Phallacy

Life Lessons from the Animal Penis

By: Emily Willingham

Narrated by: Emily Willingham

A wry look at what the astonishing world of animal penises can tell us about how we use our own.

The fallacy sold to many of us is that the penis signals dominance and power. But this wry and penetrating audiobook reveals that in fact nature did not shape the penis - or the human attached to it - to have the upper...hand.

Phallacy looks closely at some of nature's more remarkable examples of penises and the many lessons to learn from them. In tracing how we ended up positioning our nondescript penis as a pulsing, awe-inspiring shaft of all masculinity and human dominance, Phallacy also shows what can we do to put that penis back where it belongs.

Emphasizing our human capacities for impulse control, Phallacy ultimately challenges the toxic message that the penis makes the man and the man can't control himself. With instructive illustrations of unusual genitalia and tales of animal mating rituals that will make you particularly happy you are not a bedbug, Phallacy shows where humans fit on the continuum from fun to fatal phalli and why the human penis is an implement for intimacy, not intimidation.

This program includes a downloadable PDF that contains illustrations from the book.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2020 Emily Willingham (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"This is a hilarious tour through a menagerie of dicks, and a ferocious guide to not being a dick yourself.” (Ed Yong, New York Times best-selling author of I Contain Multitudes)

“Phallacy is Dr. Emily Willingham's detailed, insightful, and funny cross-species biography of the penis. It's an entertaining romp that is as much about evolution as it is about emotion and egos. It shines a light on how we became so penis-centric and the resulting repercussions for science, society, and sex.” (Jen Gunter, MD, New York Times best-selling author of The Vagina Bible)

“Exuberantly witty and scathingly subversive, Willingham’s Phallacy takes a long-overdue look at the myriad ways that putting the penis, and maleness in general, at center stage have skewed many fields of scientific inquiry, from the study of evolution to Freud’s fulminations on psychoanalysis. An important and timely book.” (Steve Silberman, New York Times best-selling author of NeuroTribes)

Lots of bookmarks!

First book I’ve listened to that I made it a point to save bookmarks for hilarious moments I wanted to remember to tel people about later. So great and entertaining!

Seminal stuff. Buy this book - you won't get shaft

Brilliant author and scientist takes on a hard topic and creates an interesting read that won't go over your head. Seriously, it was very interesting. Dr. Emily Willingham has written what should be the go-to book on animal di**s. I listened to the audiobook and found the author's voice pleasant and thoroughly enjoyed her wit.

Hard to listen to. Good science. Too much bias.

Voice is hard to listen to. Science part in middle is good. Beginning and end are not about science - more authors opinion and bashing.

Science isn't fair sometimes

At first, the occasional biases presented by the author are a little annoying. But after some quick introspection realizing the title of the book is a play on words and that science by its very nature is incredibly biased, especially in terms of male and female differences, such quick diversions by the author become a welcome and enjoyable aspect of the book. As well as it is an incredibly informative book and a fun read.

Fascinating, skewering, snarkastic

This book is exactly what I needed: for years I’ve been the specific type of dude both genuinely fascinated by what animal penises illustrate about evolution, and likely to bring up examples at parties.

Emily Willingham provides an encyclopaedia’s worth of such examples, which is fun, but she also methodically anatomises the gaps and blind spots that have persisted in the literature because dudes were focused on dude questions, and shows how much more we can learn by broadening perspectives and research questions.

So I have far more examples for parties, but much more perspective on how much of what I used to say has to be revised and unlearned, which is truly useful.

Best of all, Willingham approaches all of this with an entertaining, merited, sarcasm, which really comes across where she inserts what are footnotes in the text as snarky asides. I generally enjoy author-read work, but this on in particular has a nuance of tone I’m glad to have heard her perform.

The concluding bit of cultural analysis seems a bit more rushed than the more detailed bulk of the book, but I genuinely appreciate having enough context to recognise “kind of dude who talks about animal penises at parties” to be something that emerged in the wake of the publication of one amateur comparative anatomy poster (which Willingham doesn’t think too highly of, and she has proved her standing as a judge of these things).

There are many, many things I won’t be able to think of the same way because of this book, including many of my previous assumptions.

Feminist Cry

I bought this book because I thought it was going to be an interesting book about human and animal penises and evolution from a biological standpoint. However, it is clear that the author is a staunch feminist and has allowed her view to influence her writing. At many times, it feels like she is insulting the male gender.

Not what I was expecting

I bought this book thinking it would be an insightful look into the world of animal physiology & behavior.
Instead the author frequently bashs men and includes her own opinion way too frequently for my liking.