There an idea that there’s something incorrigible about the male libido (see the article in the NY Times, “The Unexamined Male Libido” by Stephen Marche: “It isn’t about sex, it’s about power . . . How naive must you be not to understand that sex itself is about power every bit as much as it is about pleasure”).
Freud, as Marche says, talked about the repression that civilization requires: males must repress their desires (the ID), or they will end up killing their father and marrying their mother. But I remember post-Freudian writers like Norman O. Brown and others who pointed to the non-repressive path of polymorphous perversity: every organ is as sexualized as the penis, and the ID itself is ambiguously gendered. A man can’t dominate with his penis, because every one of a woman’s organs, and his own organs too, are as sexually potent as the penis. In this view, the tendency to use the penis for power and dominance is a socially- not biologically-imposed trait.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the penis (and the male libido). Its function, as with the other organs, is pleasure. It’s only when (as happens very frequently) the penis becomes an instrument of power, or when its pleasure appears to require physical and mental subjugation of the sexual partner, that the penis must be chopped.
