On Christmas Eve, Swedish street artist Carolina Falkholt announced her big ball-less Broome Street dick on Instagram ("NO TIME 4 BALL$$," she wrote).

Three days later, after much controversy, that building's landlord had begun painting over her four-story tall lifelike phallus.

Falkholt shared this statement with Hyperallergic:

We live in cultures where sexual violence and sexual abuse are constantly happening. And there are a lot of raped and abused children who have lost their voices due to the shame that comes with having their own bodies violated at a young age. No more bodyshaming. Talking about these subjects in public space is a must for a healthy, nonviolent community/world. And the dialogue created around feminist public art pieces raises awareness. Art is one of the only places left where we can truly be free and discuss whatever difficult topics there are, since art has the ability to translate and transform language in any direction possible.

Enormous penis pops up in NYC and Local Residents Complain About Penis Mural on Broome Street

Thanks, Dixie!

photo via Carolina Falkholt Read the rest

A huge wooden penis has been, er, erected atop Mount Oetscher, 6,211 feet in the Austrian Alps. From Metro:

The Oetscher ski lift operators were equally puzzled by the penis, but seemingly embraced the artwork as a future tourist attraction. One wrote jokingly on social media: ‘With us, not only winter is coming.’

The operators have however asked the ‘creative artist’ to ‘secure the object sufficiently’ as they fear it might not withstand a storm.

Jaelyn the Alien, aka Baby J, says:

"So this music video was inspired by a numerous amount of recent events that include random people on the internet (meaning instagram,twitter and SNAPCHAT users) sending me pictures/nudes of their penises. Whether that is them jacking off or just the classic penis picture. This video is my response to the people who send me their revealing photographs.

(ItsBabyj1, thanks UPSO!)

Read the rest

Thomas Manning, 64, is recovering after receiving the first penis transplant in the United States. Manning had his penis amputated in 2012 due to penile cancer. It took 15 hours for surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital to complete the transplant, medically known as a "gentitourinary vascularized composite allograft." The surgery involved "grafting the complex microscopic vascular and neural structures of a donor organ onto the comparable structures of the recipient." According to the surgeons, the procedure could someday be used for gender reconstruction. From CNN:

Dr. Dicken Ko, director of the hospital's Regional Urology Program, said the objectives of the surgery were primarily to reconstruct the genitalia so that it appeared natural, followed by urinary function and hopefully sexual function. However, Ko added that while sexual function is a goal, reproduction is not, because of a concern surrounding the ethical issues of who the potential father may be.

Andrew Wardle suffers from a rare medical condition that prevented him from developing a penis. The 40-year-old man claims that he has been intimate with more than 100 women and most of them never knew he was missing a member.

“I knew my way around a woman’s body, I knew my way around their mind,” Wardle says. “I was very confident in bed of what I could do to them so they wouldn’t come near me and they were finished and I was fine.”

And when that didn't work, he told his partners not to bother because recreational drugs, or kidney disease, made it impossible for him to get an erection at the time.

Wardle is currently undergoing procedures to have a penis constructed from muscle tissue. His story is the subject of a new TV documentary.

(The Independent) Read the rest

In December, Stellenbosch University Dr. Andre van der Merwe performed a penis transplant on a man whose own was amputated after a (majorly) botched circumcision led to gangrene. Van der Merwe says that his patient just informed him his girlfriend is four months pregnant. Read the rest

For once, the answer to a question in the headline is, "Well, quite possibly."

It's been 100 years since a well-documented case of penis captivus — i.e., penis-stuck-in-vagina syndrome — appeared in the medical literature. But that doesn't mean it's a total myth. The BBC's Health Check discusses the physiological mechanisms that could lead to such an unpleasant event and explains why there are lots of anecdotal stories surrounding something that's thought to be "vanishingly rare" from a medical perspective. Hint: While very, very, very few people end up needing medical treatment for penis captivus, there may be many more who get temporarily-but-disconcertingly stuck for a few seconds.

Some rights reserved by ganesha.isis Read the rest

From Retraction Watch: The Indian Journal of Surgery has retracted a 2011 paper entitled "Penile Strangulation by Metallic Rings". The reason: The authors apparently self-plagiarized the report from an earlier 2005 paper. Please insert your own jokes here. Read the rest

First: When shown images like the one above and asked to choose which men they found more attractive, women cared significantly more about body shape than penis size. (Also, it's worth noting that the image above is meant to show you an average, actual human guy in the middle and the extremes of body shape and penis size that were shown to the women on either side of him. In reality, the women were shown a full spectrum of images mixing different body types and penis sizes).

Second: The hypothesis (that human women sexually selected human males to have the larger-than-other-primates junk they are blessed with today) comes with some big questions, including the obvious — flaccid penis size does not correlate well to erect penis size.

Third: As Faye Flam points out at The Knight Science Journalism Tracker, the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences might need a new acronym (or, at least, different subject matter).

Here's a link to the actual study Read the rest