Authors: Tom Hickman
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 refrigerated 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.
Every year at least two hundred Americans, and thirty to forty Britons break their erect penis. A few, bizarrely, do so by tucking themselves into their underwear while still tumescent, but almost all do it during violent intercourse. A few, equally bizarrely, do it by falling out of bed during this and buckling their erection on the floor; a few by being too physical and crumpling against their partner’s pubic bone or perineum; but most do it when their partner is on top in the riding position and rotating her hips.
The lining of the penis, the tunica albuginea, is about the thickness of thin cardboard and protects the spongy chambers that fill with blood during erection, and it has a safety factor of ten times the normal erect-state pressure. If that is exceeded, however, the tunica breaks – and breaks with an audible crack.
Again the pain is excruciating, the penis swells and turns the colour of a ripe Victoria plum, and surgical repair is needed, as well as six weeks’ bed rest with the penis in splints. The break will heal, though the likelihood is a penis that kinks on
subsequent
elevation. If the break is extensive, the unfortunate penis-possessor can develop Peyronie’s disease in which fibrous plaque accumulates at the site, erection becomes painful and rigidity diminishes – and the penis can take a sharp left or right turn and be grossly misshapen, bulging at top and bottom but seeming to have an invisible clamp around the middle. Four in ten men with Peyronie’s have a permanent degree of erectile dysfunction.
Unlike a torn frenulum, Peyronie’s (which can also have medical causes) is suffered mostly by middle-aged men, though the prevalence and incidence are hard to establish; many don’t seek help because of their embarrassment. Current literature suggests 3–9 per cent of men are victims.
The dispossessed
According to Rabelais in
Gargantua and Pantagruel
, the first part of his body that early man protected (with tough fig leaves) was ‘the staff of love and packet of marriage’, words spoken by Lady Humphrey de Merville in exhorting her husband, on his way to war, to attach a jousting helmet to his groin. It was in Rabelais’ century, the sixteenth, that new technology allowed the ‘genitall shield’ to be incorporated in suits of armour: no less boastful in size than the codpiece but serving a more critical function. When purpose-made protection is lacking in dangerous circumstances, men take emergency measures. Troops being carried in aircraft that came under fire from the ground during the Second World War often chose to sit on their helmets, protecting their lower head rather than their upper.
In the aftermath of wars, penises can be even more vulnerable than during them: the victorious have a habit of emasculating the vanquished. Once, it was universally believed that making enemies incomplete in their parts would prevent
them
from getting to the other world, from where they might wreak vengeance; the belief still seems to exist in parts of the Mediterranean and Middle East. Mostly, of course, penis-possessors at war have castrated other penis-possessors, to take from them the very thing that makes them men, their manhood, and in so doing, ‘feminise’ them.
The Egyptians, Babylonians, Hebrews and Ethiopians among other nations regarded penises as trophies of war, with bookkeeping scrupulousness: after invading Libya in 1200
BC
, the Egyptians went home with a haul of 13,240 (six Libyan generals, 6,359 Libyans, 6,111 Greeks, 542 Etruscans, 222 Sicilians). The Aztecs weren’t trophy collectors, preferring to string taken penises along the road to shame their foes – as the Spanish found out when they invaded central Mexico in the sixteenth century. Whether taken as trophies or not, the cutting off of enemies’ genitalia has occurred in every kind of conflict: the Normans, for example, castrated Englishmen in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings, including the already dead King Harold who, William of Poitiers relates, had his ‘leg’ cut off – leg being a Norman euphemism; the English and French castrated each other on the famous battlefields of the Hundred Years War; the remnants of Napoleon’s army in the retreat from Moscow, starving in the snowy countryside, were hunted down by the Cossacks and castrated in their hundreds. The conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, big and small, have not been exempt.
Penis-possessors haven’t always needed the excuse of war to deprive other penis-possessors of their manhood – in the years of the codpiece the Turks waylaid Western travellers to see if the contents lived up to the packaging and removed what they found when it did not, out of indignation and perhaps pent-up relief that it did not. Fear of the potency or the size of the penises of other races has historically led to instances of
castration
. The soldiers of the Roman emperor Hadrian cut off the organs of living Israelites – because circumcision, a religious rite of Judaism, permanently exposed the glans, as occurs in the uncircumcised when the penis is erect, thereby giving them the reputation of being pathologically lustful – flinging them heavenwards and taunting God: ‘Is this what you have chosen?’
2
Bible Belt America, which believed that the black man was the descendant of Noah’s accursed son Ham and had ‘the flesh of asses’, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth lynched over four thousand for the alleged rape of white women, almost all of the men first having their genitals cut off.
Castration has always been in the repertoire of executioners and torturers. During the Crusades (when Christians and Muslims emasculated each other with equal enthusiasm) the French knight Thomas de Coucy hung up his captives by their genitals until they ripped from their bodies; in his autobiographical memoirs (
De vita sua
) Guibert de Nogent gives an account of this, and the nightmares it gave him. Centuries later the Inquisition similarly suspended some of those unlucky enough to come to its attention – and targeted the penises of others with the ‘crocodile shears’, a metal contraption of hemicylinders with internal teeth, which was heated red hot before being clamped in place. Castration was also an aspect of hanging, drawing and quartering, which for five hundred years – until as late as the eighteenth century – the English meted out for high treason (often liberally interpreted: Henry VIII executed a few obstinate Catholic clergymen to bring others into line over his reform of the Church; he dispensed with an alleged lover of his fifth wife in this way too). Victims were half hanged, their ‘privy members’ then cut off and held before their face while they could feel the agony and humiliation, before these were thrown into the fire, followed by the bowels
from
their sliced-open body – a fate suffered by Charles I.
Castration of the testicles was commonly one of the prices for a variety of crimes in the whole of medieval Europe, including for counterfeiting coins and for poaching royal deer; in France during the Protestant Reformation it was the penalty for homosexuality, which the convicted on balance must have thought preferable to death, commonly the penalty in different cultures and periods. But a second offence meant the loss of the penis and a third burning at the stake. Across Europe, for rape, for the taking of the virginity of a daughter of a peer, and, in some parts, for adultery with another man’s wife, the penis and the testicles were forfeit – as in China, Japan and India (where a man who seduced the wife of his guru was made to sit on a hot plate and then chop off his penis himself). European revenge narratives cite many instances, the most famous that of the French philosopher Pierre Abelard who fell in love with his pupil Heloise. After she became pregnant, her uncle and a gang of kinsmen tracked him down and, he later wrote, hacked off ‘those parts of my body by which I committed what they complained about’.
3
Clerics and monks guilty of sexual transgressions were often separated from those selfsame parts. A lay brother who impregnated a teenage nun of the Gilbertine order at Watton in Yorkshire was lured by her fellow sisters to their monastery, where she was forced to castrate him before returning to her cell.
Abuse and betrayal have undeniably always driven some women to castrate men, needing no coercion to wield the knife. But such handiwork became a worldwide phenomenon from the early 1990s after John Wayne Bobbitt, a small-town former US Marine, had his penis cut off by his wife Lorena. Across America, and from China to Peru, copycat cases began to occur, with Thailand becoming the epicentre: by the end of the millennium, over a hundred cases had been reported to Thai
police
, who admitted there were probably many more but the victims preferred to keep their loss to themselves. Penises, and testicles, can of course be reattached and even returned to normal functioning – if, that is, they can be found. Bobbitt was lucky: his wife had thrown his penis over a hedge and it was recovered. A man in Alaska was equally lucky: his partner had flushed his down the toilet but it turned up at the local waterworks. In thirty-one of the above Thai cases Bangkok Hospital was able to give another meaning to ‘friends reunited’. Other severed penises, however, had gone for ever – women had fed them to their ducks or chickens or put them in a blender or down the waste disposal. One man in India had to wave goodbye to his penis after his wife attached it to a helium balloon.