by Tom Hickman
Penis and possessor may no longer ask much of each other, or, if penis-possession finally becomes vacant possession, anything at all. But the prick of the brain, never mind its location or how neurologically defined, remains questing, even to the end of sentience.
PART FOUR NOTES
1. The indigenous San people of southern Africa, often referred to as ‘Bushmen’, are the oldest culture on the planet with a history dating back at least 70,000 years – and are known for their curious anatomy. The labia minora, or inner lips of the woman’s vagina, are greatly enlarged, hanging down five or six inches like a small apron – and the males have a permanent semi-erection in the flaccid state. It was once speculated that San males were the last humans to have an os penis, but the condition results from a unique circular ligament in the rectus muscle.
2. A quirk of language is that fellation in modern times is invariably a ‘blow job’, which suggests the very opposite of what the act involves.
The derivation of the term isn’t clear. As a euphemism for ejaculation, one supposition is that it’s used in the sense of a kettle coming to the boil, or a whale surfacing: blowing off. Both seem fanciful. Far more persuasive is that the term comes from the black jazz scene of the late 1940s and ’50s, meaning to play an instrument.
The other modern alternative, ‘giving head’, needs no clarification.
3. For centuries a common method of contraception, anal sex is an increasing heterosexual recreational activity. Sixty years ago, Kinsey found that about one man in ten had tried it at least once, but he had little data, and none on women. In the 1990s a US national survey estimated that one man in five had tried anal sex – a figure that had doubled in 2005.
One in three women admits to having experienced anal penetration but, according to a French study, only a third of them found it pleasurable.
The prevalence of anal sex varies across the world with South Korea reporting the lowest figure and America the highest, where one in ten couples are believed to practise it regularly.
4. Hundreds of expressions for intercourse, as opposed to specific words, have or do exist, some of them highly personal between couples (in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Swann begs Odette ‘to do a camellia’). In the centuries when men got about on horses, for example, they talked of ‘stabling the steed’; less elegantly now they talk about ‘hiding the sausage’, for which colloquialism thank the Australians.
5. For some men a partner’s finger touching their prostate via their rectum before or during ejaculation is exquisitely pleasurable. For most men the spot is so sensitive that having it touched is painful, even stopping them from doing what they’re doing. Many men, undergoing a medical rectal examination of their prostate, experience the embarrassment of becoming erect.
6. Writers of high-grade fiction strive to capture the intricacy of sexual activity, its psychological complexity, and to do it with originality. But on occasion the results are earnestly risible – which prompted the Literary Review magazine in 1993 to introduce its annual Bad Sex Award for Fiction. Every year the international competition is, to coin a cliché, stiff.
Over the years, predictably, fictional efforts to portray the penis in varying states have garnered their share of Review nominations. Norman Mailer in his last novel (Castle in the Forest) compared an unerect penis to ‘a soft coil of excrement’. John Updike wrote in Brazil of a character experiencing erection feeling ‘his cashew become a banana, and then a rippled yam’, and in Seek My Face wrote of an erection being like ‘that Marisol Masterpiece with the cigarette lighter’ (?). Rowan Somerville (The Shape of Her) became the 2010 winner for a description of penetration: ‘Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.’ Perhaps Sarah Duncan was on to something saying in an article about the Bad Sex Award that her fellow fictive practitioners might be advised to eschew detailing what body parts go where and an explicit vocabulary; ‘there isn’t a single word for penis’, she wrote, ‘that doesn’t sound daft. Dick, cock, willie, member, etc. They make me giggle.’ (She has avoided appearing in the Review’s lists.)
7. Serious writers find themselves nominated by the Literary Review for its Bad Sex Award because their mazes of metaphors and similes often make sex appear to have more to do with the natural elements than anything experienced between the sheets.
Then I felt him beginning to move inside me again . . . Heaven or Hell . . . It was Heaven. I was the earth, the mountains, the tigers, the rivers that flowed into the lakes, the lake that became the sea. (Eleven Minutes, Paulo Coelho)
As if struck by a sacred bolt of lightning . . . the world, the seagulls, the taste of salt, the hard earth, the smell of the sea, the clouds, all disappeared, and in their place appeared a vast golden light, which grew and grew until it touched the most distant star in the galaxy. (Brida, Paulo Coelho)
The Brazilian Coelho is not the only exponent of labyrinthine prolixity, of which the above is a mere sample. This, for example:
Almost in an instant his desire . . . to reach a climax stalls and gives way to a sort of sensitive physical alertness . . . as though he has been transformed into a delicate seismograph that intercepts and instantly deciphers her body’s reactions, translating . . . into skilful, precise navigation, anticipating and cautiously avoiding every sandbank, steering clear of each underwater reef . . . (Rhyming Life and Death, Amos Oz)
And this:
She took my body into hers, and every movement was an incantation . . . My body was her chariot, and she drove it into the sun. Her body was my river, and I became the sea. And the wailing moan that drove our lips together, at the end, was the world of hope and sorrow that ecstasy wrings from lovers as it floods their souls with bliss (Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts)
Writers from lower down the literary scale don’t escape the Review’s attention.
His towel fell away. Sebastian’s erect member was so big I mistook it for some sort of monument in the centre of a town. I almost started directing traffic around it (To Love, Honour and Betray, Kathy Lette)
Her hand is moving away from my knee and heading north . . . And, like Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Pamela will not easily be discouraged . . . Ever northward moves her hand . . . And when she reaches the north pole, I think in wonder and terror . . . she will surely want to pitch her tent (Rescue Me, Christopher Hart)
Honey Mackintosh bobbed up and down between my legs, her big soft lips locked around my hootchee and, true to her Scottish roots, she sucked away like she was the last person left on earth to play the bagpipes on Robbie Burns’ birthday (The Sucker’s Kiss, Alan Parker)
Meanwhile, down in Vaginaland, Mr Condom’s beginning to feel a bit iffy . . . and as he gets flung willy-nilly in and out of the pink tunnel. He starts getting friction burns, hanging onto Bobby’s stiff penis for dear life, headbutting Georgie’s cervix at 180 beats per minute (Ten Storey Love Song, Richard Milward)
Whether comic sex writing is bad sex writing is a moot point. After all, its intention is to make readers laugh – not what those at the superior end of the writing trade really have in mind.
8. The Aranda hunters and gatherers of central Australia are one of the few peoples today who appear to be ignorant of the fact that males are necessary for procreation. Others are the Trobrianders, inhabitants of a group of islands in the western Pacific, the Yapese, inhabitants of a large island in the Carolines, and the Kajaba, a Colombian society.
The Keeraki of New Guinea believe that anal insemination could occur among boys who submit to men during puberty rites. The Etora in Oceania believe that boys have no semen at birth but acquire it through oral insemination by older men. New Guinea males have regular sex right up to the end of pregnancy because they believe that repeated infusions of semen provide the material to build the foetus’s body. In Rwanda, tradition is that since semen and milk are white, intercourse is encouraged during lactation.
A number of societies believe semen can be trans
ferred to the mother’s milk, poisoning the baby. In Equatorial Guinea the Fang believe that a boy will become impotent if milk from his mother’s breast drips on his penis.
9. The first donor insemination was conducted in 1884 at the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, a medical student’s semen being used on the wife of a Quaker merchant (who chose not to tell her). In subsequent years a few doctors conducted the procedure discreetly. In Britain during the 1930s unnamed senior academics were sperm donors, fathering large numbers of children. In a six-year period an eminent London neuropsychologist regularly supplied samples to a discreet London infertility clinic, his ‘hyper-fecund’ sperm leading to as many as two hundred births. It wasn’t until 1954 that the public at large became aware of artificial insemination – a year after the first pregnancy was achieved using frozen sperm. In 2010 a baby was born from semen that had been frozen for over twenty years.
Sperm donors must be fit, free of disease and their sperm count above average to give the best chance of pregnancy. Fresh donations have greater fecundity than frozen and produce higher pregnancy rates. Many countries have a serious shortage of donors, often because they don’t allow anonymous donation, including Britain. The most sought-after sperm on the global market comes from Denmark – the Danes tend to be tall, highly educated and donate for altruistic motives.
Sperm agencies recruit contributors, usually via the Internet, supplying them with a collection kit and a courier service. Agencies are largely unregulated. Most women seeking a donor do so through strictly controlled sperm banks and fertility clinics – where men provide their samples while viewing erotic material.
And what of Robert Graham’s supremacist genetic experiment? Some hundreds of children were born as a result of it. But after he died in 1997 at the age of ninety, his repository, sited in an underground bunker on his ranch near San Diego, no longer funded, closed down.
10. Patriarchal societies though they were, the Ancient Greeks and early Jews enshrined a man’s marital duty in law. The Athenians decreed that citizen wives were entitled to sex three times a month. The Jews were more specific: labourers were to satisfy their wife to orgasm twice a week; scholars only on Fridays; businessmen who travelled to other cities, once a week; and camel drivers (who travelled even more and whose work was arduous) once every thirty days. ‘Men of leisure’ were theoretically under obligation to satisfy their wives nightly, which seems to have set the bar a bit high.
EPILOGUE
As two
The penis is not just a body part – it is a determinant of identity and behaviour. Possession can lift the possessor to great heights or hurtle him to great depths; as in any long-term relationship there are good days and bad days.
The difference in libido, that tangled combination of heart and head and hormones, between men and women is vast. Men are programmed to hunt, to spread their seed, women to conserve and nurture, though that is a simplification. What is true is that penis-possession can allow men to depersonalise sex almost at will, if they have a will, and throughout adult life makes ‘infinite desirelessness a strain to bring on’ (Intimacy, Hanif Kureishi). Should men rove, or venture where they wished they had not, they’re likely to blame their penis, not themselves, just as they do should they fail in their performance. It is as if, as the Californian sex therapist Barbara Keesling quipped, their penis is ‘a stranger letting space in their underwear’. And a possessor almost always forgives his penis any transgressions; it’s unlikely that he will admonish his appendage further than the hero of Paul Theroux’s My Secret History, who ‘often looked at [his] penis and thought: you moron’. How could it be otherwise?
Women have more to lose than men by submitting to the libido’s lash, yet men don’t have a monopoly on infidelity; humankind is only nominally monogamous. There is, of course, love, which may be for ever, or not. Women prefer sex to be linked to love. Men often aren’t worried. Men succumb to love more quickly; women need time, just as they do in bed. And in bed the different paths that men and women want to follow to arousal and completion can cause all kinds of misunderstandings. Even at their closest the planets Mars and Venus are 128 million miles apart.
If sex is so difficult, if men and women are such an imperfect match, why does sex seem to dominate their lives? After all, their primate cousins (other than bonobo chimpanzees) couple only when the female is fertile (which in the gorilla’s case is for six days every four years – even the dominant male in a group is lucky to have sex a few times a year). Humans, Jared Diamond points out, ‘are bizarre in our near continuous practice of sex’.
And why? Because, as Diamond also points out, human sex isn’t just a biological imperative. Despite all the trouble and travail it causes penis-possessors and non-penis-possessors alike, sex is fun. A world without sex, the American humorist Henry Louis Mencken thought,
would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.
Yet, increasingly, science is divorcing sex from reproduction. The Journal of Australia, an authority on in-vitro fertilisation, predicts that sexual intercourse will fade away as a means of procreation in favour of technology that can achieve genetic preferences and avoid genetic risks. Evolutionary biologist Robin Baker goes further, predicting that ‘if sex no longer has any biological benefit but is only acting out ancient scenarios’, its attraction could wane. Should that happen the penis would become less and less significant and in a thousand years could shrink to the gorilla-like dimensions from which it grew.
It’s a dystopian view. Penis-possessors everywhere can only hope that their descendants fight evolutionary fate every inch of the way.
INDEX
The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
10cc (pop group) 195
Aaron 12
Abbot, Henry 88
Abelard, Pierre 118
Abishag 153
Abraham 68
An ABZ of Love (I. & S. Hegeler) 9
Acting My Life (Holm) 42
Acton, William 133
Adam & Eve 74, 140, 171–2
adultery 7, 118, 140, 161
Aeschylus 72
Africa, Africans 70, 91, 120–1, 127, 128, 165, 166, 188
African Americans 17, 20
Aggression and Community: Paradoxes of Andalusian Culture (Gilmore) 177
The Alarming History of Sex (Gordon) 54, 106
Alaska 119
Albert, Prince 108
Alexandra, Tsarina 107
Allen, Woody 26
Aly Khan, Prince 192
Amazon tribes 155
America, Americans 11, 12, 13
American Gigolo (film, 1980) 103
American Pie (film, 1999) 181
Amis, Kingsley 151, 178
Amun 65
anal sex 141, 188, 210, 213
An Analysis of Human Sexual Response (R. & E. Brecher) 195
Ancient Egypt 65–6, 68, 116, 131, 165
Ancient Greeks 24, 50, 66, 67, 68, 70, 75, 79, 83, 87, 139, 140, 165, 170, 184, 187, 188, 189, 190, 203, 214
Andalusia 177
Anderson, Pamela 51
Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 60
Antwerp 80
aphrodisiacs 153–4, 159
Arabs 28, 66, 68
Aranda tribe 137, 213
Archives of Sexual Behavior 37
Argyll, 11th Duke of 7
Argyll, Margaret, Duchess of 7–8
Aristophanes 68–9
Aristotle 70, 72, 74
Armenia 121, 129
Asher, Jane 53
Asia, Asians 20, 21–2, 48, 51, 121, 154, 173<
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Asshur 66
Assyria 77, 155
Athenians 70, 87
Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy (Dickinson) 14, 18
Atum 65
augmentation phalloplasty 22
aura seminalis 74
Auslander, Shalom 140
Australia, Australians 106, 137, 166–7
Australian Aboriginals 165
Ayckbourn, Alan 55–6
Aztecs 50, 116
Babylonians 116
Bad Sex Award for Fiction 211
Baden Powell, Robert 200
Baker, Robin 201–2, 218
Baldwin I, King 80
Bangkok Post 28–9
Bankhead, Tallulah 191
Barham, Patte 107
Barnes, Julian 43–4
Barnfield, Richard 9–10
Bartholin, Thomas 130
Bates, Alan 25
BBC Broadcasting House 90
Beardsley, Aubrey 85
Beatty, Warren 205
Bech: A Book (Updike) 56
Bede, Venerable 78
Bedroom Farce (Ayckbourn) 55–6
Before She Met Me (Barnes) 43–4
Bennett, Alan 37–8, 42
Berle, Milton 39, 108
bestiality 180
Bible 12, 68, 77–8, 171–2
Bible Belt America 117
Bill, Elizabeth 89
Bindon, John 173
The Birds (Aristophanes) 68–9
‘Bishop Percy’s Loose Songs’ (1650) 152
Biswell, Andrew 101
Black Death 79, 94
Black Diaries (Casement) 18
Black Spring (Miller) 77
Bloch, Ivan 96–7
The Blue Room (play) 103
Bobbitt, John Wayne 118
Bobbitt, Lorena 118
body dysmorphia 29–30
Bogaert, A.F. 19
Boleyn, Anne 146
Bonaparte, Princess Pauline Borghese 31
bonobos 46, 47, 217
Boogie Nights (film, 1997) 18
The Book of the Penis (Paley) 55
Bordo, Susan 56
