by Tom Hickman
The corollary, of course, is that some women positively dislike the large penis, like Sandra Corleone in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather:
When I saw that pole of Sonny’s for the first time and realised he was going to stick it into me, I yelled bloody murder . . . when I heard he was doing the job on other girls I went to church and lit a candle.
But what of the majority of women? Da Vinci thought that ‘woman’s desire is the opposite of man’s. She wishes the size of the man’s member to be as large as possible, while the man desires the opposite for the woman’s genital parts.’ Leaving the second observation aside, da Vinci was contradicted on the first by Masters and Johnson, who in the 1970s concluded that size was unimportant to a woman’s sexual satisfaction. Researchers, now, are in some disagreement with that finding. If a penis is bulky (as opposed to lengthy), it makes greater contact with the outer parts of the vagina and therefore, it’s thought, sends vibrations to the clitoris, the trigger of female sexual gratification. The ongoing debate is whether this is physiologically significant – or whether the bulky penis is only a psychological predilection. What is not up for reassessment, however, is that penis length is of secondary importance. ‘If things aren’t too bad in other ways I doubt if any woman cares very much,’ the American playwright Lillian Hellman (Pentimento) observed.
As Alex Comfort makes clear in The Joy of Sex, ‘female orgasm doesn’t depend on getting deeply into the pelvis’. There’s a good purely physiological reason: only the first two inches of the vagina are rich in nerve endings. The long and short of it, therefore, is that unless there’s a startling abnormality, no erect penis is too small to surmount what the Chinese poetically call ‘the jade terrace’ and make adequate contact where it matters. And only in very, very exceptional cases is a penis too long, and virtually never too thick. A young man, weeks away from marriage, wrote to Kinsey explaining that his penis was 7.25 inches erect and 6 inches in circumference, which led him to be ‘afraid that my organ is too big for intercourse with an average woman’. Kinsey wrote back, ‘We have never seen a solitary instance in which the dimensions of the penis caused any difficulty in intercourse. Certainly we have records of successful adjustment where the penis measures two or three inches more than your own.’ In being reassuring Kinsey was not being entirely accurate: elastic as the vagina is, a penis ‘rare’ in the Kinseyan sense can touch the neck of the cervix and the posterior fornix, causing pain; a man with such a penis may have to wear the equivalent of an outsize tap washer to reduce his intromittence. That said, the experienced Phoebe was entirely accurate in telling the inexperienced Fanny Hill that she ‘had never heard of a mortal wound being given in those parts by that terrible weapon’. The vagina is highly accommodating – it can give passage to a baby at birth, after all – and closes upon whatever size penis is presented to it.
Women, of course, do have preferences about body parts, just like men. Some, for instance, have a taste for the circumcised penis, finding it neater, some for the uncircumcised penis, because the foreskin is another element and that it rolls back on erection adds intrigue. But in the final analysis whether a man is ‘Roundhead’ or ‘Cavalier’ is likely to be of scant significance – as is size. Whether women have a partiality for ‘bigs’, whether in one dimension or the other or both, this isn’t likely to top their wish list. What does, if a woman has feelings for the penis-possessor, is that she has no preferences – she accept his penis as it is, part and parcel of him: ‘how innocently part of him it seemed, and not a harsh jutting second life parasitic upon him’ in Updike’s telling phrase (Couples). Anyway, a sensible man should give due cognisance to the fact that a woman is more likely to be turned on by broad shoulders and pert buttocks (should he have these) and by his ability to make her laugh than she is by his genitals. And, remembering Abraham Lincoln’s dictum that a man’s legs need only be long enough to reach the ground, he should be at ease with what he has. After all, what really matters is that he employs his penis to his partner’s satisfaction as well as his own.
Yet research shows that almost without exception, irrespective of intellect, education and cultural or ethnic background, men ask women if the penises of previous incumbents of their bed were bigger. To appropriate a remark of the painter Ferdinand Delacroix (who was talking about canvasses), ‘Men are always more given to admiring what is gigantic than what is reasonable.’
Whatever the evolutionary path of the human penis, Jared Diamond observes that it is four times bigger than biologically necessary, and ‘as a structure [is] costly and detrimental to its owner’. And if the functionally unnecessary tissue ‘was instead devoted to extra cerebral cortex, that brainy redesigned man would gain a big advantage’. The truth of that is theoretically undeniable – but one can guess that the men who would be prepared to make the swap would be few and far between. Indeed, as Phillip Hodson pondered in Men: An Investigation Into the Emotional Male, if the majority of penis-possessors had the option, they would only be satisfied ‘with Beardsleyesque phalluses of such dimensions they need to be carried in both hands’.
PART ONE NOTES
1. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, a soothsayer reads the fortune of two of Cleopatra’s handmaidens and tells one, Iras, that her future is the same as the other, Charmian. Iras wheedles: ‘Am I not an inch of fortune better than she?’ Interjects Charmian: ‘Well, if you were an inch of fortune better than I, where would you choose it?’ To which Iras retorts: ‘Not in my husband’s nose.’ A reader unfamiliar with the Elizabeth colloquialism is likely to assume that Iras, by innuendo, would like the addition exactly where she does not.
2. It intrigued the quintessential word manipulator, the Irish author James Joyce, that losing a word space gave the dubious synecdochic maxim ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’ an even more dubious, phallocentric meaning – not that he would have disagreed with Simone de Beauvoir’s remark to all male sexual supremacists that ‘the penis is neither plough-share not sword, only flesh’.
3. In the wake of the Durex and DP surveys and irritated that Asians were treated as one big group, an Asian website came into being with the ambitious hope of identifying variations between Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Thais, Burmese, Malays, Indonesians, North and South Indians, Sinhalese, Pakistanis, Bengalis and Nepalese. It attracted only a few hundred replies and soon disappeared.
4. In the mid-1990s the honeymoon home video of American rock musician Tommy Lee and ex-Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson was stolen, turned up on scores of Internet sites – and Lee’s penis for a time became the most viewed penis on the planet. Admittedly it was only of secondary or perhaps tertiary interest, but Anderson’s assertion that it had her name tattooed on it, and ‘when he gets excited it says, “I love Pamela very, very much, she’s a wonderful wife and I enjoy her company to the tenth degree”’, was clearly not entirely uxorious hyperbole, not that it stopped them subsequently getting divorced.
You will always say of his membrum virile that it is huge, wonderful, larger than any other; larger than your father’s when he used to get naked to take his bath. And you will add, ‘Come and fill me, O my wonder.’
Eighth-century Japanese pillow book
FROM BIT PLAYER TO LEAD
TOWARDS THE END of the sixteenth century, a fifteen-year-old French peasant girl named Marie was minding the family pigs when they escaped into a wheat field. Chasing them, Marie leapt over a ditch whereupon, according to the celebrated French surgeon Ambroise Paré, ‘the genitals and male rod came to be developed’. In consternation Marie rushed to the physician and the bishop, neither of whom could offer help. Resigned, Marie renamed herself Germain and went to serve in the king’s retinue. Years later the French essayist Michel Montaigne, on his way to Italy, stopped off to see the prodigy, who wasn’t at home. He had not married, Montaigne was told, but he had ‘a big, very thick beard’.
If Renaissance woman suffered anxiety that strenuous acti
vity might make her prey to gender transformation (‘there is still a song commonly in girls’ mouths,’ Montaigne noted, ‘in which they warn one another not to stretch their legs too wide for fear of becoming males’), Renaissance man was made indignant, at the very least, by the tale of Marie/Germain and others like it. His conviction was that he was born to rule over woman and the Bible provided the evidence. ‘The whole world was made for man,’ opined the doctor and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici (The Religion of a Physician) published in 1642. ‘Man is the whole word, and the breath of God; woman the rib and crooked piece of man.’ So did biology. In the first instance, as God had made man in his own image it followed, ipso facto, that God was a fellow penis-possessor, and woman, as a non-penis-possessor, was by definition lesser; in the second, medical authority held, as it had for more than a thousand years, that all foetuses were male: infants that emerged as female had simply failed to achieve masculine perfection. The reproductive organs of the female were male but in a defective state: the uterus was the scrotum, the ovaries the testicles, the vagina the penis and the labia the foreskin. These, save the last, had remained inside the female’s body because she had generated insufficient heat to thrust them outside – a process seemingly not unlike turning a washing-up glove inside out.
To Renaissance man, the penis was God’s ultimate gift; and that a woman might suddenly acquire one was not only an affront to God and to the natural order but to rightful penis-possessors. To Leonardo da Vinci the human body – the male, penis-possessing body – was even an analogy for the very workings of the universe, as depicted in his famous drawing of Vitruvian Man.
You can blame the Ancient Greek physician Galen for woman’s inferior status in Western thought. It was he who erroneously theorised that there was a single model of human physiology, though he’d never seen inside the human body (he’d only dissected dogs and pigs). ‘Turn outward the woman’s [sexual organs], turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man’s, and you find them the same in both in every respect,’ he wrote. And until the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries showed he was talking, well, cock (or balls,if you prefer), there simply were no words for female plumbing. Not surprisingly it did strike Galen that it was jolly useful that half the human race were botched males, allowing, as it did, childbirth, not to mention the pleasure of sexual intercourse. The Creator, he thought, would not ‘purposely [have done it] unless there was to be some great advantage in such a mutilation’.
Was woman’s inferiority ever thus? According to some interpretations of prehistory, the situation was very different: woman ruled over man, because she was deemed enchanted: mysteriously, monthly, she bled and yet healed herself; she produced new life from her own body. Be that as it may, once man realised he was necessary for conception to take place, non-penis-possessors became relegated. Until relatively recently, the consensual view was that this happened only when herdsmen and farmers began to control animal sexuality around ten thousand years ago and put two and two together about their own. Nowadays most anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists doubt the timeline, believing it insulting to our ancestors who, ten thousand years ago, had had anatomically modern brains for some one hundred and fifty thousand years.
All is conjecture. What is indisputable is that, if once the penis was only a jobbing extra in the story of life, by the time writing appeared around five thousand years ago, its name was already above the title of the film. ‘Throughout all of history,’ as Isadora Wing percipiently remarks, ‘books were written with sperm, not menstrual blood.’
How true that is, is evidenced in mythology, those supernaturalised chronicles of the dawn of time and the birth of humankind. The Egyptian god Amun, for example, brought the world into being by swallowing his own semen and then spitting it out. The god Atum masturbated to create the Nile, while in Mesopotamia the god Enki, ‘lifted his penis, ejaculated, and filled the Tigris’, and had the stamina to move on to create the Euphrates similarly (he dug irrigation ditches with his penis, too). Man was quick to create his gods in his own image: with a penis – three, in some manifestations of Osiris, another of the multiplicity of Egyptian penis deities. The Phoenicians even named their chief god Asshur, meaning penis, ‘the happy one’. And man was already sizeist. The celestial rod of the Indian god Shiva shafted through the lower world and towered up to dwarf the heavens, so impressing the other gods that they fell down in worship.
There were, of course, goddesses as well as gods in the ancient world, and female generative power had its worshippers, but none was dominant in any major culture. The penis erect (ithyphallic, or straight up) ruled the roost and monuments fashioned in its likeness, usually in stone (the Japanese also favoured iron) sprang up like dragon’s teeth across the globe. In Greece by the third century BC, the island of Delos boasted an avenue of massive erections, mounted on prodigious testicles, aimed skywards like cannon. Herms, the most famous and sophisticated phallic monuments – smooth stone square pillars that sported the bearded head of Hermes, the messenger of the gods, and, halfway down, an erect ‘penis stick’ – were placed at every crossroads to offer protection to the traveller, frequently anointed with wine and oil and constantly touched for luck. Herms stood at roadsides (as did the Japanese counterparts, the dosijinas), on every street corner and inside every home, as did their counterparts among the Egyptians, Hindus, Hebrews, Arabs and other Semitic peoples. The Scandinavians and the Celtic tribes of Europe placed phallic stones at strategic points on boundaries and at entrances.
The Romans adopted the herm and scattered it across their empire – and in echo had their gravestones carved with the likeness of their own head and genitals. Rome adopted the Grecian god Priapus, too (as Liber), a god permanently at awesome attention – though ‘phallus’, the word describing the penis in an erective state, derives from the god Phalles, whose cult of tireless sexual activity was rampant among young men. Greek, Roman and other cultures sculpted penises on the walls of their cities, houses and public baths to ward off bad luck, just as they protected their fields with replicas – and sometimes the real thing, removed from executed criminals and enemies. They decorated their household objects with phalluses, baked phallic cakes during festivals and wore phallic amulets – fascina in Greece, the word derived from yet another phallic deity
