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You can’t visit Iceland without going to the Icelandic Penis Museum.

The rest of the country is nice too—pristine volcanic tundra, stunning iceberg seas, boiling thermal hotpots—but the real reason tourists come, even when they won’t admit it, is to giggle and titter at this basement gallery, where every variety of animal phallus is on display, neatly jarred and labeled like fruit preserves. So when I spent the holidays with family in the capital of Reykjavik in 2002, I knew that I had to see it for myself.

December is a cold, damp month there, when the sky is an over-cast gray and the frigid arctic winds blow down from the northern glaciers. The museum lies at the end of Laugavegur, Reykjavik’s main shopping street, and down a seedy little alleyway sandwiched between the tourist traps and lingerie boutiques. A distinctive sign, carved into an appropriately suggestive shape, hangs at the alley’s mouth, warning passers-by of what lies within.

In a country whose main export is incomprehensible Björk music, anything seems possible.

My mother and my 17-year-old sister Katharine went with me, both bundled in layers of bulky sweaters against the bitter winter. They both lived in Reykjavik—Mom working for the U.S. embassy and Katharine attending high school at the U.S. naval base—and they were curious to see the infamous collection as well. I was visiting, on winter break in my last year of college. I had just turned 21, so as a newly official adult, I was confident that I could handle this very adult museum.

“I can’t believe we’re actually doing this,” said Katharine as we approached the innocent-looking front door. “I hope I don’t see anyone from school.” She stared intently at her feet as a young British couple opened the door and sauntered past us, laughing.

“Don’t worry so much,” I said. “It won’t be anything obscene or they couldn’t get tourists to buy postcards. Besides, I’m sure it’s educational.”

Inside the door, the proprietor sat at the counter, quietly reading the morning newspaper. He was a jovial old man with a belly and a full white beard, like some sort of penis-guarding Santa Claus. Behind him, I could only see the backs of shelves. He folded his newspaper as we approached and launched into a spiel about the museum’s collection, which, he noted proudly, contained a specimen from every Icelandic mammal species.

Icelanders are fond of saying things like that, but it’s less impressive when you know that Iceland has only two native mammals—foxes and minks. But once we passed inside and around to the front of the shelves, we saw he also had seals, bulls, reindeer and even fish, all floating in thick yellow syrup, packed into jelly jars and lined up in neat little rows on the wooden shelves along the walls of his sparse one-room cellar, lit by a single 100-watt bulb dangling overhead.

Stubby little rat penises floated, barely visible, in their brine, next to bottles of spiny cat members, barbed like medieval maces, and dog phalluses, knobbed and knotted like the bulbs of tulips. The spring-loaded bull penis was as long as a man’s arm. Pickled and preserved, the spring had uncoiled and now resembled the snaky tendrils of some albino jungle vine.

Mom and Katharine squinted at a tall greenish cylinder full of tiny intimate fish bits, with a seriousness usually reserved for reading the stock report. The label identified it as skate, a speckled flatfish that Icelanders regard as a special delicacy. It looked less appetizing reduced to its masculine parts.

Katharine was laughing. “They don’t really look like penises; they look different . . . ” She trailed off, perhaps embarrassed to admit in front of family that she knew what penises were supposed to look like. “They just look funny,” she said firmly.

I had to admit she was right. A girl I knew in college once mentioned how funny she thought penises looked, since they “just hung out there,” loose, flopping organs. I felt indignant when she said that, hurting for the entire male sex that came naturally equipped with that chunk of flesh. But now, I understood her amusement. Once you took away the man and had to just look at the member, they almost looked naturally detachable, like they should tear off easily, perhaps coming with a handy carrying case for storage between uses. How can a man be defined by something so precarious?, I wondered.

The weirdest of all wasn’t even in a jar. It stuck straight out from the wall, mounted like an obscene hunting trophy—a giant pointed thing, four feet long, carrot-like, fraying around the edges.

“Ohmygawd,” said Katharine all in one word. “What on earth is that thing?”

“It has to be a whale,” said Mom.

She looked at me expectantly, as if my maleness gave me some unique insight into the world of aquatic phalluses. I just shrugged.

“I don’t know what else it could be.”

It was, in fact, a whale. A minke whale, according to the plaque.

Katharine eyed it critically. “It looks more like a penis than the skate’s did,” she said. “But where does it go when the whale’s swimming?” She had a point. I’d seen whales before, in pictures, in movies, at Sea World, but I’d never noticed anything like that on them. It should have been pretty hard to miss.

“Maybe it’s internal,” I said. “Some animals can pull them in.”

“Well, you sure know a lot about this,” laughed Katharine.

Now I trailed off, embarrassed to even hazard guesses about whale anatomy. I hoped that was the end of it, because I felt less enthusiastic about discussing whale penises with my mom and little sister every second.

“I can’t believe that this place actually exists,” Katharine said. She smiled a gap-toothed grin—the same one she’d smiled since she was 6 and her adult teeth started coming in. Even now, she still seemed like the family baby to me.

“So . . . you okay, Katy?” I asked. I wanted to be sure that these penises weren’t traumatizing her.

“Yeah,” she said nonchalantly. “This place is educational, after all. I learned that you don’t like talking about penises.”

We looked at the whale part one last time before slumping back to the front, past the bottles and jars, past the old fat man with his newspaper, and back out into the frigid air of Laugavegur.

——————————————
Mike Rosen-Molina is an East Bay writer and a patron of the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot, the National Yo-Yo Museum and that Swiss theme park dedicated to proving that aliens built the pyramids.

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