Fear of the Penis

What the narrow sense covers

Where the term is used literally it is described as a symptom, more often reported by women than men, and it behaves like other specific fears. It does not require an uncovered penis: the outline through thin fabric will do, as will accidental touch, hearing the word, or thinking about an erection. At the mild end it produces something like a panic attack. At the extreme end it is described in terms of fight or flight, with a person ceasing to be intimate with a male partner and avoiding mixed-gender places where revealing clothing is likely, from a gym or beach to a cinema or a living room with a screen on.

The proposed origins are the usual set:

• sexual trauma in childhood
• a medical condition such as dyspareunia
• inheritance, or inheritance combined with life experience
• sometimes nothing at all, a fortuitous origin Freud added a footnote suggesting the fear might come from the failure to keep the copulatory organs decoratively separate from the excretory ones.

Men have the condition too, and for them the reported consequence is difficulty consummating a relationship, out of a sense of vulnerability that is traced to childhood instruction that sex and its functions are evil, sinful and dirty. Being told later, as an adult, that romance is permitted turns out not to reverse the earlier lesson. Some men with it avoid sweatpants and light fabrics in public, which puts them on the same side of the problem as the people who fear them.

Two neighbouring coinages exist. Ithyphallophobia and medorthophobia are alternative names for the same condition. Medomalacuphobia, the fear of losing an erection, is offered as its antonym. In the most severe cases, combined with a psychiatric condition, the literature points at Klingsor syndrome and at ederacinism, both of which name self-inflicted genital injury.

What the broad sense does

Everything else the word does is rhetorical. It has been used to describe a man treating another man as a rival and a threat to his marriage. It has been used as an allegory for a general modern unwillingness to discuss the physiology of the young male body, on grounds of prudery or a puritan position that lands specifically on men and boys. It has been used as an epithet for lesbian or female asexual aversion to male sexuality. Fawzi Boubia defines it as hostility toward the stronger male gender. It has stood in for an aversion to procreation. In arguments about anti-male sexism it is deployed to name double standards in the legal system that turn on which set of genitals a defendant has. In human sexuality writing it appears as an adjective and only ever a disparaging one, attached to penetrative sex acts.

There is also a stray technical use: phallophobia has been implemented as an algorithm in studies of heuristics in robotic decision-making on themes of sexual temperance.

What that leaves

A word doing this much work is not doing any of it precisely. The narrow clinical sense is real and sparsely documented, as its counterpart for female genitals is, and treated with intensive counselling and therapy. The broad sense is a term of argument, and the two share a spelling rather than a subject. Where cultures speak of the male genitals as a single unit, the term also overlaps linguistically with castration anxiety, which adds a third thing it can be mistaken for.