"Body" by Bob Flanagan (High Risk)

Nail & Board, Meet Bob's Penis

In The Serpent and the Rainbow, the villain ties Bill Pullman to a chair and positions a spike into his crotch. He asks if he wants to hear him talk and the villain says “No, I want to hear you scream” and drives the spike in with a hammer. After dropping him off with bloody underwear, Pullman's voiceover assures us that he didn't hit anything major. He just pierced the skin around the balls. The audience needed that reassurance, else the thought of a bleeding penis would be too distracting.

Bob Flanagan offered no safety net.

At age 14, Bob Flanagan was a poster boy for cystic fibrosis, a condition that he describes as coughing up mucus as thick as pudding. Living with that pain excited him. He wanted more. At 28, he became a BDSM performance artist with Sheree Rose, his partner. He's read poems while Sheree pelted him with food. In his most famous act, he nailed his penis to a board. In the posthumous documentary Sick: The Life and Death of SuperMasochist Bob Flanagan, he discusses how he used BDSM serves as therapy for the lifelong body horror.

If you are familiar with the work of Bob Flanagan, this article is not surprising. He talks about Sheree hitting him in public. He enjoys the attention. He relates how the head of his penis is pierced and attached to his taint. If he gets erect, he's in pain and then he's aroused. That makes things worse. Or better depending on your perspective. Finally, he speaks of the first time he drove a nail into his penis.

If you aren't familiar with his work, your reaction will vary depending on whether you have a penis. I personally never want to read it again or contemplate Bob's habits. He knows that he's freaking people out with his hobbies and he enjoys the squirming. People actually paid money to see him engage in self-torture.

In many ways, he was entitled to his fun. Bob Flanagan lived under a death sentence where he choked on his own mucus. In a few years, it'd kill him. So he got off on the pain. He loved the humiliation. His girlfriend smacked him around and pissed on him. In a Nine Inch Nails music video he played a torture victim, but every torture (crushing genitals, pulling on nipples, penis yanking) is something he used to do on a regular basis.

Thankfully, it's a short essay. Like many essays in this collection, this serves as an advertisement for the writer. If you think that you want to see a performance artist driving nails into his penis, then Bob Flanagan is your guy. If you find yourself sickly fascinated by all the eunuch stories on Game of Thrones, then you know which documentary is going to give you the same thrill.

I can't say that I see the appeal.

One day I will have enough paid subscribers not to ask for donations to my gofundme. Sadly, today is not the day.

Apple TV has that documentary.

I published Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mystery. It has nothing to do with penises getting nailed to boards. Victorian literature rarely does.