Keyword

The Great Masculine Renunciation

Trousers & The Most Precious Ornament

Trousers & The Most Precious Ornament

A man in his own clothes is as much sexless as possible. He shaves his face so that, if he be young & fair, you’d not know but that he might be a girl, and any protuberance by which his sex might be known is carefully and shamefully suppressed. It is an organ of drainage and not of sex. It is tucked away and all sideway dishonoured, neglected, ridiculed and ridiculous – no longer the virile member and man’s most precious ornament, but the comic member, a thing for girls to giggle about – comic and, to nursemaids, dirty. ‘You dirty little boy, put it away.’

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The Fig Leaf Mentality

The Fig Leaf Mentality

On Power, Masculinity, Patriarchy and Man's Most Precious Ornament

It was a particular form of masculinity and male expression that Eldridge Cleaver believed had been suppressed through conventional male clothing and through the design of a new style of trousers wanted to ‘free up’. He said, ‘We’ve been castrated in clothing. My pants open up new vistas. I’m against penis binding. Men wear their penis either down the right pants leg or the left […] strapped to the leg.’

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