In fact, historian Desmond Morris claims that Caligula would force his defeated subjects to kiss his extended middle finger. It’s a double-whammy that expresses ill will and superiority. For primates in the wild, phallic aggression might literally involve jabbing your man-junk at another male to show that you’re tough and that you’re a man’s man. On a more general level, “phallic aggression” is basically like what guys do when they get in conflict and try to out-man each other. If we take a few steps back, we’ll find anthropologists that say that other primates in the wild express their aggression and sexual superiority (both important out in the wild, and maybe at nightclubs) through phallic aggression. In fact, it wouldn’t take a doctorate in anything to point out that the finger is probably a phallic symbol. The Greco-Roman gesture expresses that sentiment. When someone flips the bird, we don’t think that they’re trying to ward off misfortune. Let’s go back to the Greco-Roman tradition, though, because its origins seem to make more sense in terms of what the middle finger means. Sort of like how people make a cross sign with their fingers against supposed demonic forces. Or you could raise your middle finger against the evil eye. You might have seen it before it’s a fairly common symbol. The most popular one is the one in the picture below. In Central Asia, you could fight off the evil eye’s effects by having a nazar, which is a charm. Little did you know that that’s an evil eye that could be a harbinger of bad things to come. Imagine an intense and/or dirty look of loathing in someone’s gaze. It is basically a look of envy or dislike that people give to one another–one that many cultures believed to bring bad luck and injury. I didn’t really know what the evil eye was, so I looked that up, too. The second hypothesis is that it came from the Mediterranean in the first century, when people would use the extended middle finger to ward off the evil eye. The word for it, when used in an insulting manner, means “a male that submits to anal penetration.” In Ancient Greece, it was called the “impudent finger.” The combination of Greek and Roman cultures and power would have made it easy for the gesture to spread across the Roman Empire, and maybe even a bit beyond. In Greece, the gesture was mentioned in comedies and used in society. One is that it originated from Ancient Greece and/or Rome. Where did it come from? It looks like there’s at least a couple theories on Wikipedia. Now the phrase 'up yours' makes more sense.Īnyway, back to the bird.

Middle finger to draw