DDR: Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

 

I read this some time ago. Well, "read." I got very little out of it, and only remember the "schlupping sound" (ewww) and someone fucking the eye socket of a skull. So unless memory really kicks in as I read, this will essentially be my first reading.

A long time ago, one of my high school teacher friends called and told me he had assigned Naked Lunch to a group of his English students. I was quite taken aback. "Have you read that book?" I asked. He had not. He'd just heard that is was "Great." I relayed the two things I remembered from it (see above). "I'd better get those books back," he replied. 

Holy shit!

I'm not sure of the page count, as I get vastly different numbers from various sources, so I'll wait until I have the book in my hands for that. (Both LFPL copies were out, so I had to go e-book on it. Interestingly, the library also had an audiobook. Not sure I ever want to hear THAT, but time will tell.)

Day 1 (DDRD 2,831),  August 2, 2025

Read to page 

In addition to the usual fol-de-rol gushes preceding the text of the book, here's one that surprised me:

I mean...John Fuckin' Ciardi, man! His words mean a lot more than some crrrrritic. 

🕺

🕺

🕺

🕺

Ahem. Take 2.

(In the voice of Pinnichio's

Geppetto): Now you're a REAL book!

289 pages. ☮ uh 🎂.

Day 1 (DDRD 2,838),  August 9, 2025

Read from page 197 to page 259.

I started with the back material of the book (199 to 289) because that's where they put 

and

In the same spirit that compels me to watch DVD Extras before I watch the movie. I feel that it gives me greater insight into The Show. 

For instance: Burroughs talks about The Algebra of Need, which is really at the heart of this story...and maybe all of Burroughs' stories. Hell, maybe at the heart of ALL stories. "The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes, you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite." (201) 

Pretty grim. But that last metaphor reels in the words of Iggy Pop: "All the animals are running with the pack / I'm outside, I'll tell you why: I don't want to bite 'em back." ("Strong Girl," from the Instinct album)

And it's not just dope fiends, is it? All of us are bound by something: past abuse, insecurities, fear, desire...name your poison.

And actually,  Burroughs says the same thing (☝) a few pages later.

Now this: "The ill effects of marijuana have been grossly exaggerated in the U.S. Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror. Anyone given over to these alien vices deserves the complete ruin of his mind and body. People believe what they want to believe without regard for the facts." (224)

William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination by Oliver Harris (which sounds interesting) was referred to, and I found it on Internet Archive. One of the other results was a thing called Human Identity - Reality and Illusion by Leghtnis Beine, and that sounds very interesting,  too. (See...this always happens. One book leads to another which leads to another...etc.)

Addendum: Read to page 289. Yep. Well...no kids this afternoon, and kind of tired after a 90° softball game,  so I just dug in and kept reading. Some pretty weird shit in the outtakes. It struck me that Burroughs was pretty nondescript about sexual matters in his first three books, preferring the fade out to the microscope. But that's all over with now; very vivid descriptions of sexual activity, most of which would be called perverse, some of which was definitely perverse. Not titilating for me, but kind of grotesquely fascinating, I suppose. 

Okay. Now on to the text of the book itself. Tomorrow,  that is.

Day 2 (DDRD 2,839),  August 10, 2025

Read from page 1 to page 65.

New word for me:

de·cor·ti·cate

/dēˈkôrdəˌkāt/

verb

past tense: decorticated; past participle: decorticated

1. 1.

   technical

   remove the bark, rind, or husk from.

   "tamarind seeds were cleaned, roasted, decorticated, and pulverized"
2. 2.

   Medicine

   subject to surgical decortication.

Origin

early 17th century: from Latin decorticat- ‘stripped of its bark’, from the verb decorticare, from de- (expressing removal) + cortex, cortic- ‘bark’.

From HERE.

That sounds very unpleasant.


And speaking of unpleasant: "A beastly young hooligan, has gouged out the eye of me of his confrère and fuck him in the brain." (34)

And my memory tells me there's more eye socket fucking to come. No pun intended. 

Later...

Eye Socket Fuck (henceforth ESF) #2: Referring to the method by which he fixes the President, our humble narrator tells us, "Now I sometimes have to slip my penis under his left eyelid." (57)

Read to page 65...which is 1/3rd of the way through the "novel." " " because I'm not sure that it is a novel. There are a few identifiable characters,  but no character development, no plot. Just a series of unconnected stories about using drugs, having sex, or both. Lots of descriptions of anal sex (which it hurts me to read about, even though I've never been a participant on either end of that activity) and ejaculating penises. I'm finding it hard to believe that this is an important work. 

Day 3 (DDRD 2,840), August 11, 2025

Read to page 96. Might go back for more later, but I need a little break from constant anal sex, oral sex, hangings, and spurting cocks. (It really has been non-stop...so if that's what you're looking for, here it is. As for me...not so much.)

Read this and remember that my friend had assigned this book to a group of minors in a public high school: "A Javanese dancer in ornate teak swivel chair, set in a socket of limestone buttocks, pulls an American boy--red hair, bright green eyes--down onto his cock with ritual motions. The boy sits impaled facing the dancer who propels himself in circular gyrations, lending fluid substance to the chair. "Wheeeeeeeeee!" screams the boy as his sperm spurts up over the dancer's lean brown chest, one gob hits the corner of the dancer's mouth. The boy pushes it in with his finger and laughs: "Man, that's what I call suction!" (66)

That ain't your daddy's American Lit.

P.S. I Googled Why is Naked Lunch Considered a Classic Work and one of the things that came up was This American Life 546: Burroughs 101. And it's narrated by Iggy Pop! (HERE if you wanna.) 

ADDENDUM: read to page 131 = 2/3rds point. Have to admit, though, that I'm not enjoying this book...and that my primary response to it is revulsion. It's just non-stop pornography, really.

Day 4 (DDRD 2,841), August 12, 2025

Read to page 186, The End. A pretty unsatisfying read, and I would strongly recommend that you not waste your time on it as Idid. Twice. There's really nothing here, just disconnected savings, most of them pornographic. It's not illuminating. It's not entertaining. Hell, it's not even interesting. You'd get more out of sittin a dark room and listening to the rain drum on the roof for four hours. Then you would get out of reading this book.

Nevertheless,  I'm thinking about reading The Soft Machine next.

Glutton for punishment, I guess.

Page 139: "a horrible schlupping sound."

"Americans have a special horror of giving up control,  of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out." (179)

A Shake-speare Kind of Day

I'm standing outside these doors at the Baptist Hospital formerly known as East,  waiting for lunch to begin. The lunch crew are assembled with The Boss at the apex of the formation when I hear her say, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

I was not expecting that.

DDR: The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament by Jane Schaberg

Bulletin, Bulletin, Bulletin, this is a Bulletin, Bulletin, Bulletin

George Carlin bit. Didn't say it was funny. But it goes through my mind on a regular basis, and it's fitting here (methinks) for myself and the other four people who give a shit about what I write here. (And I'd like to personally thank every one of you: Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Thank you." Steve Martin bit. DSiwF.)

I've been on a bit of a William S. Burroughs kick lately. No, I didn't see that one coming either. But I rewatched Queer (2024) and loved it so much (***** = Must See) that I decided to read the book, which my local library just happened to have. And then I found out that Queer was a part of a trilogy (a loose trilogy, to be sure, but it is trilogy nonetheless), so I backtracked to the first book and read Junky, and while reading that I started nibbling at The Adding Machine, then finished Junky and went to book three of the trilogy, The Yage Letters, then checked out Naked Lunch and had started reading the first few pages of that, intending to begin in earnest today when it hit me: the book I'd gotten via interlibrary loan,  The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament by Jane Schaberg, was non-renewable and due August 15, and although I'd gotten a good start (179 of 379 pages), I'd been so absorbed in Burroughs that I hadn't even opened the book in a week, and it was obvious that I was going to run out of time if I started another book for my DDR. So I'm switching to glide. 

The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament...you're up! 200 pages, 13 days--less than 16 pages per day average. Piece of cake!

Day 1 (DDRD 2,832),  August 3, 2025

Read pages 180 to 210. 😊

"The isolated individual self is an illusion." (182)

When I was in the local Edgar Cayce: Search for God group (which I affectionately refer to as The Crazy Women's group because (1) most of the participants were female and (2) they were all crazy), one of the recurring themes was We Are All One person. The first time the leader said this to the group I involuntarily responded, "Well, I'm glad I came, then." Nobody laughed, but I still think that's pretty funny. 

"...in the moderately dualistic systems, salvation means the reunification of the male and female principle to an androgynous or asexual unity..." Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her * (188)

Reading this made me think about the role of sexuality in spiritual quests. Maybe the denial (and even the vilification) of sexuality is wrapped up in renouncing both male and femaleness. To be sexualty is to be immersed in some gender identity, thus it is not sex which is being "criticized," but gender identification, which limits the reach of the spirit.

* Available in its entirety here:

https://www.scribd.com/document/465374347/Elisabeth-Fiorenza-In-Memory-of-Her-A-Feminist-Theological-Reconstruction-of-Christian-Origins-The-Crossroad-Publishing-Company-1994-pdf

Day 2 (DDRD 2,833),  August 4, 2025

Hey, its a 2, 3, 4 day. We're back in the groove.

Read to page 240. 😁

" In many historical reconstructions of the empty tomb materials, then, Mary Magdalene is either a semi- fictional character (her name comes from ancient tradition, but the story about an empty tomb is theological fiction) or a woman who did not understand the significance of what she found, until men interpreted it for her through their own experience." (218) How's that for misogyny run amok?

At one point on page 238 (almost...there...), Jane Schaberg couples mainstream and malestream. A clever way to critique the patriarchal usurpation of The Story. Im wondering if there's another level to it, though. Malestream is so close to maelstrom that autocorrect tried to throw it in instead of Malestream. And a maelstrom is, as we all know, "a situation or state of confused movement or violent turmoil." 

140 pp2g

Day 3 (DDRD 2,834),  August 5, 2025

Read to page 270. 

Lots of talk about John Crossan...who seems kind of assholy. For instance, on page 252:

"Jane, if I could give you the empty tomb, I would."

WTAF?

I do wish that Jane Schaberg would (1) stop invoking Virginia Woolf...in fact, I wish shed left Virginia Woolf (whom I live dearly) out if this completely. Her constant invocations if Wolf remind me of people who have bumper stickers proclaiming that they live their corgis. Who the fuck cares? (2) learn he proper use of punctuation--especially semi-colons. (For the record, "In the English language, a semicolon is most commonly used to link (in a single sentence) two independent clauses that are closely related in thought...." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semicolon) That's not difficult to understand, is it?

Another book I'd like to read: Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion by Jack D. Zipes. Not at the library, hoopla, or Internet Archive, but can be had for about $10 from Thrift Books. Here's the quoted line which hooked my upper lip: "The fantastic has liberating potential, can be seen as 'inverting and subverting the world with hope,' in the words of Jack Zipes." (255) 

We have a new contender for the most misogynistic statement of all time: "Kraemer remarks that for Philo "the inclusion of women was facilitated by the fact that they were of relative old age (probably menopausal), childless, apparently virgins, and probably never married. That is, while possessing the bodies of women, they were in all significant respects, male." (267)  I mean...SERIOUSLY??? And Schaberg doesn't even comment on this. 🧠 🎆 

So Woman is defined by sexual activity. That is some really outrageously sick shit. My daughter already ticks off the last 3 things listed, and she's 33 years old. I guess in 12 more years she ceases to be a woman, then? What utter bullshit. 

I was going to follow that with a boiling pot emoji,  but got no image for boiling and got this 😋 for pot. Kind of refuses the whole anger thing, but let me just add thus: Fuck Philo. And Kraemer. And Schaberg,  too, for not protesting even a little bit.

Day 4 (DDRD 2,835),  August 6, 2025

Read to page 300.

Y'know, for a scholarly work, this book has a lot of proofreading errors. Things like this

are really starting to annoy me.

Oh, look, another one:

Rough going today. I feel like Schaberg is spinning her wheels...and spending too much time on supposition. 

Day 5 (DDRD 2,836),  August 7, 2025

Read to page 330. Which means tomorrow should do it. And there will be much rejoicing, for verily I say unto you that whilst this tome does yield up some interesting figs of knowledge, I would recommend that you not spend your time on it. I'd rate it at **. There's just too much dillydallying around, too much Virginia Woolf, too much angst, too much anger, too much supposition, and too many errors. 😞

"I wonder in particular how much scholarly emphasis on the empty tomb traditions as crassly physical is attributable to male notions of female piety, and sexist identification of women with the flesh and death (womb/tomb), the uncanny." (303)  Having spend over 300 pages...about 10 hours...with Jane Schaberg, I feel that I can justly say that I think this is bullshit. Maybe I'm being unjust, maybe I'm missing the deep crevices of nuanced, but there are some big assumptions in that statement, and it seems to me to be teetering on the edge of paranoia. At any rate, this was the straw that cracked T 11. I'll finish this book, of course, but after that I'm finished with Schaberg. I want more facts/evidence, fewer assumptions and speculations. 

And fewer errors in the text.

Public Domain

ADDENDUM: Decided to read a few more pages, hoping to ease my sufferings tomorrow. And ran across another book which sounds interesting: Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism by April . Unfortunately it's not available at my local library or Internet Archive, and its very pricey (I saw prices ranging from a low if $50 to a high of over $1,000). But here's an interesting thing that April DeConnick had to day which caught my attention: "Mysticism is erotic theology...."

Yep.

Read to page 340. 25 pages to go!

ADDENDUM 2: Found a bit of Paradise Now: Essa630m-CcwC&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

So I'll be having some of that peach pie for dessert.

Day 6 (DDRD 2,837),  August 8, 2025

Read to page 379, The End.

Here's a line which pretty much sums up my problems with Schaberg's methodology: "And it is not what I want John 20 to me." (352) Not "This is not what John 20 means" or even "I don't think that this is what John 20 means." Not an assertion which is then backed up by facts. A desire. A supposition. 

And the overuse of Virginia Woolf is astounding. Here's page 354. The sections bounded by red are direct quotations from Woolf:

I love Virginia Woolf. I did a study of her work in college and read most of her novels. But this (⬆) is just craziness in a book of theology. He'll, its crazy in any book not written by Virginia Woolf. 

I'm beginning to feel that I've wasted my time here. My vision of Mary Magdalene as Jesus' number one disciple has been affirmed, but that was already a strongly held belief. What facts have I gained? Hmmm.

The rest is silence.

DDR: The Yage Letters by William S. Burroughs & Allen Ginsberg

 I don't feel like I'm finished with William S. Burroughs yet. And although it isn't his third book, The Yage Letters is the third book in The Yage Trilogy. (Or perhaps more properly The Naked Lunch Trilogy. "...the trilogy to which, in late 1953, Burroughs originally applied the title “Naked Lunch” — texts published separately as: Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters." https://realitystudio.org/scholarship/confusions-masterpiece/  But that would be confusing, so Yage it is.) Unfortunately, neither the library nor Libby nor hoopla had a copy of it. Internet Archive had this

...but they also showed me this:

Note the Borrow Unavailable. Hmmm. 

Yage is listed as having 84 pages, Redux 184. That's a big difference. 

And now it's time for...A Closer Look.

So yeah...I'm wanting Redux. No time to order it, no Kindle version available. But wait, what's this?

I'm not a big fan of audiobooks. They tend go put me to sleep. In fact, I often use one for just that purpose, and if I set the shut diff timer for 15 minutes, I almost never make it to that point, so strong a soporific is this for me. But in this case, I'm going to give it a go. In tandem with the original publication. 

You know, I doubt that there's any writer who has been more subject to Restored / Expanded versions of their works than William S. Burroughs. Is that because he continued to rework his texts, or because his original works were subject to such strict censorship by editors? 

Okay. 184 pages, then. Though I won't be able to track pages very well. Guess % will have to do for this one.

Day 1 (DDRD 2,829),  July 31, 2025

"Read" to 33%...approximately page 61.

Well. The Editor's Introduction accounts for quite a few of the Redux version's 100 added pages: it ends at 59 minutes...about 20% of the whole Redux book. (This would equal approximately 37 pages.

According to the Editor's Introduction, Queer was supposed to be the sequel to The Yage Letters, not vice versa as I had thought. So...Burroughs wrote Junky first, then immediately started work on Queer. But the house that was going to publish Junky (Ace) wanted more material, so Burroughs strip-mined Queer for some of that material. (Thus some of the Restored Text of Queer was material taken back from Junky. Then he wrote the "letters" which constitute The Yage Letters * But it wasn't published until 10 years after Junky  (1963), and Queer wasn't published until 1985, after most of Burroughs' other works had seen print. What a convoluted bibliography! 

After the Editor's Introduction, there's a section entitled "The South American Book Might Turn Into Something of Interest." It seems to be more Editor Introduction. In it, we add further confusion to the whole bibliography affair when we get a reference to "From Naked Lunch Book 3: In Search of Yage." Also, "Whether the letters of In Search of Yage are authentic records or literary works, or whether we attribute them to some composite figure inhabiting the interzone between fact and fiction, a hybrid of William Burroughs and his persona, William Lee, changes how we read them, and behind the received version of how these letters were written there lies another story altogether."

Also, part of The Yage Letters was "cannibalized" to form a part of Naked Lunch. Thus at this point I say ⚐⚐⚐⚐⚐.

ANYway...this section ends at 1:33:15, which is 33% of the book...thus approximately 61 pages. Which means that Redux doesn't include that much "new" Burroughs material. And there's also a 27 minute section at the end of the book which I'd guess is editorial commentary, so maybe indicating even less "new" Burroughs material...like maybe jyst 20 pages or so?

* "Harris established that the 1953 letters were in fact largely fabricated from notes and a prose narrative which Burroughs first wrote." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yage_Letters) 

P.S. The audio book thing worked out okay. I am glad to be switching to text for the next (and major) part of the book, though.  I think I'll play the audiobook along as I read just to see what kind of changes the editor made from his comments in the introduction(s). It seems like it was primarily punctuation and spelling stuff.

P.P.S. I have had a lot of visitors from Brazil in the past day...1.89 K. O que houve com isso? I dunno, but 

Valeu pela transmissão, Brasil!

Stopped at page 19 (2:02:03, 43%). The new version of Internet Archive is a pain in the ass. If you stop reading, when you start back up it opens to page 1. As for the audio vs. text, there's almost no difference at all. I noticed a few times when the reader did a contraction that wasn't it the text if added a shirt word (like "an"), but they might have jyst been Reader lapses. At any rafe, they make no difference whatsoever, so I'm not very impressed with this whole Redux business as if now.

P.P.P.S. Oops. My mistake. If you hit the little bookmark symbol on the left of the screen on Internet Archive, you can set a bookmark, and when you reload the page later you can do he same think to get back to the page you marked. Not as smooth as the old system nor so wide as a church door, but t'will do.

And furthermore...I read a nice review of The Yage Letters Redux in Rain Taxi*. You can check it out HERE.

* Which, by the way, has published a half-dozen or so of my book reviews. 🔴 [Actually it was 8. I checked.]

Day 2 (DDRD 2,830),  August 1, 2025

"Read" to 39.

The guy who reads the "Bill Lee" sections--the majority of the book--is terrible. It sounds like he's trying to do an imitation of Burroughs' voice, but it's a bad imitation, and he ends up sounding angry about everything.

Ah-ha! There's a footnote on Page 42 that wasn't included in the Audiobook. It's a good footnote, too:

Wonder why they left it out.

An added section! "Roosevelt After Inauguration." Available on several sites, like THIS ONE. Pretty short, but worth perusing. Fits in well with the current political scene in the US of A. Oh...correction. The link text isn't the whole thing that's read on the audiobook...though it does include a YouTube video of Burroughs reading this Reddit version, so there's that. This bit is so much like Trump's moves that it's uncanny. 

This first section ("In Search if Yage") ends at 3:16:06 / 69% / page 49. The next section ("Seven Years Later") is mostly Ginsburg, so some relief from that obnoxious reader's voice. 

Added Ginsburg section: about going to a doctor, and only a few lines long. Very skippable.

Another section when Ginsburg is talking about a man preparing a drug for him has some different FD's just a few lines. It makes no difference whatsoever.

In addition to a better reader (who seems to be imitating Ginsburg), this section has two drawings and a poem. Some minor variations throughout, but none substantial.

The Burroughs reply letter which ends this section (which is not included in the audiobook) is a pretty interesting note on cut up technique...obviously very early in Burroghs'  experiments with Brion Gysin's "discovery." Strangely, this letter is signed William Burroughs instead if Bill Lee.

This section ends at 3:39:28 / 77% / page 66.

Then: "Epilogue." Ends at 3:45:44 / 79% / page 72. And that's it for the original version of the book. (The remaining pages are either blank or lists of other City Lights books.) So that leaves 21% of the book,  which would amount to approximately 39 pages. Let's see what we've got there.

First up, Appendix 1, a description of yage preparation...parts of which were familiar, I think repeating lines from earlier on in the book.

Then Appendix 2, a Burroughs letter. Lots about centipedes.

Appendix 3, 4...more, more, more.

Time for a break, I think. I'm at 3:58:16, 83% of the way through. Probably will finish this off later today.

The LFPL has two copies of Naked Lunch Restored Edition). Surprisingly, both are out. So I put in a request, but as I will be needing it tomorrow, I checked out an e-copy. So I guess I'm still on this William S. Burroughs Train. 

Coinky Dinky Time: I've been following John Porcellino's work for some time now, and when I (recently) found out that he had a Facebook page, I started following that, too. And today, just a few hours after I wrote about Brion Gysin (who seems to have invented the cut cup method of writing) popularized by William S. Burroughs, this appeared in my Facebook feed:

No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Day 3 (DDRD 2,831),  August 2, 2025

"Read" to Page 184, The End. The last sections have a little bit of repeated matter, but most of it is new, including ore material from Ginsberg. So I guess the Redux is worth seeking out. (I'd doubted that before.) I'm becoming interested in Ginsberg. "One day death will vomit me out of this body." He seems like a gentle, wise man. 

So now...I think it's going to be Naked Lunch. Not sure how I feel about that, but time will tell.

Queer (2024)

 

This was one of the few movies I went to see in the theater by myself. The last one before this was Batman v. Superman (2016). And before that...I can't even remember one. But I really wanted to see this, and didn't want to wait for it to come out on a streaming service. I was pretty blown away by the movie. Then at the end, there's a scene where Daniel Craig walks into an empty hotel room and looks into a tiny model of the hotel that he's in and sees himself walking around. At that point the screen went black, strobe lights started flashing, and I thought, "That is the weirdest ending to a movie I have ever encountered." Turns out it was a fire alarm, and I had to leave the theater without watching the final couple of minutes of the movie. When it finally came out on HBO I watched those final minutes. It was literally just a couple of minutes, and nothing really substantial happened, but I did feel a sense of completion, nonetheless.

Then I decided to read the novel, which I did in 3 days, and there were so many points of interest for me: things that changed my understanding of the movie and things that were left out of the movie and things that were added to the movie... that I decided I needed to watch the movie again. I did, and I found it to be incredibly intense. I have to admit that some of the homoeroticism made me uncomfortable, but behind that the power of the depiction of obsession and yearning really moved me. The director did some pretty brilliant things to bring William Lee's feelings to the screen, and I could only conclude that this was a great movie. And that I would be watching it again pretty darn soon.

I was also really impressed by Daniel Craig. I have always liked him, but his acting in this movie was far beyond anything I have seen from him before. And it was a brave role for him to take on. He risked alienating most or even all of the audience that had made him famous and wealthy. My hat is definitely off to him.

 🎩 

P.S. Although there are some very strong homerotic moments, there are only two brief scenes where penises are seen, and they're just hanging limply and nothing is done to or by them.