by Tom Hickman
A black American, Cleaver was variously jailbird, drug addict, Black Panther civil rights leader, revolutionary Marxist, author, born-again Christian, presidential candidate, radio talk-show host and environmentalist. And in the 1970s, passionate advocate of the codpiece. He produced a prototype, built into a pair of trousers (‘Cleavers’), which, he said, would ‘put sex back where it should be’. What he’d devised went far beyond the recognisable codpiece cup – indeed Cleaver’s cup ranneth over, being, in effect, an external set of genitalia (‘anatomically correct’, he superfluously emphasised) that might have put the wearer in danger of arrest for indecency.
Cleaver’s campaign withered on the vine. So did Jennifer Strait’s twenty years later – and she not only had academic clout but also the Internet on which to rally penis-possessors to the flag.
Professor of apparel, merchandising and textiles at Washington State University, Strait launched her attempt to rehabilitate the codpiece – the conventional codpiece – because, in agreement with Cleaver in this respect, she thought men’s clothing reflected ‘absolute sexlessness’. And she sought sexual equality: ‘If women exaggerate their breasts with bras, why shouldn’t men enhance their body form?’ Her campaign began cautiously, with a T-shirt (‘Bring Back the Codpiece’), her intention being to introduce codpiece-sloganed boxer shorts, aprons and bumper stickers and only move on to codpiece production once a head of steam had been generated. Her expectations were deflated. The men’s fashion magazines ran a mile from her approaches and T-shirt orders only trickled in. Penis-possessors weren’t in the market for retro enhancement: they saw ridicule looming. After two years Strait gave up, leaving her website (last modified in 1995) a forlorn testament to a lost cause.
Both advocates of the codpiece had tried to catch the coattails of the increasing sexual frankness that characterised the decades leading up to the millennium. But the zeitgeist was beyond the peek-a-boo respect that the codpiece had once accorded the penis – in fact, the age has outed the penis. Penises of male strippers jiggle at hen parties in pubs, clubs and village halls to shrieks of ‘Off, off, off!’ On stage and screen (big, small and finally computer) real-life, flesh-and-blood penises leap like salmon. It seems quaint that forty years ago the hippie counterculture musical Hair, the first theatrical production to feature full frontal male nudity, created a firestorm of protest – for a revival in 2008 theatre managements were more concerned to caution patrons that they might be exposed to herbal cigarette smoke from the stage than warning them about the sight of dangling bits and pieces. So many penises have been among the dramatis personae of so many plays that managements no longer bother to draw attention to the fact, though they do warn when strobe lighting is used. When Nicole Kidman appeared on the London stage in The Blue Room and was hailed as ‘pure theatrical Viagra’, no one seemed interested that her costar was just as naked and turning cartwheels into the bargain – surely a theatrical first. So commonplace are penises on the boards – simulating masturbation, fellation, penetration or, as with a celebrity cast as himself, doing little more than coming on to milk the applause – that only a coup de théâtre will get a review; the penis that came to boiling point with a whistling kettle in Buff made inches of column space – if fewer than Puppetry of the Penis, which invites laughter with a display of genital origami. Long gone are the days when male nakedness on television was restricted to buttocks; in mainstream cinema even the erect penis and not necessarily only simulating can be sighted. Since Richard Gere revealed all in American Gigolo in the 1980s, it is almost de rigueur for screen actors to showcase their genitals (Kevin Costner was so put out when the studio cut a few frames from a movie in which he emerged from the shower, he threatened to sue). On the Internet’s porn sites, tens of thousands of penises preen and prod at work and play – possibly an oxymoron.
Penises have also become intrinsic to the age’s iconography, in the tool kit of pop art and advertising. The Chapman brothers substitute penises for noses; a female artist shows her ‘Wall of Wangers’ in a London gallery, a display of eighty-eight penis-casts of eighty-eight different erections, making it seem that the Plastercasters pop groupies in the 1960s weren’t really trying; in the ultimate in penis art, a portrait of former Australian prime minister John Howard is painted by an artist using his penis as the brush (one up on Renoir who said ‘I paint with my prick’, though he meant that figuratively and viscerally). Advertising turns to erections sparingly (always humorously, with covert cushion or towel or sometimes the product being promoted) but is addicted to the penile double entendre: ‘one-and-a-half inches in the lunchbox’ (a bigger packet of biscuits); ‘15½ inches and no wrinkles’ (a shirt); ‘Can you keep it up for a week?’ (a national vegetarian campaign). Size does (or doesn’t) matter matters almost as much to advertising as it does to penis-possessors.
The average penis-possessor is not likely to theorise whether the penis’s status is diminished by frank flauntings or constant allusions. He does not feel a personal diminution. Indeed, in the years of his pomp he is subconsciously sure that his virile member is not only not dishonoured or ridiculous within his trousers but sallies forth with him, on display in some virtual way that cannot be defined by mere words. The gait of some penis-possessors leaves no doubt of this cocksureness, involving their thighs in an apparently necessary circumnavigation of what lies between them – something, it seems, of an order preventing simple forward locomotion: a codpiece worn interiorly, perhaps, and possibly a poulaine. Such penis-possessors tend to sit on public transport with legs flung wide, as if bringing their knees closer together simply can’t be done. So prevalent is the habit among the Japanese – an irony here, given the Japanese’s low standing in the international measurement tables – that on the Tokyo underground the carriages have ‘do not . . .’ stickers on the windows. In her contribution to the book asking women how they would behave if they had a Dick for a Day, Maryanne Denver wrote: ‘I would stick it on my forehead and parade around the way regular owners do.’ She was expressing herself metaphorically; but where some men are concerned, only just.
PART TWO NOTES
1. During the First World War the Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando wore a fascinum on a bracelet to ensure victory for the Allies – a residual belief in penis power, perhaps, or just a case of covering all the bases.
Today in certain cultures men have similar phallic amulets. In Thailand, one or more are worn hanging near the penis from an intricately woven cord around the waist under the clothes, to absorb any negative energies directed by others to their genitals, and to increase their sexual attractiveness (and maybe bring gambling luck too). The Thai name is palad khik – ‘honourable surrogate penis’.
2. A male baboon says hello to another by pulling on his penis, the courtesy being reciprocated; proto-human man almost certainly did likewise. The Walbiri of central Australia today hold the penis of a visitor as the equivalent of shaking hands.
A hangover from the practice of genital oath-taking still exists in rural areas of Mediterranean countries, men clutching or touching themselves when emphasising the veracity of what they are saying, or to avert bad luck.
3. The primary biological function of the penis is to deliver semen to the vagina, to accomplish fertilisation – a function, however, that occurs in negligible ratio to its use purely for pleasure and even less in expelling urine ‘from the bladder to the porcelain of the outside world’, as John Gordon phrases it in The Alarming History of Sex. That semen travels the same penile piping (though not, of course, at the same time) Gordon regarded as an example of ‘nature’s recurrent economy’; an obverse view might be that when it comes to genitalia, God is not a sanitary engineer.
Women are exasperated by men’s cavalier attitude to urination (as a character in Laurie Graham’s novel The Ten O’Clock Horses says, ‘a man having a jimmy couldn’t aim it down the Mersey Tunnel’), but the German psychoanalyst Karen Horney over fifty years ago believed it indicated
‘fantasies of omnipotence, especially those of a sadistic character’.
Modern Swedish women would seem to agree. In 2000 they demanded that men use the toilet sitting down, partly for hygiene reasons but more crucially because standing up was deemed to be ‘triumphing in [their] masculinity and therefore degrading women’. Feminists at Stockholm University campaigned to scrap the campus urinals, and primary schools began to get rid of the wall-fixed porcelain to acclimatise young males to the new order.
The campaign has spread to Germany where, a survey suggests, 40 per cent of men now sit, the same percentage as in Japan.
4. A variation in the seventeenth century was that conception was the result of magnetic energy produced by the friction of intercourse, the female reproductive tract being ‘magnetised’ by the male ‘spark’. In the middle of the following century the word ‘spunk’, the principal meaning of which is courage, became a colloquialism for the safety match – which requires friction to spark, leading, two stages removed, to its slang use for semen. ‘Mettle’, also slang for semen, derived from it having the same proper meaning as spunk.
5. Yin–yang is a dominant concept in Chinese philosophy, representing the two primal cosmic forces in the universe. Yin (moon) is the receptive, passive, cold, female force, yang (sun) the active, hot, masculine one. Summer and winter, night and day, health and disease, woman and man – all things follow the principles of yin–yang and are in some way related to each other.
6. Japan, an overtly phallic culture into the twentieth century, still celebrates fertility festivals that give a good idea of what went on in medieval Europe. Men carry a giant wooden (or, increasingly, pink plastic) penis in procession to a local shrine, with many wearing papier mâché penises on the front of their costumes, and woman cradling wooden penises; phallic ice creams, lollipops and other snacks are on sale to the crowds. At some festivals a giant phallus of straw is set fire and plunged into a straw vulva, as milk-white sake is spattered about. Many festivals have disappeared in recent times – again, Westernisation.
7. When Rasputin was murdered in 1916 by a group of nobles fearful of his influence over Tsarina Alexandra, they hacked off his penis. What happened to it during the next half century is unaccounted for but, according to Patte Barham who helped Rasputin’s daughter write her biography, it was kept in a velvet box from which in 1968 her co-author’s Parisian maid produced it, looking ‘like a blackened, over-ripe banana, about a foot long’. Nothing more was heard of it until the Russian museum of erotica opened in St Petersburg in 2004 with Rasputin’s alleged organ as its prime exhibit.
8. Unlike many big-penised men, the affable comedian/actor Milton Berle was modest about his appendage, though Sammy Davis Junior once confirmed ‘even down it’s world class’. Asked by Davis how big his penis got erect, Berle replied, ‘I don’t know, I always black out first’ – bringing to mind the observation of another actor/comedian, Robin Williams, that ‘God gave every man a brain and a penis but only enough blood to make one work at a time.’
9. For centuries men have enhanced the asppearance of their penis with inserts, but the practice has limited appeal in the West. It has become more popular since the 1970s, mostly in the gay community.
Some twenty cultures of South East Asia traditionally accessorise their manhood. In India and Burma, many men sew little bells, some the size of a small chicken egg, under the skin of the shaft. The Malays, Koreans and Filipinos favour metal balls about the size of a hazelnut, the Sumatrans small stones, and the Japanese pearls. Three to a dozen inserts are common in all cultures – the Japanese yakuza (mafia) can have many more, sewing in a pearl for each year spent in prison.
In the past, Asian royalty would remove one such accessory to bestow on a person deserving great honour.
On the Indian subcontinent and in South East Asia generally, men have always attached jewellery through the penis itself, to enhance lovemaking: in India, a ‘barbell’, the apadravya, is inserted vertically through the glans; in Borneo and Sarawak, the similar ampallang, but this is fixed horizontally and sometimes intercepts the urethra. A combination of apadravya and ampallang is referred to as ‘the magic cross’.
Traditionally, the taste in North Africa and the Middle East has not been for penile but for scrotal adornment: the hafada ring is fastened anywhere through loose skin; multiple piercings are not uncommon, particularly the ‘frenulum ladder’.
Apadravya, ampallang and hafada augmentation is found in the West, but the most popular is the so-called ‘Prince Albert’ ring, which pierces the underneath of the penis behind the glans, passes up through the urethra, and exits at the tip. That Queen Victoria’s consort wore a ‘dressing’ ring like this is widely believed but is an urban myth emanating from the 1970s.
Mankind is ruled by the Fates, they even govern those private parts that our clothes conceal. If your stars go against you the fantastic size of your cock will get you precisely nowhere . . .
Juvenal
HAZARDS OF OWNERSHIP
Pluses and minuses
ONE NIGHT IN the summer of 415 BC, just before the Athenian army set sail to wage an unpopular war against Sicily, someone knocked the penises off the herms across the city – hundreds of penises, in public places, in courtyards, in the doorways of private houses. According to the nineteenth-century English classical historian George Grote, men waking up to find their phallic guardians castrated felt as if Athens ‘had become as it were godless’.
It was never discovered who carried out the deed, or why. In the 1990s the feminist Eva Keuls, professor of classics at Minnesota University, asserted in The Reign of the Phallus that the perpetrators were a group of women making an antiwar protest and a protest against their phallocentric world into the bargain. Other historians have dismissed her claims as codswallop (etymology uncertain but in the context of this book identifiably synonymic). The story, however, emphasises the alliterative observation made by Gay Talese (Thy Neighbor’s Wife) that penises are ‘very vulnerable even when made of stone, and the museums of the world are filled with Herculean figures brandishing penises that are chipped, clipped or completely chopped off’. The British Museum has a cabinet entirely filled with such dispossessions, hacked away in the name of religion by early Christians and divers fundamentalists in later periods such as the English Reformation and the French Revolution, though Victorian prudes made some contribution, taking hammers to the private parts of public statuary as an outrage against decency.1
The vulnerability of stone penises hardly compares to that of flesh and blood penises, and is as nothing compared to flesh and blood testicles. The penises of most mammals are protected within a sheath, from which they emerge only when engorged. The penises of human males, and their fellow primates, have no such sheath because, instead of being attached to the abdomen along their length, they are pendulant: they hang free. As for testicles, those of all mammals originate inside the body and in many species stay there; in some, they emerge only during the breeding season and then go back inside for safe keeping. But in others, including man, testicles descend into the scrotal sac before birth and here they remain through life. Given that the internal arrangement self-evidently offers maximum protection, it seems counterintuitive that the external arrangement exists, particularly, you might think, among the advanced higher primates. The reason that it does, a report in the Journal of Zoology suggested, is due to evolutionary locomotion. Species with a generally gentle way of getting about (elephants to moles) keep their testicles inside the skeletal structure. Species that run and jump (deer, kangaroos, horses, primates) have theirs outside – a development that occurred because their ‘concussive’ types of movement squeezed their testicles when they were internal and, since the reproductive tract has no sphincter, involuntarily expelled sperm, thus wasting it.
There are advantages to having external genitalia. Penises not in a rigidly fixed position have copulatory (and urinary) flexibility; external testicles house sperm in mildly ref
rigerated conditions, which keeps them lively and eager for the off (see Part 4, ‘The “Precious Substance” Revisited’). ‘The “Precious Substance” Revisited’). But there are disadvantages: the increased danger of accident or assault, compounded in man by his upright gait, which points his delicate extremities to the front. His testicles are particularly vulnerable to injury and, being much more delicate than his penis – they are in fact part of his internal viscera – a blow or pressure to them can cause nausea or even loss of consciousness.
It’s estimated that one adolescent boy in ten has been kicked in the testicles, with varying degrees of distress and consequence. Penises also suffer damage; small boys regularly turn up in A&E after the toilet seat has fallen on theirs, if not a sash window as happened to the infant Tristram in Tristram Shandy, giving a servant the opportunity to quip: ‘Well, nothing in the Shandy household is well-hung.’ Males of all ages regularly appear in A&E too, having carelessly trapped themselves in their zipper. Every year four million men in the UK and nineteen million men in the US sustain genital injuries taking part in sport and exercise. Some other kinds of accidents seem hilarious to anyone but the sufferer. A British holidaymaker in Fiji in 2005 dozed by a rock pool and awoke to find a barnacle clamped to his penis and had to be rushed to hospital. In 2006 a Croatian sat in a deckchair on his local beach but when he tried to get up found that his testicles were stuck between the slats – they’d shrunk while he skinny-dipped in the sea but had expanded to normal in the sunshine; an attendant had to cut the chair into pieces to free him.
Even having sex can cause a man physical injury. Perhaps a majority of men don’t know they have a frenulum (if they’re circumcised, they haven’t), the thin elastic strip of skin that anchors the tip of the penis to the shaft on the underside. Frenulum means ‘little bowstring’ in Latin, and like a bowstring it can snap. Too vigorous sex is to blame and the injury is usually sustained by very young men or by men of any age during one-night stands, when the sex is more than usually vigorous. And there can be a lot of blood (Suzi Godson, The Times sex expert, wrote of an encounter in a hotel in which a man’s frenulum ripped ‘and when they left the room it looked as if someone had been murdered on the bed’). Besides being excruciatingly painful, the injury almost certainly involves an acutely embarrassing visit to A&E for some needlework, but it mends quickly. A broken penis is a different matter.
