measuring up

Music: Psychic TV: Allegory and Self When asked if he would pose nude on a forthcoming album, Enrique Iglesias announced that he would not. "Maybe I have not got the biggest penis in the world," he said to a British tabloid. "Maybe if you had the biggest penis in the world, you would sell records. But I don't. I could actually have the smallest penis in the world out there." Elsewhere apparently he joked that his next product line would not be related to music, but what you do to it: a new product line, perhaps titled "It's the Motion," of extra-small condoms. The interest in such candid admissions prompted Igleisas to reframe the context of his remarks: "It's not true and hurtful to me and my girlfriend." Apparently "it" refers to the claim that Enrique has a small penis, but it's hard to tell. Context, he stresses, is the "out of" he's got himself stuck-into.

From a rhetorical standpoint, Igleisias just destroyed any purchase in (public) masculinity--not when he joked he was small (which, for many of us, is endearing), but when he back-tracked and claimed "regular" status, saying that the tiny-dick snickers were "hurtful" to him and his famously hottie partner, Anna Kournikova (link photo is barely WS: "golly, what's in there?"). The celebrity self-disclosure of insecurity as a form of security only works if you stick to your gun(n)(-s): Shock-Cock-Jock Howard Stern is famous for bemoaning the size of his member, and he never shies away from the disclosure. Over six years ago the lead singer of Sugar Ray, Mark McGrath, got into a "mine's smaller" debate with Stern on the air, creating more media frenzy over "size." The confessional display works only because each man's claim to the phallus is not reduced to the penis; the male sex-right and privilege afforded to those sexed "male" is claimed via the autonomy of success or simply via declaration of independence. For example, McGrath is now a spokesperson and television host, in addition to leading an increasingly INXS-sounding punk/ska troop, proving that it's not the dick that matters; it's the semblance of autonomy that matters. Those readers who followed my "biconic" predictions for Rock Star INXS will recognize--with a yawn--this reading. Similarly, Stern lets it all hang out there--offensive bits and all--while establishing his claim to the phallus. Here is a man who admits to going to psychotherapy four days a week, but who just signed a 5 million dollar contract for a three years on "serious," I mean SIRUS, radio (and just who is he dating?) Stern is like Zizek in reverse, in so many ways.

(As an aside, with winks: the phallus is not a penis; it represents signification itself, complete autonomy, the agency of the signifier or the power to signify as such. Strictly speaking, no one really "has" the phallus—that is the joke, or better, the joke on us. Anything that seems to move on its own accord is "phallic," including cars; for example, they seem to come and go on their own, like in car commercials or in that horrible horror-b, The Car and its cousin, Maximum Overdrive. Newborn babies are also phallic, as are the tummies of expectant moms, and, of course, the penis is too. The joke about the penis having a "mind of its own" is case in point: it moves on its own. So, the parenthetical story here is that in our culture men are associated with the penis because, like their penis, they are supposed to be independent, autonomous, self-sufficient, and so on; the feminine is associated with sensitivity and, therefore, dependency.)

So what do we make of the backsliding Enrique? His comment that the "it" is hurtful is certainly amphibolous. I think the key to the whole mystery is in, as Al Jorgensen has put it, the House of the Mole.

The last time Enrique made page six (or here in the states, now page two) was when he had his "trademark" mole removed in a bloody, five minute operation back in 2003. He reported being astonished that so many people noticed. After weathering the publicity of the mole's removal, he said that it was removed because the doctor warned that could become cancerous (we need to tell Cindy Crawford, I guess, 'cause we don't want her new career as a furniture collection putter-togetherer destroyed by melanoma!).

One is removed because it is too big in public; the other is bemoaned because it is too small in public. None of this has to do with the actual "private," you see: things there are just fine . . . or not, as apparently there is some degree of implosion for Enrique!

Alfred Armstrong points us to an odd book, Moles and their Meaning(1909) by Harry De Windt, which may help us to decipher the secret meaning behind Enrique's public/private protuberances. De Windt claims that " every mole upon the face of man or woman has upon some other portion of the body a corresponding birthmark, the position of which can generally be located with startling accuracy." Based on the position and coloring of Enrique's departed mole, Armstrong points us to the following diagnosis in De Windt: "Denotes misfortune, but only at an advanced age. Youth and middle age shall be peaceful and prosperous. This sign is specially favourable to the knowledge of secret and occult things - a marvellous and intuitive reader of human character." Perhaps his current engagement is the measure of "advanced age," and therefore, the hurtfulness of lack.

What should intrigue us about these popular protuberances--one above, the other, below; one too big, the other, too small-- is that they have come to signify fulfillment of manhood in the popular imaginary. Insofar as the star system functions for us as a screen for projected fantasy, celebrity skin functions to engage us far beyond the register of lust. Enrique is quite a looker, and so the subconscious logic here is that the mole, like the penis, is a measure of prowess (and threat). Like Samson's mane, the removal of the mole threatened to diminish Enrique as a signifier of fully realized manhood at the very moment that what props his status as a bearer of this signifier is the beauty myth, something that has traveled to the male celebrity shortly after the advent of the cinema. In other words: what made Enrique truly a man was that ugly ass mole sitting in the field of a very pretty face; he removed it. That mole signified a lot in culture; now he despairs he cannot find condoms to fit his penis, the "mole that counts." Then he "takes back" his joking desperation. It's that last gesture that undoes him: now he's really a man. No one likes the Real.