Authors: Tom Hickman
Anthropologists call penis panic a culture-bound syndrome; South East Asians call it
kora
: ‘head of the turtle’ in Malay. And from time to time
kora
packs outpatient departments with terrified men, as it did in Singapore during an unaccustomed spell of very cold weather in 1967. Cold naturally tightens the
genitals
. Hundreds of men were otherwise convinced about the cause of their shrunken parts and headed for the hospital, most with a hand in a trouser pocket or under a dhoti, others with a string disappearing under their clothes (some with a rock tied to the string), with a few unashamedly hanging on to their exposed member with both hands, those taking no chances having a safety pin thrust through their glans. During possibly the largest outbreak of
kora
paranoia in modern times, which occurred in 1984–5, five thousand men in the Chinese Guangdong province used similar preventative measures, though, with cultural nicety, some chose to prevent fatal retraction by holding their penises with chopsticks.
Venturing into the unknown
Men want sex but from the beginning of time have been in trepidation of its source. Long before Freud and psychoanalytical theory, primitive man thought that a woman’s external sexual organs looked like the site of male castration – and that such a fate might befall him if he ventured in.
The vagina was a place of procreative darkness, a sinister place from which blood periodically seeped as if from a wound. During menstruation, counselled the medieval
De secretis muilierum
(On Women’s Secrets), a woman was so full of poison that a man who had intercourse with her could be made leprous or cancerous. The vagina was so evil, according to Muslim thought, that a man who looked into its entrance could be turned blind. First crossing its threshold was dangerous, men everywhere believed. In many countries and still in parts of Africa and India, the risk of deflowering a bride came to be taken for the bridegroom by an older man, village headsman, or feudal lord or cleric, whose powerful status supposedly could overcome the malevolence within – a belief undoubtedly encouraged by older men, village
headsmen
, feudal lords and clerics. In the East, high-caste males sometimes commanded a slave – who was expendable if the task proved injurious – to see to the matter.
In some countries where this defensive strategy was common, a parallel practice was for alpha males to take ‘the first fruits of the bride’ on her wedding night. Over four thousand years ago, according to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the people of Uruk (modern-day Iraq) were less than happy about their king’s insistence on ‘the king to be first and the husband to follow’.
The Greek historian Herodotus believed the custom was unique among an obscure tribe in Libya, but it was widespread in the ancient world – and instances of it occurred here and there almost to the present day, notably in the Ottoman Empire, the centre of East–West interactions for six centuries up to the early twentieth century, and in western Armenia, where Kurdish chieftains reserved the right to bed a bride on her wedding night.
A considerable body of writing maintains that the right of the first night (
jus primae noctis
) was practised in medieval Europe, but there is no incontrovertible evidence (blame Voltaire for the widespread currency of the claim; in the eighteenth century he took it to be historically authentic). There is, however, evidence that a liege lord had the right to lie on a bride’s bed and pass his naked leg over her (
droit de jambage);
in some places the bride was obliged to make a payment to him (‘legewite’ in Anglo-Saxon law, a ‘tax for lying down’) in compensation for the loss of her (assumed) virginity to another. The custom was symbolic, less to do with sex than a display of lordly power over the peasantry – and an interesting take, perhaps, on the idiomatic phrase ‘leg over’.
Even when made safe, men feared that the vagina, already attributed mysterious sexual power (did it not conjure up
a
man’s organ, absorb it, milk it, spit it out limp?), might be insatiable. ‘Three things are insatiable,’ runs a Muslim aphorism, ‘the desert, the grave, and a woman’s vulva.’ The Arab world was victim to the most rabid fear of the voracious vagina. ‘I saw her vulva!’ laments a lover in the fifteenth-century masterwork
The Perfumed Garden
. ‘It opened like that of a mare at the approach of a stallion.’ The author warned readers: ‘Certain vulvas, wild with desire and lust, throw themselves upon the approaching member.’ Europe had much the same anxiety about insatiability, which in some women, it was said, caused the clitoris to rear up to the length of the male member. ‘Though they be weaker vessels,’ wrote the Elizabethan musician Thomas Whythorne, ‘yet they will cover two, three or four men in the satisfying of their carnal appetites.’
Prior to intercourse, Thomas Bartholin declared in a popular seventeenth-century medical treatise, the vagina ‘gapes to receive the Yard, as a Beast gapes for its Food’. Beast – or, four hundred years later, as a ravening bird in Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley
, Mellors telling Connie about intercourse with his wife: ‘. . . and she’d sort of tear at me down there as if it was a beak tearing at me. By God, you think a woman’s soft down there, like a fig. But I tell you the old rampers have beaks between their legs’. Or worse: teeth. The Middle Ages believed that some witches, with the help of the moon and magic spells, could grow vaginal teeth with which to rend men; in the myths and legends of many nations from China to North America but especially in South East Asia, vaginas with teeth, or even weapons, castrate or kill their sexual partners.
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A lesser but no less real anxiety for some men was and remains that the vagina will not let them go. In
The Second Sex
, Simone de Beauvoir wrote understandingly of young men’s
nervousness
in venturing ‘into the secret dark of women, once more feeling childhood terror at the threshold of a cave or tomb’, and their fear that ‘the swollen penis might be caught in its mucous sheath’. While this is generally only a fear born of inexperience, entrapment of the penis – penis captivus – more often than not dismissed as an urban myth, can occur. In rare cases the twin levatores ani muscles on either side of the vagina can go into spasm so severe that it is impossible for a man to withdraw or for his penis to detumesce. In 1980 the
British Medical Journal
carried considerable correspondence testifying to experience of treating penis captivus, including a letter from a doctor who remembered as a houseman at the Royal Isle of Wight County Hospital seeing a young honeymoon couple being carried in on a single stretcher. Such an embarrassing situation is believed to have involved Lady Edwina Mountbatten and her black lover, the cabaret star Leslie (‘Hutch’) Hutchinson (who, a maudlin Lord Louis Mountbatten told the bandleader in the nightclub in which he was getting drunk, ‘has a prick like a tree trunk and is fucking my wife’), in a London hotel in the 1930s; they were discreetly whisked away for medical disengagement.
Attracting the Venom
Men’s anxieties about their sexual encounters have never ended with withdrawal. The spectre of venereal disease (the Ancient Egyptians termed it ‘copulatory sickness’) has always peered over their shoulder. Gonorrhoea was common in Europe from before the Middle Ages. But things worsened ominously in the last decade of the fifteenth century: a virulent strain of venereal disease, either brought back by Columbus’s sailors from the New World or a mutated form of something that already existed (it is disputed), broke out like a plague.
Within days of infection, caused we now know by the spirochete bacterium, a small circular ulcer called a chancre appeared on the penis. Within weeks, bags of pus erupted all over the body from head to knees; the flesh fell from faces. The great pox (to distinguish it from smallpox, with which it shared some characteristics) quickly killed thousands – men and women both, though men blamed women, who, they thought, not only infected them but infected themselves. It was popularly believed that contact with menstrual blood was a prime danger. It was two hundred years before it was clear that men infected women too.
The great pox became somewhat less virulent within a hundred years – a widespread rash the colour of raw ham rather than pustules and death averted for perhaps twenty years. Some must have wished it was not: lumps could appear everywhere from infected lymph glands, as well as bone pain and warts around the anus; penile skin could decay and have to be cut away. The disease, of course, had many levels of severity and, usually, there was a prolonged lull during which the sufferer seemed to have got better. Then rubbery tumours grew in soft tissues and viscera and there could be multiple symptoms including angina caused by bulging of the aorta, blindness, deafness, numbness of the legs leading to paralysis . . . and madness.
The treatment was isolation, semi-starvation, enemas – and mercury: mercury potions to be ingested, mercury sweat tubs, salves of mercury to rub on the skin and to blister the penis. When codpieces strutted through the courts of Europe those of some syphilitics were effectively medicine chests, their penises within wrapped in mercury-treated bandages. Mercury was highly poisonous (and ineffective) and added to a sufferer’s woes, particularly in the eighteenth century (when the great pox was renamed syphilis): the dosages became so
strong
that jaws, tongues and palates were ulcerated, hair and teeth fell out and noses were destroyed – silversmiths made false ones to cover the gaping holes of the nostrils.
Gonorrhoea, popularly the clap – caused by the gonococcus bacterium – was ten times more common than syphilis and its symptoms, while debilitating, far less cruel: a characteristic yellow discharge from the penis, painful urination, swelling and acute tenderness in a testicle; conversations about ‘pain in the cods’ were heard in every coffee house in Restoration London.
Up to the late fifteenth century, treatment ranged from washing the genitals in vinegar to plunging the penis into a freshly killed chicken. Thereafter, mercury was the popular choice, as it was for the great pox, together with blood-letting, purging, semi-starvation, steam baths and bed rest with as many coverings as could be endured. Luckily the purulent penis cleared up in a month or two, like a runny nose, before the mercury did too much damage. But scars of the infection could create fibrous bands that constricted the urinary passage, in later life necessitating its painful dilation with a curved metal instrument.
For several hundred years venerealogists advised that ‘if the Man make long stay in the Woman’s Body, and through the excessive Ecstasy, Heat and Satiety, welter and indulge himself in that Coition . . . [it] is much the sooner way to attract the
Venom
, than quickly withdrawing’. Better still was to avoid passionate women. There was nothing so dangerous, men were counselled, as a woman who enjoyed coition – which ultimately led to the schizophrenic Victorian belief, expressed by the physician William Acton, that it was ‘a vile aspersion to say that a virtuous woman is capable of sexual feeling’.
Venereal treatments did become more effective during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it wasn’t until
the
arrival of penicillin during the Second World War that syphilis and gonorrhoea appeared to be conquered – until, that is, the last couple of decades when sexually transmitted diseases began to increase and are proving progressively resistant not just to penicillin but to subsequent antibiotic developments.
In the circumstances one might suppose that in everybody’s interests men would use protection as a matter of course; to reverse Madame de Sévigné’s complaint about the condom in the seventeenth century, what is available today is only a spider’s web against full enjoyment while armour against infection. But many who do use protection, don’t all the time, while others simply won’t – with those in middle age being the worst offenders, being the least likely to use a condom with a new partner. It is as if penis-possessors have a genetically programmed aversion and regard their member in a condom as something like Munch’s
Scream
. They use different terminology but are like their forebears who preferred to risk spending ‘one night with Venus, the rest with Mercury’ – ending up with their ‘pike bravely bent’ as Shakespeare has it.
In earlier centuries men could perhaps put up some defence for their behaviour. They were unaware that they spread venereal disease as well as caught it. And before the vulcanisation of rubber, the condom was an unattractive proposition. The first, after the arrival of the great pox (and marketed as a preventative against disease, not a contraceptive barrier), was a tricky linen hood that fitted precariously over the glans and under the foreskin and was held in place by ribbons cinched around the scrotum. It was still going strong in the eighteenth century (ribbons available in regimental colours), continuing to give ‘but dull satisfaction’, the diarist/ biographer James Boswell wrote. Mostly he indulged without,
and
contracted the clap seventeen times in nine years. Later, the condom was of washable sheep’s intestine and extremely unpleasant to don. ‘Often my tool, stiff as a boring-iron, would shrink directly the wet gut touched it,’ commented the pseudonymous Victorian ‘Walter’ in his possibly spurious autobiography,
My Secret Life
. He too ‘went bareback’ and accepted the consequences, time after time ‘taking the clap, which laid me up some weeks, and made it again needful to open my piss-pipe by surgical tubes’.
Game, set, mismatch
Men may have grown out of the past’s wilder dreads about women’s sexuality.
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But however experienced, however at ease with the dimensions of their penis and their confidence in its cooperation, they enter unknown territory in every sexual encounter, sometimes even with a partner they know well.
Their dilemma is the mismatch between women’s sexuality and their own. Inherently, women require stimulation involving their whole body, which takes time; inherently, men just want friction applied to their penis and to move to intercourse as quickly as possible, which is why two thousand years ago Ovid counselled them ‘not to sail too fast and leave your mistress behind’. Penis-possessors’ interest in foreplay, unless they have developed consideration and restraint, can be limited: ‘a quick rub at the clitoris as if to erase it’, as one woman has put it, ‘and some prodding about for the G-spot – if they have heard of it’, before they get down to the business of penetration and ejaculation. For many men, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld wrote, ‘any other loveplay is a ridiculous nuisance’.