by Tom Hickman
The outcome is that few males when grown to man’s estate free themselves entirely from some preoccupation with penis size, which, Alex Comfort noted in The Joy of Sex, is ‘built-in biologically’ and labelled by the anthropologist Jared Diamond, when professor of physiology at the University of California, as an ‘obsession’. Yet it appears that whereas for centuries this has played out as meaning ‘big’, among the Ancient Greeks the reverse was the case. Penile taste in Athens ran to the small and taut (in the plays of Aristophanes, diminutives such as posthion, little prick, were terms of endearment) with big penises considered coarse and ugly and only possessed (the Athenians said) by barbarians and, in their own mythology, satyrs, which were comic in a slapstick way, though we derive our more subtle ‘satire’ from the word. ‘Our modern stag party jokes of well-endowed men’, wrote Eva Keuls (Reign of the Phallus) ‘would have been lost on the Athenians’. The Romans, however, thought little differently to modern man; they had a predilection for big penises – Roman generals sometimes promoted men on the generosity of their genital addenda. ‘If from the baths you hear a round of applause,’ wrote the creator of the epigram, Marcus Martialis (known in English as Martial), ‘Maron’s great prick is bound to be the cause.’ And like modern man, the Romans heaped ridicule on the head (sic) of anyone plainly below the average, as did the poet Catullus of a fellow Roman ‘whose little dagger, hanging more limply than the tender beet, never raised itself to the middle of his tunic’ – mockery that 2,000 years later finds an echo in a magazine article by a journalist sent to write a piece on a nudist camp, who spied ‘a shy little thing, a nouvelle cuisine portion of garnished mollusc’, which made him think that if he were the possessor ‘I would be at home in a darkened bedroom, battling with the weights and measures’.
Covertly, throughout time, men have competed with other men with their penises. If their distant ancestors beat their penises against their abdomens to discourage competitors or shook them in the face of inferiors, as some primate species continue to do, men have maintained the practice, if only figuratively – in Japanese art, which is characterised by immense exaggeration of the sexual organs, men are often seen duelling with them. The American politician Walter Mondale once said after some political disagreement with Bush senior, ‘George Bush doesn’t have the manhood to apologise’, to which Bush felt compelled to retort, ‘Well, on the manhood thing, I’ll put mine up against his anytime’ – sounding rather like Grumio in The Taming of the Shrew who responds to Curtis’s insult about his appendage by saying, ‘Am I but three inches? Why, thy horn is a foot; and so long am I at the least.’ No man wants to be taken for what Shakespeare termed a ‘three-inch fool’, a truth not lost on the Tel Aviv advertising agency which in 1994 devised a poster campaign aimed at the city’s notoriously bad drivers: ‘Research proves aggressive drivers have small penises.’ No wonder so many penis-possessors have a compulsion to give their penis a surreptitious tug in the changing room when other men are around – as Alan Bates and Oliver Reed admitted they did before filming the nude wrestling scene in Women in Love – to make sure it looks its competitive best.
All of which leads to what Rosalind Miles describes in The Rites of Man: Love, Sex and Death in the Making of the Male as a ‘lifelong habit of surreptitious cock-watching. In public lavatories, swimming baths, gyms, even at the ballet, [men] will always check out the opposition.’
True or false? In one of its many sexual surveys, Cosmopolitan magazine asked men if ‘they secretly check out another man’s equipment’ when standing at a urinal in a public toilet; it also asked if they would prefer to have a 3-inch penis and earn £100,000 a year or have a 10-inch penis and earn £10,000. The survey was, of course, essentially frivolous and without doubt attracted its share of frivolous answers. Nonetheless, the response was revealing. To question one, 82 per cent of respondents said ‘never’, 16 per cent said ‘sometimes’ and 2 per cent said ‘always’, whereas in practice the reverse order might be more likely – the instinct to take a surreptitious look is so powerful that many men do it without realising; and many who don’t, consciously resist their instinct only because it breaches social etiquette – other than, perhaps, in gay clubs.
Waiting in the ringing brightness of the lavatory, he felt a tinge of loneliness, and wondered where Danny was. Everyone was busy here, men in pairs queuing for the lock-ups, others in shorts or torn jeans nodding tightly to the music, caught in their accelerating inner worlds. A guy in fatigues half-turned and beckoned him over to share his stall – Alex leant on his shoulder and looked down at his big curved dick peeing in intermittent spurts. He unbuttoned and slid in his hand and…there it was, so shrivelled that he shielded it from his friend, who said, ‘You’re all right, you’re off your face,’ and, ‘You can do it,’ and then, hungrily, ‘Well, give us a look,’ while he stroked himself and stared and stared. (The Spell, Alan Hollinghurst)
‘Almost every male seems to envy someone else’s penis,’ wrote Dr Bernie Zilbergeld in The New Male Sexuality. Woody Allen had already got there in the 1983 film Zelig with the line: ‘I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. He thought it should be limited to women.’
To return to the Cosmo question about penis size and money, which like the other nudged respondents towards the ‘appropriate’ reply (if, that is, they wished to appear mature), 42 per cent said ‘yes’ to the ‘inappropriate’ second option – a powerful indication, one might surmise, of how irresistible is men’s desire for a greater-than-average penis.
Is it any wonder that Forum, the international journal of sexual relations, thinks it has ‘probably printed more words about penises than any other part of the body, male or female’ (no surprise that a number of its articles on the subject over the years have been headlined ‘Man’s Best Friend’); or that the most frequent question on all Internet Q&A sex sites continues to be, Is size important? A downloadable chart of four outline drawings (‘low average’ to ‘extraordinarily large’) can be found on the net, which a man can print out and use as a template against which to judge himself. There should be solace for the average man in knowing that he is statistically within touching distance, as it were, of some 90 per cent of all his fellows. But even the most balanced of men is capable of half-believing that he is under-endowed – the Hunt survey for Playboy in the 1970s indicated that more than two-thirds of men thought that ‘something more in their shorts would make a difference’; and ‘the majority’ of the 7,000 men interviewed by Shere Hite for The Hite Report on Male Sexuality ‘wished they were bigger’. Many American men, according to the Kinsey Institute, believe the average erection is 10 inches – this despite (or because of) frequently accessing Internet pornography in which participants have shaved off their pubic hair to increase visibility and many have used a vascular device to pump up temporarily.
If few men would say no to having a bigger penis, most are not so discontented with what they have that they seek the means of achieving it. There have always been supposed ways and means. The world’s oldest sexual guide, the Kama Sutra, counselled men to apply the hairs of a poisonous tree insect for ten nights and sleep face downwards on a wooden bed, ‘letting one’s sex hang through a hole’ – the swelling was supposed to last a lifetime. Today, the siren voice of the Internet offers a multitude of preparations. In almost every time and culture some men have hung weights or connected stretching devices; and websites offer everything from a simple elastic band that fits around the corona or crown and fastens to another band around the thigh, to elaborate contraptions of rings and rods,springs and tension bars. Other sites promote the centuries-old Sudanese Arab technique of jelq, a daily technique of stroking the penis to erection from base to tip but stopping short of ejaculation, and then starting the process again and again (rich families used to send their sons to a mehbil or athletic club for an attendant to save them the drudgery of doing it themselves). ‘Gain three inches’ urge emails for creams and patches that drop unsolic
ited into millions of mailboxes daily.
Since the early 1990s, plastic surgery has been a new enticement. A penis can be thickened by implanting strips of fat taken from other parts of the body (usually buttocks or love handles) under the penile skin; and it can be lengthened, by cutting the ligament that anchors it to the pubic area. But phalloplasty is still considered to be in the early stages and professional associations still distance themselves from it because the results can be less than satisfactory. The body naturally reabsorbs fat and when this happens what remains unabsorbed can create lumps and bumps; even if this doesn’t happen, many men find that the transplanted fat makes their erection feel as if it were wearing a padded jacket. And a penis lengthened by detaching it from the suspensory ligament may appear to arise from the scrotum rather than the abdominal wall – and be lucky to rise even half-mast; indeed, some erections after surgery point to the ground. In the worst of outcomes, some men have reported, on erection their penis flaps around like a running hose left on the ground. There can be deformity and pain – and post-surgery scarring has been known to cause a penis to retract, becoming smaller than it was before, a situation so harrowing that in one English court action a lawyer likened his client’s emotional state to post-traumatic stress disorder.
There was considerable worry in 1993 for thousands of men who had had penis-enlargement operations in Thailand, after the Bangkok Post reported that unscrupulous surgeons had been injecting a mixture of olive oil, chalk and other ingredients into their clients’ penises to achieve the required result; the Chiang Mai hospital had even seen penises containing portions of the Bangkok telephone directory. More than a few men, particularly in South East Asia and Japan but also in the US and UK, have taken a DIY approach to an instant increase in size by injecting Vaseline, paraffin and other oils – with calamitous results: serious infections, gangrene leading in some cases to amputation, or erectile dysfunction. In 2002 a thirty-one-year-old showed up at the Institute of Urology and Nephrology in London for treatment for gross abnormality and ulceration after using a high-pressure pneumatic grease gun.
Yet despite the potential hazards, some tens of thousands of men around the world have submitted themselves to the operating table. That nine in ten were already of average or greater dimensions, and psychological profiling indicated that very few had a clinical psychological need, speaks volumes about the significance some men attach to size. Like women who have breast implants, their need is to impress – but to impress other men rather than women, even though the increase is likely to be only an inch at most in the flaccid state and nothing discernible in the erect one. And like women who return for even bigger implants, there are men who return for even more enlargement. One surgeon gave up penile cosmetic practice after a new patient, who’d already had four operations elsewhere, came to him for a fifth, presenting for examination a penis as wide as it was long – ‘a dick’, the surgeon said, ‘like a beer can’.
According to Masters and Johnson, so insecure are men on the subject of their penises that most at some time in their life are likely to suffer from feelings of inadequacy – a size syndrome known as body dysmorphia, common among bodybuilders. Like the anorexic, the dysmorphic looks in the mirror and sees a distorted image: a body or body part that is not as it is. In the throes of penile dysmorphia men are quite capable of believing that the 18-inch appendage once claimed by the porno magazine model Long Dong Silver, or ‘Mr Torpedo’, and the 15-inch one sported by Dirk Diggler in the film Boogie Nights, are not confections in latex. Scott Fitzgerald was someone temporarily in an extreme state of the condition in Paris in the 1920s when he asked fellow novelist Ernest Hemingway to lunch because he had something important to ask him. Fitzgerald was nervous and avoided addressing what was worrying him. Finally, at the end of the meal, he blurted out that it was ‘a matter of measurements’. Zelda, his wife, had said that he could never make any woman happy, because of ‘the way I was built’. Fitzgerald, who had not slept with anyone else, didn’t know whether what she said was true. As he wrote in A Moveable Feast, the Paris notebook published after his death, Hemingway took Fitzgerald to the gents, assured him on examination that he was normal, and advised him to have a look at the statues in the Louvre. Fitzgerald wasn’t convinced; the statues might not be accurate. He was not convinced by Hemingway’s assurance that ‘Most people would settle for them.’ He wasn’t convinced even after Hemingway dragged him down to the museum to see for himself.
Forty years later, by then an impotent alcoholic whose creative juices had dried up, Hemingway blew his brains out. And how good his reassurances to Fitzgerald were could be questioned after his friend and fellow novelist Sydney Franklin was quoted as saying, ‘I’ve always thought that his problem was that he was worried about his pincha [penis] . . . the size of a 30/30 shell’ – about the size of a little finger. The bullfighting, big-game-shooting lifestyle appears to have been over-compensation for under-endowment.
For many of the three men in a hundred who are statistically said to be under-endowed (that is, below the 5–7-inch erectile median) – and the one man in a hundred unfortunate enough to suffer from what the medical profession insensitively terms a ‘micropenis’, a penis that achieves under 2.5 inches – the feeling of inadequacy, even deep despair, dominates their lives. Prince Camillo Borghese, second husband of Napoleon Bonaparte’s dissipated sister Pauline, fled the French court after she dismissed him for being ‘si drolement petit.’ The actor Montgomery Clift was not only tortured by his homosexuality but by a penis that earned him the unedifying diminutive ‘Princess Tinymeat’. Only someone as compulsively confessional as the impressionist painter Salvador Dalí would make public his lack of size. In Unspeakable Confessions he wrote:
Naked, and comparing myself to my schoolfriends, I discovered that my penis was small, pitiful and soft. I can recall a pornographic novel whose Don Juan machine-gunned female genitals with ferocious glee, saying that he enjoyed hearing women creak like watermelons. I convinced myself that I would never be able to make a woman creak like a watermelon.
Dalí tried to pretend that he did not mind, though the sexually neurotic landscape of his paintings suggests otherwise. His ‘anxiety about the small size of his penis was no exaggeration’, comments Ian Gibson in The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí – and the anxiety stayed with him always. Is the American TV and radio shock jock Howard Stern another compulsive confessionalist? He certainly can’t stop talking about having a small penis and claimed in his autobiography Private Parts that he always goes to a stall rather than a urinal: ‘God forbid someone should see my puny pecker. I barely clear the zipper.’ Perhaps he’s just a well-balanced extrovert free of Daliesque neurosis. Or joking (his first wife Alison said his penis was ‘fine’). Perhaps the Spanish crooner Enrique Iglesias was joking when he announced that he wanted to launch a range of extra-small condoms for men like himself who were not well endowed and had a problem finding any to fit. After Lifestyle Condoms offered him $1 million to model their wares, the boyfriend of one-time tennis beauty Anna Kournikova said he’d only been joking. If he was and Stern is, few men share their sense of humour, certainly not ‘NW, Worcester’, a twenty-five-year-old who wrote to Forum advice column, telling of the humiliation of daily teasing in his school’s communal showers, before continuing:
For many years I hated being seen naked but have managed to overcome this to a certain degree, although I do still feel very unhappy with men seeing my penis, and my few sexual conquests so far have always involved lovemaking in the dark. In fact, my first three lovers never saw my penis at all. Eventually I found a really understanding lady who has really helped me to come to terms with this problem [but] two things still depress me. Often I see pre-pubescent boys at the gym and swimming pool I attend with bigger penises than mine and I admit I feel hugely jealous and inadequate.
Penis envy, or rather penis fear – fear of the imagined size and potency of another male’s sexual organ – is at its heightened w
orst when a woman enters the equation. The eighteenth-century essayist and critic William Hazlitt, futilely obsessed with the promiscuous daughter of his landlord, believed her ‘mad for size’, agonised about what his rivals had on offer for her favours, and was driven almost to insanity by an overheard exchange about ‘the seven inches’ of another lodger. His thinly disguised account of the whole affair, Liber amoris, was described by Thomas De Quincey as an exorcism, ‘an explosion of frenzy . . . to empty his overburdened spirit’. Humbert Humbert, jealously guarding the nymphet Lolita, is in a paroxysm of anxiety at a swimming pool as he watches a bather, whom he does not yet know is Quilty, his rival and nemesis, follow her with his eyes,
his navel pulsating, his hirsute thighs dripping with bright droplets, his tight wet black bathing trunks bloated and bursting with vigour where his great fat bullybag was pulled up and back like a padded shield over his reversed beasthood.
(Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov)
Anxiety becomes agony when a man knows that another has penetrated the woman he loves. Geoffrey Firmin in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano is just such a man. Waiting for Jacques Laruelle to finish showering, the sudden impact of the memory that
that hideously elongated cucumiform bundle of blue nerves and gills below the steaming unselfconscious stomach had sought pleasure in his wife’s body brought him trembling to his feet.
At least such knowledge is usually private or known only within a small circle. Not so in Elizabethan England, where a man with an unfaithful wife was often savagely derided, especially if he meekly accepted his situation; called a ‘wittol’ (cuckold) he had horns or antlers hung on his house, neighbours made horn signs at him with their fingers – and the most easily mocked were paraded around their parish with horns on their head.
