The day after his mother died, 31-year-old Rocco Tano decided to get an impromptu circumcision. “I just wanted to feel the pain that my mother felt,” the protagonist of Netflix’s new Italian-language series Supersex explains in voiceover as he unbuttons his trousers and the surgeon’s scalpel nears his crotch. “I wanted the pain to keep me alive.”
Grief can make people do irrational things – but in Tano’s case, the snip to the foreskin was more than an extreme form of inscribing the memory of a loved one on his body. For the man better known as Rocco Siffredi or “the Italian stallion”, it was also potentially the death of his career. Because by the time it met with disinfected steel, Siffredi’s member was well on the way to being a powerful business asset. It was, as his distraught producer puts it in the biopic upon learning of the operation, “the greatest, most beautiful dick in the universe”.
