The Prostitute, The Comedian -- And Me
by Tracy Quan(Page 5)
TQ: I wonder if you would have the patience to be a hooker. If you were in the profession, I think you'd be in a more flamboyant area of the trade.
CP: I could have been a fabulous dominatrix if this had been more available twenty years ago. I could have made a fortune and paid off every bill I ever had in my life! Fifteen years ago, when I wrote about nipple clamps in my chapter on Michelangelo, S&M was still in very small esoteric areas of the urban scene. By the time Sexual Personae got into print -- that's how long it's taken -- now S&M is everywhere. My period of experimentation was before all this. If I were young now, I'd certainly be experimenting with S&M because my mind was moving in that direction. But it happened too late for me.
TQ: S&M was once an elite phenomenon. Why is it now so popular in American society?
CP: It also happened in imperial Rome. In the old days, Rome was like our New England. You were, like, dutiful and you thought of the state and the good of Rome. There were all kinds of sumptuary laws -- you couldn't spend money on jewelry, there was a certain way to behave. It was very simple, prudent, frugal, industrious. Suddenly, the culture got very large. It moved from republic to empire, from Rome within Italy to this Mega-Empire! The movie "Cleopatra" with Liz Taylor is very good (even though it was considered a bomb) because it shows that great moment of transition from the old republic into the new empire. And that is when people became much freer. My conclusion is that S&M comes back when people are most apparently free. As religion breaks down, as government and law and order break down, S&M sex bizarrely reappears.
TQ: Another thing about the sexual culture of the classical period -- in Sexual Personae, you point out that a smaller phallus was considered desirable in ancient Greece. How did the preference for the larger phallus evolve?
CP: Most of the world has probably always esteemed a large penis, except for Ancient Greece. I think that was an exception to the rule. In Greece, there was a period of interest in proportion -- they were working out the ideal proportions of the human body. (You know, the same period when they were trying to figure out the dimensions of the Parthenon.) They decided the head should be one-sixth of the total body. The penis, in proportion to this, can't be that big.
Roman statues were in the style of Greek nudes, and nudes that survived from the Greco-Roman period always had small penises. In art, the penis has often been extremely small, imitating the Classical Greek style. Women who went to museums in the nineteenth century and saw these nudes were probably very surprised when they got married and realized the actual proportion a penis has to the male body!
