Credit: Dangerous Minds / Reddit

For the rest of his life, John Lennon credited Yoko Ono with saving him, and there’s little reason to believe she didn’t, other than basic misogyny.

When the two first met in the late 1960s, as Lennon freely admitted shortly afterwards, the Beatles’ legend was in a rut. He was depressed, addicted to drugs, sleeping around, gaining weight due to unhealthy eating habits and struggling to write songs, feeling it was pointless as their fans would just scream straight through them. When he wasn’t disappearing into his destructive behaviours, he was getting interested in more progressive and experimental forms of art and thus, meeting Yoko was a breakthrough.

Suddenly, he’d found someone with whom he could express his interest in forward-thinking art forms. It’s telling that if you asked Lennon and Ono, their “affair” began when they started making art together. Of course, their relationship became physical as we all know, but there was as much clandestine intimacy to them making a bunch of tape loops as there was to them making love. I’m sure Cynthia would have been able to stomach an affair consisting purely of making weird art, but I guess we’ll never know.

The next year of their relationship saw a breakthrough for Lennon’s creative drought. He and Ono began tirelessly making art together, all of it brave, strange, personal and absolutely not fit for public consumption. Which is fine, to be clear! Not everything has to be capitalised on for the sake of a cheap buck; there’s genuine power in making art for the sake of making art, especially when it’s essentially a diary of meeting the love of your life.

We quite simply did not need to see that much of John Lennon’s cock.

…how often did Lennon get his Little John out?!

Too much. Waaaaaay too much.

I’m sure there were a few Beatlemaniacs at the time who fantasised about having John Lennon posed bollocks to the wind on an album cover. However, I don’t think that Two Virgins was exactly the album they imagined bearing that cover. Little did they know that Two Virgins was going to be a comparatively tame piece when they took into account what was *ahem* coming next.

On September 10th, 1969, Lennon and Ono unveiled the “film” Self-Portrait at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The idea was that the film would play, and a second set of hidden cameras would capture the audience’s reactions and project them in real time. They had reason to believe that these would be reactions worth capturing as well because Self-Portrait is 40 minutes of John Lennon’s cock and two bollocks.

The arc of the film is Lennon achieving an erection and holding it for an (admittedly impressive) 40-minute running time. At the very end of which, a dribble of precum leaks from the tip. Insert your “one hell of a climax” gag here, personally it’s beneath me.

Unfortunately, a lighting issue prevented the live cameras from showing anyone’s actual reaction, so instead of an actually pretty novel presentation of a fairly radical piece of art, the audience just stared at Lennon’s cock for three quarters of an hour.

I can only hope they got their money’s worth.