Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America.

Hung

A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America

By Scott Poulson-Bryant

Doubleday, 224 pages

Hung is a mix of entertaining personal anecdotes and sweeping popculture criticism that takes on one of our culture's deepest obsessions: the supposedly prodigious endowment of Black men. Scott Poulson-Bryant, founding editor of Vibe magazine, brings the collective obsession with Black dicks up for air and poses critical questions even while equivocating on some of the answers.

Does the myth of the big, Black dick compromise the humanity of those forced to carry that symbolic weight between their legs? Bryant argues, at times lucidly, that despite the general ambivalence of our society, and indeed, Black men themselves, the myth is alive, well and still possessed of a destructive power.

But rather than build a weighty case that supports this reality, Bryant leaves the reader to wonder exactly why he believes this to be true. Is it because our capitalist society has denied Black men the opportunity to be truly "endowed" with economic power? Has the machinery of pop culture obsessed over the magic in his lap to such an extent that even the Black man must swear allegiance to the Magnum flag?

Following this path, Bryant has written a sweeping meditation. From hip-hop history and Hollywood power plays to interracial porn and Mapplethorpe photographs, Hung reaches into every corner of our popular culture to find answers.

Though this reach occasionally begins to feel a bit stretched, his mix of personal memoir and cultural criticism yields moments of enlightenment sure to engage and, in many cases, shock the reader. This is particularly true in the chapter on pornography. Here Bryant delves into the popular Little White Chicks series featuring "some of the biggest studs Black porn has to offer .... as they search out lonely/bored/horny white girls and sexually ravage them into submission...."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Bryant digs deep to understand why interracial love in Hollywood continues to be taboo, while "an explicit representation of ... the marauding black beast [is] selling some of the largest product in the marketplace." To make sense of the paradox, he goes to that territory so often neglected in discussions of Black male sexuality. "This is about desire," he writes, "the desire of white men wanting to watch (and symbolically participate in) the degradation of white women using a big Black stud as the weapon of choice."

As the author delves into the semiotics of porn, we see the complex symbols at play on the field of this American obsession. It is often through the symbolic that the hung myth takes hold (deriving sexual satisfaction from a stereotype made real in a porn flick, for example). It is here, in the attachment to these all too American symbols, where the impossibly fantastic view of Black men began, where it lives and where one day it must end.

The strength of Bryant's book is in his ability to elicit the hung myth from what seems like anyone. Whether talking to a white friend at a bar or Black porn superstar Lexington Steele, Bryant, for our clarity and enjoyment, allows his subjects to speak for themselves. He manages this with an improbable humor, particularly when self-deprecation is his target, as can be seen in his college tale of "Scott Pulsing-Giant."

In the tour of Ivy League college friends, hip-hop execs, Wall Street brokers, fashion stylists, and professional athletes, the reader is taken with Poulson's journalistic skill and the vibrant personalities of his glamorous and intelligent friends, colleagues and aquaintances. But it also leads a reader to wonder if these sources, despite their diversity, don't just represent a certain strata of Black culture brokers. Those in-the-know, big-city types whose insights, though sharp and important, may not tell the entire story.

Missing in their commentary is a sustained analysis of the implications of public policy and interpersonal behavior rooted in the myth of the predatory, hypersexual, super-hung Black man. Bryant acknowledges this connection in the double entendre of his title, meant to evoke both an image of a massive endowment and a lynching. But the voices he brings to life so vividly seem removed from a world where racist juvenile and criminal justice systems are locking up supposedly hung Black men at astonishing rates even as society debates how they measure up below the belt.

Bryant's Hung shows us that racism can be incoherent and contradictory; it may reside in a distant place in our unconscious, but those facts make its presence and impact no less real. The hung myth, and racism in general, exists simultaneously on many levels: individual, institutional, political, cultural and psychological. Hung works hard to illustrate this fact in all the shadows of contemporary pop culture.

In the end, the book that Bryant has put together is, in fact, a meditation. He tells us in his voice, and in those of his peers, that the myth of the hung Black man is alive and well. And in the process inspires a dialogue that is desperately needed, and perhaps more importantly, a possibility that a myth created by racism might some day he destroyed.

Andre Banks is a writer and communications associate at the Applied Research Center in New York.

Reviewed by Andre Banks