Artfully massive private parts around the globe.
Dona i Ocell, Barcelona, Spain
Dona i Ocell, which translates as “Woman and Bird”, is a two-for-one, a massive statue of a penis with a similarly massive vulva carved into the side of it and a tube atop the glans, topped by a set of bull’s horns. Commissioned by the city to attract visitors, it is one of the last pieces of work by pioneering Surrealist Joan Miró, completed just months before his death in 1983 with the help of his protege Joan Gardy Artigas. The size of it was supposedly very important to Miró, who knew he was dying and wanted to leave his mark on the city. The statue itself is about 72 feet high, putting the penis section at about 65 feet. The Catalan word for bird, ocell, is also a slang term for penis.
Diva, Pernambuco, Brazil
Unveiled in early 2021, just days after Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro vowed never to legalize abortion, Diva is a 110-foot bright red vulva made from resin-covered reinforced concrete and built into a Brazilian mountainside. The work by artist Juliana Notari was created as a comment on the phallocentrism of society, policing of women’s bodies, and the far right’s “problematization of gender”. It immediately proved incredibly controversial, drawing anger from the far-right. Thankfully, however, nobody has followed the example of an American student visiting the German vulva statue Pi-Chacán in 2014: he got stuck in it and required the efforts of twenty firefighters to get out.
Dirty Corner, Versailles, France
When this 200-foot-long sculpture was originally displayed in Milan it was referred to as “a cornucopia, an ear trumpet, a Tibetan horn”. With a move to Versailles, however, which came with restrictions for spectators to merely look at it rather than move through it as they originally had, artist Anish Kapoor began calling it “the queen’s vagina”. It was deemed by some of the press to be “pornographic provocation and attack against French identity represented by the figure of the Queen”. Kapoor saw it as representing the ongoing institutional fear of “the other”, something which was only accentuated when it was later daubed with racist graffiti, which Kapoor opted to keep as “scars”, only cleaning the sculpture of them when faced with criminal charges for “inciting racial hatred” by letting them remain.
Haesindang Park, Samcheog, South Korea
Penis statues are ten a penny—the world is full of them, from Bangkok’s penis shrine to Mongolia’s celibacy reminder to the six-foot marble one Demi Moore recently admired on vacation. But Haesindang Park has the most bang for anyone’s buck: hundreds of massive penises, some of them straightforward towering dongs and others surreal penis-people with pretty much every feature replaced with a phallus. There is even a working double-ended penis see-saw. The park has its origins in a tragic folk tale where a fisherman’s wife was taken by the sea, and all the fish left the bay out of sadness. They only returned after another fisherman urinated into the water, lured in by his penis, so a penis-based park made perfect sense.
Marree Man, Marree, Australia
In 1998, a mysterious and enormous image appeared on the ground of the Australian desert. It depicted a naked man, 1.7 miles from head to foot. Nobody ever came forward to claim credit, and despite investigations, no conclusion was ever reached about who was responsible for it, with the most likely artist responsible dying in 2002. While the figure’s penis isn’t particularly exaggerated or anything, the sheer scale of the figure means that its sensible-sized member is still some 900 feet long. More disproportionately penis-forward is the Cerne Abbas Giant, a 180-foot image carved into a hill in southern England around the tenth century sporting a 30-foot boner.
