How to talk about your personal history with penises without sounding either all Mae West-bawdy (the old “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” routine) or all fluttery and awed, like a hitherto-untouched heroine in a bodice ripper (or, perhaps, like the touched-but-hitherto-unorgasmic heroine of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover), by the supernal otherness of the thing? “Now I know why men are so overbearing,” Constance Chatterley says of her gamekeeper, Mellors, or more specifically of Mellors’ penis, which he refers to as his “John Thomas,” as though it were indeed an actual third person in the room, observing the action: “But he’s lovely, really. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really!”
The problem, for starters, even before we get to the fact that it’s difficult—impossible, even—for any single manifestation of this indubitably male organ to live up to its reputation, is how to deal with the word itself so that we’re not all blushing or smirking.“Penis:” If you say it quickly, pass your eye over it glancingly as though it were not the quasi-scientific clunker of a word, you have accomplished nothing other than a grown-up game of peekaboo: I don’t see you, big feller, bulging over there in the middle of the sentence. If, on the other hand, you give the thing its due and enunciate it fully, pee-nus, draw it out, acknowledge that it is an awkward coinage pretending to be at ease with itself under the enormous metaphoric burden it carries—bearing the weight of the phallocentric world between its legs—you are left having to deal with the (often incredulous) attention you have drawn by insisting that everything, but everything, is a stand-in for the phallic principle: cars, buildings, pencils, tails, fruit, revolvers, literary images. Take Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”: it can be read as a poem about the life-giving power of a divine force, or, in my view, it can be read as a poem about the life-giving force of penises, the surging motile energy of the male orgasm.
But here I am, getting stuck in an apologia por vita erotica sua before I have even begun.There are countless designations for “penis,” of course, just as there are many terms for its equally klutzy-sounding female counterpart, the graceless “vagina.” These designations include those one-syllable terms that sound like blunt, whambam-thank-you-ma’am heavy objects, such as “dick,” “prick,” and “cock,” as well as the half-amused, half-abashed Yiddish approximations like “shmuck” and “putz.” “Putz is worse than shmuck,” Maggie Paley declares in her The Book of the Penis, which is a veritable font of information on points of lesser and greater interest, including the etymology of “penis,” which is Latin for “tail” and a relatively late entry into the vernacular. She adds that the two terms “are now used almost entirely to mean ‘jerk.’”
Then there are the many fancy descriptions of peckers that a certain kind of male writer delights in providing on behalf of his protagonist, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert rendering his Lolita-avid penis in typically self-aggrandizing locution as the “scepter of my passion.” James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, who hasn’t had sex with his wife Molly in more than a decade, considers the generative potential lying dormant within his own relaxed endowment while lying in the bath (“limp father of thousands, a languid, floating flower”) with a kind of endearing yet pathetic self-regard. And in Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Sammler comes face-to-face with a black pickpocket’s “large tan-and-purple uncircumcised thing” only to find himself counterphobically fascinated with distinctions of color and creed: “Metallic hairs bristled at the thick base and the tip curled beyond the supporting, demonstrating hand, suggesting the fleshy mobility of an elephant’s trunk, though the skin was somewhat iridescent rather than thick or rough.” Not to overlook John Updike, who can always be counted on to sprinkle a few exactingly detailed, paint-by-number evocations of penises in each of his novels. In Toward the End of Time, there is a salute to the erect penis of the sex-preoccupied (but of course) narrator, who has masturbated himself to “full stretch” with the aid of his cache of pornography, the better to admire his own handwork: “the inverted lavender heart-shape of the glans, the majestic tensile column with its marblelike blue-green veins and triple-shafted underside. Stout and faithful fellow! My life’s companion. I loved it, or him.”
As for myself, I’ve always warmed to “Johnson,” for some ineffable reason, just as I’ve always warmed to “cunt” over “pussy,” for a similarly ineffable reason. And the ironic—or what I take to be ironic—majesty of “rod” speaks to the eighteenth-century serving girl in me. And yet, there is something about the word “penis” in all its obdurate two-syllabled out-thereness (I’ll take one penis, if you please) that seems to rise above itself, if only because of the stiffly protruding quality of the first syllable (pe) followed by the curled-up flaccidity of the second (nis) seems to mimic the dynamic of charge and retreat that is embodied in the piece of male anatomy being alluded to.
Then again, what is this high-minded introductory musing on the strictures of a given lexicon—or, as is more likely, an extended patch of throat-clearing—but a symptom of the larger predicament of inarticulateness that I, an ordinarily voluble creature, find myself facing when in the presence of this subject? Despite their apparent demystification, penises themselves retain an odd aura of unspeakableness. For all the huge strides we appear to have taken in our discussion of sex—mainly by making it into a discussion about body and gender—the discourse doesn’t seem to have advanced much since Lytton Strachey first dropped the word “semen” in one of those Bloomsbury discussions he and his friends, including Virginia Woolf (then Stephen) and her sister,Vanessa, used to have in one another’s houses on London evenings in the early twentieth century. Which is why trying to talk about penises still feels, even after Erica Jong’s zipless fuck, Monica Lewinsky, and “Sex in the City,” like smashing through glass: as though one were daring to touch a precious and lovingly curated object behind its protective pane with the audacity of mere language.To talk about penises as a woman is to turn yourself into an outlaw and the conversation into smut even before we’ve gotten to the age-old question of whether size matters. Once and for all: it does, although in less significant and subtle ways than men think. Ernest Hemingway’s infamously strutting account in A Moveable Feast, for instance, of being called upon to reassure F.Scott Fitzgerald that his equipment was adequate despite Zelda’s ball-busting insinuations (the anecdote comes from a chapter with the insufferably coy title of “A Matter of Measurements”) seems bogus on many accounts, not least of which is the suggestion that anxieties about the male-signifier-to-end-all-signifiers can be put to rest in quite so concrete a fashion. But the topic makes for easy send-up, as in the brand of condoms that offers a variety of prophylactics (the Nightcap, the Weekender, and the Extended Stay) all in boxes with the word HUGE printed on them.
Penises, it appears, deserve to be worshipped or envied (or, if need be, encouraged) but they don’t deserve to be nattered on about.This is still sacred male territory and women trespass at their own literary peril. The potholes are everywhere you look, waiting to trip you up into porn or parody, or perhaps the high gutter baby talk of D.H. Lawrence. Which is not to suggest that Lawrence didn’t, despite what is clearly a complicatedly ambivalent attitude toward women, manage to move the conversation more radically forward than most.There may be something laughable about the rhapsodic way Mellors and Lady Constance talk about his “John Thomas” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but there is also something both daring and poignant about Lawrence’s attempt to win over his straitlaced and corseted readers to the liberating effect of erotic nakedness. His late phase especially, which includes Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the short novel The Man Who Died (first published, by the bye, as The Escaped Cock), shows him pushing beyond what speculum-gazing Kate Millett and others have decried as his worship of the phallus into a more psychologically expansive view of carnal matters.
Lawrence was singular among his contemporaries for naming women’
s body parts and for attempting to depict female orgasm decades before Norman Mailer and Harold Brodkey got around to trying their hands at it. It seems all the more curious therefore that Virginia Woolf, in a speech she gave to an audience of two hundred women in January 1931 (almost a year after Lawrence’s death), noted that it would take another fifty years before “men have become so civilized that they are not shocked when a woman speaks the truth about her body.” Whether or not we have arrived at this juncture depends, I suppose, on your sense of how shock-able we remain under our contemporary posture of jadedness, but please do note that Woolf’s speculation does not make mention of a woman speaking the truth about his body. It is as though this were a possibility not even to be hinted at except on a different planet than ours.Which brings me back to where I began, unwilling to consign myself to the outpost of raunch yet unsure whether a seat will be found for me inside the clean, well-lit rooms of polite company.
The Matter at Hand
It is to be asserted, then, that very few women talk about the specifics of penises: the too-shortness, longness, thinness, fatness, curviness, redness, veininess, whateverness of them. Nice girls aren’t supposed to take note of the individual penis in all its clinical details (its potential for beauty or hideousness as well as defining characteristics like length, girth, and color)—for fear, I suppose, that the whole delicate scaffolding, the prerequisite of a cock-of-the-walk confidence if a man is to be able to perform in the bedroom, would come crashing down around us.
Or perhaps it’s simply that no one wants to know what her husband’s or lover’s penis really looks like when seen through the keyhole because it’s too heavy a responsibility—like carrying around a state secret with you all the time, burning a hole in your pocket, imperiling future lives. An article I read in a woman’s magazine about how to maintain strong friendships advised readers not to step over the other person’s “comfort zone” and went on to cite a conversation about penis size—in which a friend of the writer’s revealed in a whisper over lunch that the man she was dating and whom she would later marry had a very small penis (“It’s, like, miniature”) —as its first and most glaring example of an inappropriate revelation. The writer felt burdened with this indiscretion forever after and can’t, apparently, see this friend alone or together with her minusculely endowed husband without feeling overcome with mortification.
Indeed, I have sophisticated female friends who to this very day continue to insist that there’s no difference between one penis and the next. This claim always make me feel morally suspect, as though I were a foot fetishist or a frequenter of bondage chatrooms—someone mired in trivial and immature considerations, measuring the circumference of a banana while everyone else has moved on to worry about global warming. And, yes, I know that on the grander existential scale, or even on the less grand functional scale, it doesn’t matter all that much, but then again neither does breast size or the shape of your ass—and men never tire of discussing these. One might conjecture that while the male gaze makes us feminine, confirms heterosexual women in their sense of their own desirability by the very act of assessing it (weighing breasts like so many sacks of potatoes and coming up with ideal ratios of waist-to-hip size as if women were Barbie dolls made real), the assessing female gaze unmakes the masculine principle (the breast standing in for the woman, the penis for the man, rather than whole glorious beings) —He who does the Desiring.We in turn collude with men in treating the detached appraisal of sexual parts as an exclusively male prerogative by looking away and talking of the ardor or duration of men’s sexual performance rather the prescribed nature of their equipment, whether crooked or straight, daunting or drooping.
Then again, there is no way not to take notice of what is more often than not first perceived to be an absurd and even ungainly appendage—before, that is, its emblematic significance to the human race is factored in, like bonus points for giving added Erector Set value. Not even I, brought up in an Orthodox German-Jewish household where my mother went wild if we failed to put on robes (“dressing gowns,” as we called them) could successfully overlook the penises surrounding me. It’s one thing to deliberately blind yourself to the reality of your father’s penis—which, with the exception of girls who happen to be brought up around nudists, is what I think most of us do.To the extent that I wondered about my father’s penis, I ascribed to it my feelings about him, which would have made his penis unlikable and scary at once (albeit not scary in a curiosity-inspiring way). But it’s another thing altogether to overlook the penises of three brothers, especially if you happen to have slept in the same room with two of them until you are eight years old, at which point a psychiatrist suggests to your mother that it would be better for your already faltering mental health if you slept either by yourself or in a room with your two sisters.
I don’t know whether I suffered from any adverse comparisons I made between my own body and my brothers’ bodies—whether, that is, I was affected by what used to go by the formal appellation “penis envy”—but I do know I felt outmuscled by them. And that I studied the crotches of their pajama pants when I thought no one was looking, intrigued by the odd way the cotton bunched up in this area—as though it contained a small cluster of grapes—while my own pajamas had to make no such accommodations.Years later I would be reminded of this disparity (and the fact that it had probably made more of an impression on me than I consciously realized) when I read one of Flaubert’s tirades against the treacherous nature of women: “Women have no notion of rectitude. The best among them have no compunctions about listening at doors, unsealing letters, counseling and practicing a thousand little deceits, etc. It all goes back to their origin. Where man has an Eminence, they have a Hole! That eminence is Reason, Order, Science, the Phallus-Sun, and the hole is night, humidity, confusion.” No wonder Madame Bovary gave up and swallowed arsenic.
And sometimes, it must be admitted, even after such calculations are made, after one has an idea of what penises can get up to, they still pose themselves as less than sublime. I think of a conversation I had not long ago, sitting around the kitchen table with my adolescent daughter and my forty-year-old Filipina housekeeper, concerning the physical noncharms of the penis. Of the three of us, I’m quite sure I was the only one who had seen an adult penis up close, and thus could draw on the vehicle of my senses rather than the evidence of visual images. But no matter: my daughter and my housekeeper were in cheerful agreement as to the unregenerate ugliness of penises—the sheer aesthetic silliness of the design, as they saw it, especially when you took into account the whole picture, including the surrounding hairiness and the existence of those two undignified balls.
I listened with some amusement to their remarks, envisioning us in a bawdy scene out of Chaucer, set in a dim low-ceilinged room lit by sputtering candles rather than in my linoleum-floored kitchen awash in recessed lighting, three girls sitting around the hearth speaking the unvarnished truth about men. (I should include my friend Elizabeth—who has been conversant in her time with a shuddersome number of penises and stoutly believes they’re an acquired taste—in this warm and candid circle.“If you’re a visual person,” Elizabeth once explained to me, “the penis is a hideous organ, which isn’t to say I don’t like them.”) But I also felt a slight sense of unease, even foreboding, at the dismissive tone that was being taken. What, I wondered, if men (any man, the father of three across the hall, say, or the doorman who guarded us from potential marauders and always greeted us as though he was genuinely happy to see us again) knew that they were being viewed in this way—that it was even possible to size up their most prized credential with so much irreverence? I understood that my unmarried and possibly virginal housekeeper had little use for men, but how had I failed in transmitting to my daughter the necessary sense of gravitas about the subject, without which she would clearly be doomed, giving off the wrong signal, a slew of insufficiently dazzled pheromones?
It wasn’t, after all, as though I were conscio
usly trying to raise a rampaging shrew, a Lorena Bobbitt, say, or, going back several decades, a maddened man hater like Valerie Solanas, who first penned the SCUM Manifesto and then shot Andy Warhol. Heaven forfend. I had loved men in my time, including my daughter’s father; I had loved penises, sometimes more than the men they were attached to. Presumably I would do so again, but meanwhile I saw the line I had to adopt. It was up to me to put matters right, to defend the maligned organ. “It’s actually quite nice,” I heard myself say, as we all scraped the last of the mint-chocolate-chip ice cream from our bowls. I moved gingerly from the particular to the general, trying to walk a line between a discriminating embrace and wholehearted sluttishness: “They sort of grow on you.” And then, as the coup de grace, I, who had gone through life half resistant and half in thrall to men and their effect on me, especially in bed, who had resisted the “privileging” of the male sexual organ even as I marveled at its ability to transform itself from something soft and passive into something hard and driven and capable of filling you up like a stopper in a bottle, came out openly as an advocate.As my daughter and my housekeeper first stared at me and then at each other, I added: “I like them.” Just in the nick of time, I retracted a bit, lest I sound like I was a come-one-come-all appreciator of penises, the sort of woman who liked all flavors of ice cream as long as they were cold. “I mean, some of them.”
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