Are You High or Just Eating a Penis?
Mushrooms are the new big dicks in town, apparently
I’ve been seeing them everywhere: on dishtowels, stationary, key chains, stickers, plush toys, even—get this—while out walking in the park! As Aristotle says, “Art takes nature as its model."
Remember Portlandia’s Dream of the Nineties, where you could write songs about saving the planet, sleep til 11, join a circus and hang things from your penis? Or Put a Bird On It and call it art? Well, friends, it’s now time to lean into the mind-blowing mycelial network and PUT A DICK ON IT because the age of the wood wide web is here.
For the record, I like mushrooms. On pizza. Grilled, sauteed, what have you. One time, a friend made me a cup of tea from some locally-sourced dried Lion’s Mane and I thought it was pretty good, especially with a bit of lemon and honey. But I’ve never done any of the trippy stuff like potentially eating the wrong mushroom in the woods or engaging in Michael Pollan-style mind-bending adventures. All of that seemed super out there.
Until I watched this episode of the British docuseries Clarkson’s Farm, which chronicles the misadventures of Jeremy Clarkson, a former motoring journalist and star of Top Gear and The Grand Tour, who now owns a 1,000 acre farm he’s renamed Diddly Squat.
And I told my teenage son to hit pause and rewind, because holy fungi,
Did I just hear the words “mycelium” and “eating penis” in the same sentence?
The theory is that mycelium (those root-like structure that can be found in soil, inside plants and animals, and make up the vegetative body of fungi) originated from space, and therefore Jeremy, on point like a proper patriarch, decides right then and there he’s going to rebrand his mushrooms “Space Penises” and sell them in his farm shop.
But wait, does this mean mushrooms are actually aliens?
Depending on which reality or parallel universe you’re attached to (where Elvis is alive, Kamala won, and/or the deep state secretly rules the world), extra terrestrials either arrived earlier this week, or will show up next week, or perhaps HAVE BEEN HERE ALL ALONG.
Think about it: the invasion is expanding as we speak. Not just in our forests, where the rotting heads of those pervy tree-hugging mycelium are getting it on with the elves and fairies, but also in our flower beds, cemeteries, leaf piles, and oh my god, how many slimy dicks have we already fondled and tucked into tidy paper bags, sauteed with butter, puréed into soups, and tossed into salads, all while thinking it was the oversized cucumbers and zucchinis we needed to be worried about?
Man, that’s beautiful.
Perhaps Mother Earth has the biggest dick of all?
We’ll get back to damping down the patriarchy in a minute, but first, only because these weird thoughts prompted even more weird searches, I’m going to share a few of them here:
Via The Mushroom Network: Are Mushrooms Emissaries from Outer Space?
And from AfterSkool: Panspermia: Did Life Begin on Earth? Are Mushrooms Using US to Get to Space? (You read that right: Panspermia.)
WTF is ‘Panspermia’?
Not from earth, apparently. It’s space dust. In the 5th Century, some Greek philosopher named Anaxagoras suggested that life throughout the universe was spread by asteroids carrying microorganisms.
“Mushroom spores are durable, resilient and well-suited for interplanetary travel, lending some support to this controversial theory,” writes Nina Patrick in “Mushrooms, Apes and Aliens” for UK-based Psychedelic Health.
As the theory goes, apes were doing just fine, aping around, picking lice off each other’s butts, until a few of them accidentally-on-purpose ate some magic mushrooms and oopsie daisies! their brains were forever changed . . . leading to civilization.
(This is actually called the Stoned Ape Theory and it posits that psilocybin mushrooms were “the ‘evolutionary catalyst’ from which language, projective imagination, the arts, religion, philosophy, science, and all of human culture sprang.”)
Are you high yet?
Have we all been high this whole time?
Why did my mother tell me to ‘always wear clean underwear’ and ‘never touch a mushroom’ in the wild?
Should I put an Ayahuasca trip on my Christmas wish list and find out?
Okay. Feet back on the floor. Mushrooms and other phallic-shaped vegetables safely tucked into the crisper drawer. Perhaps we should switch to some hard data on penis mushrooms and mushroom sex before we completely lose our minds?
A quick science lesson: mushrooms are eukaryotes. Dive in if you’d like, but this affirms some of the theories above, not just about phallic fungi fruit bodies spreading their seeds wherever/however they can (thanks, guys!) but also some not-so-subtle imagery.
The reality is that mushrooms are asexual. And because mushrooms defy the rules of reproduction, according to this author, they also share a special kinship with non-binary humans.
So mushrooms are disruptive!
I feel like the proud men who named The Stinkhorn mushroom Phallus impudicus, a.k.a. fungus priapeus, fungus virilus, penis effigie, Hollanders workingtoole, and phallus hollandicus, were just waiting for gals like me to dig into the rotting dead leaf pile and point this gorgeous wand right back at them.
Since Kristine and I are all about reclaiming symbols previously wielded for oppression, aggression, perversion, and the like, we hope you will take all of this with a big heap of olive oil, sour cream, butter, salt and/or pepper, or just continue enjoying your mushroom-infused coffees, teas, and chocolates as you reach higher planes of consciousness and enjoy better sex.
One final note: Curious as to how Clarkson’s “Space Penis” mushrooms actually sold (since this episode aired last spring) I went searching on the internet and found diddly squat. All I got was this little woody, courtesy of the Reddit Group, r/Clarksonsfarm.
As always, thanks for reading!
Your sisters in peen and green,
Allison & Kristine
This was amazing. I laughed, I laughed some more, and I learned quite a few things along the way!
I enjoyed reading about the phallus family while sipping on my mushroom coffee. That last photo was magnificent but I think the tote bag takes the cake. Y'all might need some merch.