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Dirt After Dark: Chalk Penises and Also Other Penises

Jumping off of this month's episode on chalk figures in the British countryside, let's give the big guy his due and talk about the Cerne Abbas Giant's giant dick. Since surely a single rude drawing does not an episode make, we get into the phenomenon of putting phalluses on things in the Roman world and the modern collegiate environment.

The Cerne Abbas Giant (Museum of Hoaxes)

Snail Shells Date England’s Cerne Abbas Giant to Medieval, Not Prehistoric, Era (Smithsonian)

A Psychoanalyst Explains Why Men Draw Dicks on Everything (Vice)

Why The Ancient Romans Drew Penises On Everything (All That’s Interesting)

Love, Sex and Marriage in Ancient Rome (Psychology Today)

Stone Phalluses of Pompeii (Atlas Obscura)

Naming of Parts: Gender, Culture, and Terms for the Penis among American College Students (American Speech)

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The Dirt Podcast

Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.