Dick That Looks Like a Animal Drawing

whale penises, penis museum — Photo courtesy of Icelandic Phallological Museum

In 1974, at the historic period of 33, an Icelandic history teacher named Sigurður Hjartarson was given a penis.

It was a dried balderdash'due south penis, long and limp—the kind oft used in the Icelandic countryside to whip farm animals—and a colleague of Hjartarson's gave it to him as a joke at a holiday party after hearing how Hjartarson had one as a boy. Soon, other teachers began bringing him bull penises. The joke caught on, and acquaintances at the island'southward whaling stations began giving him the severed tips of whale penises when they butchered their catch.

"Eventually, it gave me an idea," Hjartarson told me when I recently met him in Reykjavík. "It might be an interesting challenge to collect specimens from all the mammal species in Iceland."

It took a while, simply given enough fourth dimension, true dedication trumps all obstacles. Over decades of meticulous collecting and cataloguing, Hjartarson acquired 283 members from 93 different species of mammals, housing them in what he's dubbed the Icelandic Phallological Museum. He finally accomplished his goal in 2011, when he acquired the penis of a deceased Homo sapiens. In doing so, he'd assembled what must exist the earth'south nigh complete collection of male person sex organs.

Anyone in the capital city of Reykjavík with 1250 Icelandic Krona to spare (well-nigh $x) can see the collection, now housed in a pocket-sized street-level infinite on a busy corner downtown. In the carpeted room lined with wooden shelves, Hjartarson packed an overwhelming number of specimens, by and large preserved in formaldehyde and displayed upright in glass jars. Amongst the collections are dozens of giant whale penises; tiny guinea squealer, hamster and rabbit penises; wrinkled, grey horse penises; and a coiled rams' penis that looks unsettlingly man. Some are limp, resting against the sides of their jars, while others seem to have been preserved in an erect state.

The walls are decorated with dried whale penises, mounted on plaques like hunting trophies, forth with tongue-in-cheek penis-themed art (a sculpture of the silver medal-winning Icelandic Olympic handball team'south penises, for instance) and other penis-based artifacts, similar lampshades made from stale balderdash scrotums. The museum'southward largest specimen, from a sperm whale, is nearly six feet tall, weighs about 150 pounds, and is kept in a giant glass tank bolted to the flooring. Hjartarson explained to me that this was just the tip of the whale's full penis, which couldn't be transported intact when the creature died, and was originally about 16 feet long, weighing upwards of 700 pounds.

Talking near his peerless shrine to the male anatomy, Hjartarson is modest—he considers himself a conventional person—and seems every bit bemused as anyone that he'd pursued an offbeat hobby to such extreme lengths. "Collecting penises is like collecting anything else, I guess," he said. "Once I got started, I couldn't stop."

Over the first few decades of his collecting, he did it on the side, standing piece of work equally a teacher then school main in the boondocks of Akranes on Iceland's southwest declension. By 1980, he had 13 total specimens: iv large whale penises, along with nine from farm animals, brought to him by friends who worked at slaughterhouses. Though he'd simply dried the penises to showtime, he began preserving them in formaldehyde so they'd more closely retain their original advent. Over the decade, his collection grew slowly: by 1990, he'd amassed 34 specimens. After the 1986 international ban on commercial whaling, Hjartarson would drive several hours to the coast in hopes of a whale penis when he heard about an animal's beaching on the news. The responses he got from friends and family unit, he said, were "99 percentage positive," if a bit perplexed. "This is a liberal state," he explained. "When people saw that my drove wasn't pornographic, only for science, they didn't have a problem with it."

By August of 1997, when Hjartarson had caused 62 penises (including those of seals, goats and reindeer), he decided to share his obsession with the public, setting up shop in a spot in Reykjavík and charging a small entrance fee. As news of the museum spread, it began attracting a few thousands visitors a year, and some came begetting gifts: a equus caballus penis, a rabbit penis, a balderdash's penis that was salted, dried and made into a iii-human foot alpine walking stick. In 2004, after Hjartarson retired, he briefly moved the museum to the line-fishing village of Húsavík and advertised it with a behemothic wooden penis exterior. In 2011, his wellness failing, he convinced his son Hjörtur Gísli Sigurðsson to take over mean solar day-to-24-hour interval operations as the curator and the duo moved the collection (then more than 200 specimens strong) to its current location. They say it now attracts roughly 14,000 people annually, mostly foreign tourists. On growing upward equally the son of the guy who collects penises, Sigurðsson told me, "Some of my friends joked about information technology, maybe a piddling, but somewhen they got into information technology too, and wanted to assist us collect them."

A drove of preserved whale penises. Photograph courtesy of Icelandic Phallological Museum

Sigurður Hjartarson poses in front of his world-famous collection of animate being penises at the Icelandic Phallological Museum in Reykjavík. Photo courtesy of Icelandic Phallological Museum

A collection of preserved whale penises. Photo courtesy of Icelandic Phallological Museum

The preserved penis of a minke whale. Photo courtesy of Icelandic Phallological Museum

The stuffed and mounted penis of an elephant that died on a sugar plantation near Malelane, Transval, South Africa in August 2001. Photograph courtesy of Icelandic Phallological Museum

The penis of Mantle Arason, an Icelander who donated his fellow member to the museum upon his death in 2011 at the age of 95, providing the collection'south first human being specimen. Photo by Joseph Stromberg

The strangest affair about the museum: If yous entered it, but couldn't read the labels or signs, it's very possible you wouldn't realize what organ filled all the jars around the room. Most of them await less similar the organs we're used to and more like abstract flesh art, with wrinkled foreskins peeled back and floating in the liquid. At times, I couldn't aid only experience grateful for the glass that protected me from these grotesque folded lumps of meat. The jars of small penises—similar the hamster'southward, with a magnifying glass placed in front of it so you can see the tiny fellow member—resemble some strange apothecary'south tinctures, arranged advisedly on wooden shelves. During my fourth dimension there, roughly a dozen tourists visited, talking in hushed voices as they browsed.

Though information technology was difficult for him to stand for extended periods of time, Hjartarson insisted on giving me a guided tour of his collection, walking with a pikestaff. In the "Foreign Section" (filled with specimens from animals not native to Iceland), we establish some of the museum'due south nigh exotic specimens: a massive giraffe penis, stark white and adorned with a cuff of fur at its base of operations and mounted on the wall, a stale elephant penis of a frankly startling length and girth, from an animal that had obviously been killed on a carbohydrate plantation in Southward Africa and was brought to Hjartarson in 2002.

Hjartarson proudly pointed out a cantankerous-section he'd had made of a sperm whale's penis. "I had a biology student come here and tell me that this helped him meliorate understand this species' inner construction," he said. The museum's mission statement, afterward all, declares that it aims to assist "individuals to undertake serious study into the field of phallology in an organized, scientific fashion." Despite the kitschy penis art on the walls, Hjartarson appears to take this goal seriously.

Except, that is, for the glass room in the corner labeled, just, "Sociology Section." In information technology, Hjartarson has assembled (what he claims to be) the penises of elves,h2o horses, an Icelandic sea monster, a merman and a zombie-like bull. He refused to admit the section's silliness. When I asked him why there's an empty jar labeled "Man sapiens invisibilis," he said, "What you tin can't see it? It'southward right in there."

A highlight of the museum is in the dorsum corner, where a shrine has been congenital to the drove'due south human-related specimens. For years, Hjartarson said, he sought out a penis fromHuman sapiens, and got several willing donors to sign messages ensuring their members would enter the drove after decease. In 2002, Iceland's National Hospital gave him the foreskin of a xl-year-old Icelander who'd had an emergency adult circumcision, then, in 2006, he caused the testes and epididymis from an anonymous 60-twelvemonth-old. But he wasn't satisfied.

Finally, in 2011, i of the alphabetic character-signers, a man named Mantle Arason from the Icelandic boondocks of Akureyri died, died at the age of 95. Hjartarson was specially excited to go his penis—"he was a famous womanizer," he told me—simply the postmortem penectomy did not go well. Instead of being removed and sewn up shortly after death, it was allowed to shrivel, and the already age-shrunken penis wasn't properly sewn up. In the drinking glass tube, floating in formaldehyde, information technology'south an unrecognizable, disparate mess of flesh, rather than an orderly, compact shaft. "I nevertheless desire to get a meliorate, more bonny human specimen," Hjartarson declared.

He has iii more donation letters hanging on the wall—from a German, an American and a Brit who visited the museum and were moved to sign abroad their penises later death—but every year that passes makes them less valuable. "You lot're still immature," he said, poking me in the shoulder forcefully, "merely when you get older, your penis is going to start shrinking." This quirk of the human anatomy puts him in the strange position of hoping that one of his potential donors perishes before they accomplish a ripe sometime age. Asked if he'd consider donating his ain, Hjartarson told me the same thing heapparently tells all reporters: "It depends on who dies first. If my wife goes before me, I'll have my penis become to the museum when I die. Only if I become first, I can't guarantee she'll let that happen."

Bonny homo penis or not, the work of collection volition proceed, carried out largely by Hjartarson's son. He said that he plans to collect better-preserved specimens for many of the Icelandic species, and expand the museum's foreign collection—he's specifically interested in hunting downwards the penises of many of Africa's large predatory cats. "You lot tin can always get more, amend, more diverse specimens," Sigurðsson says. "The work of collecting never truly ends."