PHALLIC SYMBOLS!1!11!!

Starting of with this will hopefully ruin your day. I couldn't actually find the right video that I was looking for, but it was a segment from the Colbert Report called "Mysteries of the Ancient Unknown" it was basically ten minutes of this man (Williams Tapley) talking about phallic symbols in the Denver International Airport (along with interviews of staff and songs!)

If this chapter didn't prove that we are all naturally perverted, I do not know what will. I would have never thought that a bowl would represent the female sex organ (along with keys being a phallic symbol, keys in the bowl a reference to sex, etc) but that is exactly what happened in Ann Beattie's Janus. Of course the bowl was a gift from her love affair, and of course her actual husband was not allowed to put his keys in said bowl, but come on. The whole bowl and key this is a bit nonsensical when you ask me. Don't get me wrong- I think it is absolute genius, but some of the ideas are far fetched. Maybe I'm just the only seventeen year old boy who never thought putting a key into a bowl represented sex, but being a seventeen year old boy MOST things represent sex as is so I probably should have caught that one.

Along with the bowl, chalices, grails, rolling landscape, etc there are a very endless possibilities of what could be a female sexual organ, but mostly EVERYTHING seems to be a phallic symbol these days.
Pencil? Phallic symbol
Swords? Phallic symbol
Guns? Phallic symbol
Keys? Phallic symbol
Buildings? Phallic symbol
Hot dogs, Twinkies, and even every aspect of the Denver National Airport. Give me a break. The only things that AREN'T phallic symbols these days are apparently symbols of female sexuality/sex organs.

Where did all of this nonsense begin, you ask? None other than Freud. It is solely because of his Interpretation of Dreams that we are doomed to a life of implied sexual symbols. Okay~~ that WAS a harsh statement and I'm positive that there were many references to sexual organs before then, but this was the first thing that "unlocked the sexual potential of the subconscious". I would like to imagine what life was like directly after this was published. I am imagining a huge frenzy of writers running around trying to think up any innuendo they could. It probably looked something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2VAn-U5KTo (replace "name" with "phallic symbol" obviously)

I could very well be wrong about all of that though. Maybe the readers were the ones who TURNED everything into a disgusting sexual innuendo for their own amusement or due to paranoia after Freud. Maybe the writers always wrote with symbols for sexuality since writing was possible, and it just took Freud to point it out? In all honesty it was probably a combination of the both. I mean where would all the phallic symbols be without Freud? Still present, just less apparent. Maybe we needed someone to come along and tell us all that we are disgusting perverts.