ABSTRACT
The new emphasis on the penis has even raised it from the status of an object to that of a character: the penis of the leading man plays a leading role in Marco Ferreri's recent film, The Last Woman. The erect penis, which should be the sign of male power, has become instead the sign of his helplessness. The ways of portraying the penis today carry on many of the practices of preceding centuries. That part has been personified before, in the Roman god Fascinus for one. It must mix a tragic sense with the comic not in some Polonius-like layering of the modes, but in a way that is as rich and yet inevitably simple as the penis itself. In classical Greece the phallus was the very symbol of arete, the masculine ideal of virtue or nobility; it might also express a lack of control threatening to that idea.
