Authors: Tom Hickman
God's Doodle
Contents
Lies, Damned Lies and Self-Measurements
Aesthetics, Function and Woman
The ‘Precious Substance’ Revisited
About the Book
Throughout history man has revered his penis as his ‘most precious ornament’.
Yet, ambivalently, his penis has always been the source of man’s deepest neuroses too. Do women find it, in the erect state, inherently ridiculous? Why can’t a man be certain his penis will stand and deliver when he commands? If and when it steadfastly refuses, what can he do to remedy the situation?
And then, of course, there’s the matter of size…
To possess a penis, Sophocles said, is to be ‘chained to a madman’.
God’s Doodle
examines the schizophrenic relationship between man and this madman – and the joint relationship this odd couple has with the female sex.
God’s Doodle
is the tale of the penis and the ups and downs of history – the macabre and the bloodcurdling, the funny and the sad, distilled from myth, world cultures, religion, literature, science, medicine and contemporary life – all told with mordant wit.
About the Author
Tom Hickman is a long-time journalist who has worked on several national newspapers and magazines as features writer, features editor and editor. He has also worked for the BBC and is the author of several books, including
Churchill’s Bodyguard, Death: A User’s Guide
and
What Did You Do In The War, Auntie?
He’s got his root in my soul, has that gentleman!
An’ sometimes I don’ know what ter do wi’ him.
Ay, he’s got a will of his own, an’ it’s hard to suit him.
Yet I wouldn’t have him killed.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, D.H. Lawrence
PROLOGUE
As one
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a penis will do some of his thinking with it. Physiologically, this is impossible. But as Bill Clinton’s one-time lover Gennifer Flowers observed about the reckless presidential dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, ‘He was thinking with his other head’ – an observation that both acknowledges the phenomenon and emphasises the penis’s ability to override the higher thought processes, despite lacking the 100 million nerve cells that make up the brain’s neuronal highway.
Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci, the outstanding genius of the Renaissance, puzzled over the relationship that exists between a man and his penis, mirror-writing in one of his notebooks:
[The penis] has dealings with human intelligence and sometimes displays an intelligence of its own; where a man may desire it to be stimulated, it remains obstinate and follows its own course; and sometimes it moves on its own without permission or any thought by its owner. Whether
one
is awake or asleep, it does what it pleases; often the man is asleep and it is awake; often the man is awake and it is asleep; or the man would like it to be in action but it refuses; often it desires action and the man forbids it. That is why it seems that this creature often has a life and an intelligence separate from that of the man.
According to the Athenian tragedian Sophocles, to possess a penis is to be ‘chained to a madman’ – and the madman is capable of seizing control of the possessor’s centre of command.
Ven der putz shteht, light der sechel in drerd
, runs the Yiddish proverb: When the prick stands up, the brains get buried in the ground. At such moments, the Japanese say, the possessor is possessed,
sukebe
– a comic fellow dragged along by the mischievous lecher between his legs.
What cannot be denied is that in some respects penis-possession gives its possessor a monocular understanding of the world. From infanthood he comes to consider his penis as an entertainment centre both for himself and for others, the genie’s lamp which when rubbed fulfils his wishes (he at least wishes).
He would, of course, indignantly deny that his possession is independent of his psychology and personality: he is, after all, more than the sum of his private parts. But a penis – always – has the potential to inflict humiliation or introduce ethical dilemma. And does the man sport the penis or the penis the man or, to go further, is there truth in the playwright Joe Orton’s mischievous assertion that ‘a man is nothing more than a life-support system for his penis’? It is the basis for a lifetime’s schizophrenia.
Throughout history, women’s attitude to the penis has been no less ambivalent than men’s. That the penis is capable of coming alive apparently outside the control of its possessor
makes
women also regard it, on occasion, as an entity in some sense separate from him, which is why, as Simone de Beauvoir observed in the first post-war feminist tract
The Second Sex
, mothers speak to the infant male of his penis as ‘a small person . . . an alter ego usually more sly . . . and more clever than the individual’, compounding, from the beginning of his life, his belief that he and it are a duality, like Batman and Robin. Later, more aggressive feminists than de Beauvoir, while heaping opprobrium on the penis’s head, haven’t shaken free of this double vision. ‘You never meet a man alone,’ one feminist wrote. ‘There are always two of them: him and his penis’, the aggrieved tone rather suggesting that the penis should be unstrappable, like a six-shooter in a Wild West saloon handed to the barkeep to ensure it causes no trouble. Feminism has alleged that the ‘mere’ possession of a penis has been responsible for thousands of years of male domination of religion and philosophy, of political, social and economic thought, of history itself.
Such a claim, one might observe, is over at least one of the heads of the penis-possessor.
Penis size is not really important. Like they say, it’s not the size of the boat, it’s the length of the mast divided by the surface area of the mainsail and subtracted from the circumference of the bilge pump. Or something like that.
Donna Untrael
‘AS INDIVIDUAL AS FACES’
IN 1963 THE
fate of the British government hung on a Cabinet minister’s genitals.
Harold Macmillan’s Conservative administration was already tottering, having just lost War Minister John Profumo over his affair with the prostitute Christine Keeler, when the 11th Duke of Argyll began divorce proceedings against his wife Margaret, alleging adultery with eighty-eight unnamed men including three royals, three Hollywood actors and not one but two Cabinet ministers. Sensationally, the duke produced Polaroid photographs, then a novelty, one showing his wife, wearing only a pearl necklace, fellating a man in the bathroom of her Belgravia home, and a set of four others showing a man lying on her bed masturbating, which were captioned ‘before’, ‘thinking of you’, ‘during – oh’, and ‘finished.’ Who was ‘the headless man’, as the newspapers dubbed him – unidentifiable in the first Polaroid because the camera had cut him off at the neck and in the set because of the angle at which they were taken? A number of names were bandied about, but quickly
the
actor Douglas Fairbanks Junior and Duncan Sandys, the Minister of Defence who was also Winston Churchill’s son-in-law, found themselves in the frame, head to head, so to speak.
Sandys told Macmillan he wasn’t the culprit. But if yet another minister was implicated in a sexual scandal the government almost certainly would be toppled and the prime minister wanted to be sure. He therefore instructed Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, to investigate. Britain’s senior law lord summoned the five most likely suspects, Sandys and Fairbanks among them, to the Treasury, where each had to sign the visitors’ book, and got a graphologist to compare their handwriting with the Polaroid photo captions. While he awaited confirmation, Denning had Sandys visit a Harley Street specialist who confirmed that the ministerial genitals were not those in the masturbatory sequence.
In the event, Denning was able to tell the prime minister that the handwriting wasn’t Sandys’ either, but Fairbanks’ (something not made public for nearly forty years). For her part, never once in the rest of her long life did the Duchess of Argyll confirm anything. But she did drop heavy hints that two men, not one, were in the photos: the masturbator was not only not the fellatee he was, in fact, Sandys. It may be superfluous to point out that the duchess’s enthusiastic bathroom ministrations made a comparison of one penis with the other impossible.
When in dismissive mood, some women are inclined to say of penises that once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, but penises are infinite in their variety in size (sic), shape and colouration. Penises can be long, short, fat, thin, stumpy, straight, bulbous or so conical as to get pinched in the tip of a condom, swerved left or right or up or down, circumcised or not, smooth or as wrinkled as a Shar Pei pup; and they present in rosy pink, caramel, peach, lavender, plain chocolate or gunmetal black,
largely
dependent on the ethnic origin of the possessor, but not entirely: most penises are of a darker hue than possessors’ bodies, some startlingly so – ‘more suntanned’, as the Danish couple Inge and Sten Hegeler delicately put it in
An ABZ of Love
, published in 1963, the same year of ‘the headless man’, and the biggest-selling sex manual of the time. Significantly, the Hegelers considered penises to be ‘as individual as faces’. More significantly, in the following decade, Alex Comfort, writing in
The Joy of Sex
, the biggest-selling sex manual of all time, decreed that penises are also endowed with ‘a personality’.
Whether penises are as individual as faces or not, in cartoonish fashion the male genital compendium
in toto
has been likened to a face: the face of a very old man with a particularly ugly nose and an egg tucked into each sagging jowl (undeniably, beyond puberty, every penis looks older than its possessor). Even the head or glans of the penis has been likened to a face, which somewhat stretches the imagination, though perhaps one can see it as ‘early foetal’. ‘Such a serious little face,’ Thelma says of Harry Angstrom’s penis (
Rabbit Is Rich
, John Updike) in a moment’s rest from fellating him, completing the analogy by noting that his uncircumcised foreskin around the swollen head of his penis is like ‘a little bonnet’. Serious, or more especially sad, penises were so intolerable to the poet Bonnie Roberts, she revealed in her poem ‘Portrait of a Former Penis Bigot’, that she dotted happy faces on her lovers’ with a felt-tip pen; a Smiley badge may never look the same again.