That the mushroom resembles an erect penis is undoubtable. It rises miraculously out of the earth piercing a gelatinous egg-shaped sac. Since the sixteenth century, the mushroom has been variously described in print and botanical illustration through the eyes of men — almost exclusively men — who saw in its shape an image of themselves. That is, their latent erections. As is the case of both the naturalist and his mushroom, however, the phallus is attached to a larger body. For the stinkhorn, the phallus sprouts forth from a volva (Latin: ‘wrapper’, from which we arrive at vulva); the volva from a root; the root from a meshwork of underground mycelia; and the mycelia from innumerable, minuscule spores. The spores themselves have been dispersed upon the ground by passing through the guts of necrophagous flies, tricked into feeding off the mushroom’s powerfully-stinky slime, reminiscent of a rotten corpse.[1] In the case of Phallus impudicus, then, the question of which came first is not ‘chicken or egg’, or even ‘phallus or egg’, but ‘spore or stink’.

To describe the stinkhorn as a phallus is by no means imprecise, inasmuch as a spade is a spade. Yet the taxonomical tradition of identifying the mushroom is reductive in that it prioritises only a couple of formal elements on show above ground: that is, the egg, shaft and cap. Or more crudely, the ‘cock and ball(s)’. One could argue that it is as a result of a male-gaze of nature that such a phallocentric naming arises.

Ursula Le Guin in their treatise The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction proposes an alternative, feminist view of the history of cultural development. They argue that the greatest human invention was not the spear but the bag. In their introduction to the 2019 edition, Donna Haraway describes the prevailing story of the human innovation of the spear as another example of a ‘prick tale’, a narrative emerging from a phallocentric imagination.[2]

In the case of the nomenclature of the stinkhorn mushroom, in naming this ‘shameless prick’ in the image of himself, the male naturalist denies the carrier, the volva or ‘wrapper’, from which it is conveyed to the surface of the soil.

[1] A tautology: etymologically ‘spore’ from the Greek sporas, means ‘dispersed’.
[2] Haraway, Donna. ‘Receiving Three Mochilas in Colombia: Carrier Bags for Staying with the Trouble’. In: Le Guin, Ursula K. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (London: Ignota Books, 2019) 11.