He then fears that the same thing can happen to him-that not only could he lose his penis, but that he could be exposed and everyone will see that he does not have one. 'The classical example taken from Freud is that the little boy sees that his mother does not have a penis and this traumatizes him. Vanessa Sinclair told me over email when I posed the question to her. 'In psychoanalytic terms, castration is a core fear that everyone experiences, if not the core fear,' Dr. He accepted my counter offer and I accepted his genital drawing, only to throw it away later when my boyfriend refused to let me hang it in our apartment amongst the 'real art'-and when I saw the penis man back on Bedford the following week.Īsk a psychoanalyst and they'll tell you it's obviously Freudian. Somewhat disoriented by his pitch, and somewhat impressed with his entrepreneurship, I reached into my pocket and found a $10 bill. '$20?' he asked, waving his various shafts around. He told me he was leaving New York the next day to go back home to Africa, and he needed to unload as much of his art as he could before then. It all happened so quickly: I was walking down Bedford Avenue when a street vendor stopped me, pushing his framed, dick portraits in my path. Nothing sums up this confusion more than the time I paid money for a drawing featuring a scene of multiple anthropomorphic penises drinking beer together.

(There's certainly a reason why this article isn't asking 'Why do women draw vaginas on everything?') On a subconscious level, the scrawled outline of a phallus is instinctively as amusing to me as it is a symbol of threateningly unchecked masculinity. As a woman, I can't quite classify my relationship to the penis, drawn.

Penis shapes fixation