentary on this very question. And they have a free trial, so it won't cost you a bean. Otherwise, join me back on the pod, wherever it was you found us today. Over the next month we will be diving betwixt the sheets of Queens. This podcast was edited by Tim Arstle and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer. Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, the history of Sex Scandal in Society, A podcast by History hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
- [41:59]
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
What is Dadication?
- [42:00]
Carrie Voot
The thing that drives me every day as a dad is Dariana. We call him Day Date for short. Every day he's hungry for something, whether it's attention, affection, knowledge, and there's this huge responsibility in making sure that when he's no longer under my wing that he's a good person. I want him to be able to sit back one day and go. We worked together. We did a good job.
- [42:21]
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
That's dedication. Find out more@fatherhood.gov brought to you by the U.S. department of Health and Human Services and the Ad Council.
- [42:29]
Holly Fry
Our Skin Tells a Story Join me, Holly Fry, and a slate of incredible guests as we are all inspired by their journey. Journeys with Psoriasis along with these uplifting and candid personal histories, we take a step back into the bizarre and occasionally poisonous history of our skin and how we take care of it. Whether you're looking for inspiration on your own skincare journey or are curious about the sometimes strange history of how we treat our skin, you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on our skin. Listen to our skin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.