Authors: Tom Hickman
Down the centuries the urethral opening at the penis’s tip has been referred to as an eye (‘Jap-eyed’ in modern vernacular, though classical scholars in the 1920s grandly referred to the penis as Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops, son of Poseidon, who was blinded by Odysseus) or said to resemble a tiny mouth, and it to this that the Elizabethan poet Richard Barnfield referred in a sonnet that begins ‘sweet coral lips, where nature’s
treasure
lies’ (it helps to know that Barnfield was homosexual or one might be misled). In Elizabethan England ‘nose’ was popular slang for penis and indeed today, on the other side of the world in Japan, the penis is colloquially referred to by the name of a folklore goblin, Tenggu, unfortunate enough to have an outsize olfactory organ.
1
For centuries men have given penises men’s names, a matter, you might say, of putting names to faces: in England most popularly Peter, Percy, Rupert and Roger – traditionally a name given to stud bulls and rams – and, still current, John or John-Thomas (now more usually, thanks to D.H. Lawrence’s usage in
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
) and Willy (a foreshortening of William). But interestingly Dick, although as old as any of these, only joined the penile fraternity in the late nineteenth century and then not because it rhymed with prick, but as a shortened form of dickory dock, cockney rhyming slang for cock. Roger is no longer extant as a nickname (one hesitates to say diminutive) but for centuries has been a well-loved verb – the diary of William Byrd of Westover contains the earliest recording: on 26 December 1711 he wrote of his wife ‘I rogered her lustily’, and again on 1 January 1712, ‘I lay abed till 9 o’clock this morning . . . and rogered her by way of reconciliation’.
Some men give their penises nicknames (can Clinton really have called his Willard?) because, as the joke goes, they don’t want to be bossed around by somebody they don’t know.
Anglo-Saxon men did not have penises. They were tarse men. Over five hundred or so years, men became pintle men or pillicock men. When these terms from the Middle Ages were considered vulgar in the late sixteenth century, pillicock became shortened to cock (pillicock leaving us with the mildly offensive pillock) and it and prick became the acceptable
referents
, however surprising to modern ears: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, maids routinely referred fondly to their boyfriend as ‘my prick’. By the end of the seventeenth century, prick dropped out of polite society, as did cock, with wider linguistic consequences: apricocks, haycocks and weathercocks became apricots, haystacks and weathervanes, as in the America of the Puritan Fathers water cocks became faucets and cockerels, roosters. Men now sported the yard – derived from a medieval term for rod or staff carried as an indication of authority, not an optimistic measurement of length.
When the eighteenth century developed a liking for Latinate terms, yard finally became penis, and tarse, which had hung on at least in literary circles, now bowed out, much to the regret of scatological poets (penis does not rhyme with arse). The classical Roman term for penis was
mentula
, which one might think had a certain resonance equating as it does to ‘little mind’. But eighteenth-century wordsmiths preferred the idiomatic penis, meaning tail, not just to
mentula
but to the most popular Roman slang of
gladius
, or sword – which, as vagina meant sheath or scabbard, fitted nicely.
2
Glans, the Latin word for the head of the penis erect (meaning acorn, which it resembles, somewhat fancifully), was also adopted into standard English – though most people conversationally stuck to the centuries-old knob, helmet, bellend and, of course, head. (‘Come, Kate, thou art perfect in lying down: come, quick, quick, that I may lay my head in thy lap’ –
Henry IV
Part I, III, i, 226–8.)
The rest of the compendium also underwent Latinisation. What the Anglo-Saxons and all those who followed them referred to as cullions, ballocks (later spelt bollocks) or stones (used consistently in the King James Bible of 1611), and from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century as cods (from
codpiece
), were henceforward testicles, from
testiculus
, witness – Romans thought of their testicles as ‘little witnesses of virility’ etymologists conclude (see Part 2,
‘From Bit Player to Lead’
).
In centuries intimately conversant with the Bible, Adam’s arsenal, Nimrod (the mighty hunter) and Aaron’s rod (the patriarch’s staff, which blossomed and yielded almonds) were among the sobriquets, neologisms and tropes men devised for their genitals – not now likely to be found on Internet sites compendiously devoted to genital terminology. Down the ages men have also applied every synonym imaginable to the penis: assorted vegetables and fruits, small animals or animal parts, and reptiles – the snake and eel are constants in almost every culture, as is the phallic-headed snapping turtle in the cultures of the Middle East. The Italians still refer colloquially to the penis as a bird or fish, just like the Sumerians, the world’s first civilisation, over five and a half thousand years ago. Specific weapons and tools have always loomed large in the penile vocabulary, ‘sword’ as popular elsewhere as it was in Ancient Rome – Shakespeare employed it as well as such terms as pike, lance, pistol and poll-axe. As weaponry advanced the penis equated to ever-more potent munitions including, in recent years, torpedo, bazooka and rocket.
But all of this verbal ingenuity aside, cock, prick – and the generic tool and weapon – remain the words most commonly used for the penis in English, as do their equivalents in other languages, with balls and nuts (a foreshortening of the seventeenth-century coinage nutmegs) for the attendant testicles. The British continue to have a fondness for bollocks, knackers (a verb in the Middle Ages meaning to geld, perhaps not the happiest association), cobblers (more cockney rhyming slang, from cobbler’s awls) and, harking back to colonial days in India, goolies (from a Hindi word for any round object). The Americans’ favoured alternative for testicles is rocks,
stones
being, one assumes, not big enough in a country where everything must be bigger.
Just as some believe in face reading, phrenology, palmistry or podomancy (foot reading), there are some who believe that the complementary study of phallomancy, which has a long tradition in India and Tibet, can divine both a man’s character and fortune. Tibetans believe it’s unlucky for a man to be over-endowed: should his penis reach the bottom of his heels while squatting, his life will be full of sorrow; should, however, his penis be no more than six finger widths’ long he will be rich and a good husband. Hindus have similar beliefs, expounded in the
Brihat Samhita
, a Sanskrit astrological treatise written in the sixth century
AD.
The over-endowed man will be poor and without sons; the man whose penis is straight, small and sinewy will be rich, as will the man the head of whose penis is not very large. The man whose penis inclines towards the left is another who will always know poverty, as will the man the head of whose penis is depressed in the middle – and this man will father only daughters. According to the
Brihat Samhita
, the man who has perfectly matched testicles will be a king. The compensation for men with mismatched testicles is that they will be fond of sex. The question for non-Tibetan and non-Hindu males who have mismatched testicles and a fondness for sex, is why they think there might be something in phallomancy on the basis of the last reading, yet dismiss the rest as Eastern nonsense.
Matters of size
How big is big? How small is small? What is average? Where do you fit in? Sixteen hundred years ago, when Vatsyayana compiled the
Kama Sutra
, the world’s oldest sex manual, drawing on texts that were already up to 800 years old, he classified men according to the size of their erect lingam
(penis)
. Hares were equivalent to the width of six fingers, bulls to eight and stallions to twelve, spans of between 4.5 inches and 9 inches, or 6 and 12, depending on the size of the hand – a detail that Vatsyayana omitted, though most Asians being small-boned, have small hands.
Such imprecision was not for the Victorians. They were not the first to attempt scientific scrutiny of human sexuality, but they were the first to attempt it on a statistical and empirical basis, driven by expanding knowledge and the new discipline of psychoanalysis. Not unnaturally, the penis, and the size of the penis, principally erect, was central to this study. Dr Robert Letou Dickinson spent a lifetime making hundreds of drawings from life showing penises in repose and arousal (which he published as the
Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy
only in 1949, when he was eighty-eight). One erection he included was 13.5 inches in length and 6.25 in circumference, the largest ever medically verified. In recent years a New York clubber, Jonah Falcon, has shown enough journalists that his is the equal in both dimensions for there to be little doubt, medically verified or not.
Erotic fiction abounds with penises of such stature. In
Fanny Hill
, the most widely known erotic novel in English (which John Cleland wrote 250 years ago, to get him out of debtors’ prison), the eponymous heroine encounters organs ‘not less than my wrist and at least three of my handfuls long’; ‘a maypole of so enormous standard that, had proportions been observed, it must have belonged to a young giant’; and, most impressively, one whose ‘enormous head seemed, in hue and size, not unlike a common sheep’s heart: then, you might have rolled dice along the broad back of the body of it’. But the vast majority of those appended to men are lesser things. After the Second World War, Alfred Kinsey conducted 1,800 exhaustive interviews with men and amassed penile data on a total of 3,500
before
stating in
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
, published in 1948, that the average erect penis was 6.2 inches, with ‘most individuals’ in the 4.8 to 8.5 inch range and only ‘extreme cases that are both longer and shorter’. In fact, the shortest erection Kinsey encountered was 1 inch, and the longest 10.5 inches. The erection with the least circumference was 2.25 inches, the greatest, over 8, the average 4.75.
Kinsey was a professor of zoology at Indiana University, with a worldwide reputation for his study of gall wasps. It was only after the university set up a course on sexuality in matrimony and asked him to teach it that he turned to the investigation of sex and eventually founded his famous institute. One female student was made so enthusiastic by his slides and graphic descriptions that she wrote, ‘To me, the behavior of the penis was already awe-inspiring; now it seems even more wonderful.’ Another female student was evidently less enthusiastic. When one day Kinsey broke off from a lecture and asked her which human organ was capable of the greatest expansion, she flushed. ‘Professor Kinsey, you have no right to ask me that question,’ she said. Kinsey replied, ‘I was thinking of the eye – the iris of the eye. And you, young lady, are in for a great disappointment.’
Despite Kinsey’s voluminous data-gathering, there was still no accurate information about the physiology of sex, until the husband and wife team of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, following in his wake, conducted eleven years of empirical research. Kinsey, for the most part, had extrapolated his findings from questionnaires. In the more permissive 1960s, Masters and Johnson attached electrodes to some seven hundred men and women and filmed and monitored them engaged in sexual activity. But while they basically confirmed Kinsey’s findings about the dimensions of the penis, Masters and Johnson also made men with smaller penises – smaller, that
is
, when flaccid – feel good about themselves, because they noted something that Kinsey did not record: that the smaller the organ the greater the proportional increase during erection.
The average flaccid penis, Masters and Johnson said, was between 3 and 5 inches. In their research they compared a group of men at the lower end of this range with a group of those at the higher, and while the latter on erection had increased slightly less than 3 inches (one 4.5-er added only 2 inches), the former nearly doubled (one 3-incher added 3.33 inches). One participant who when flaccid showed no penile shaft whatsoever – the kind of penis that Fanny Hill described as ‘scarce showing its tip above the sprout of hairy curls that clothed those parts, as you may have seen a wren peep his head out of the grass’ – ‘grew to normal proportions’. Masters and Johnson’s important conclusion was that erection is ‘the great equaliser’; unaroused penises vary considerably, but there is a tendency for things to even out somewhat when they go to red alert.
There is, to put this another way, no correlation between sizes of flaccid and erect penises, just as there is no correlation between the erection and the bodily frame, which Masters and Johnson also demonstrated, and none between the erection and the size of the hands, feet or nose, as others have demonstrated, although popular myth continues to maintain otherwise, sometimes in inverse proportion. It’s true that the Hox gene, which controls initial growth of the genitals of male (and female) foetuses, also controls that of the hands and feet, but the size and shape of hands, feet and genitals are ultimately determined by many genes. A big-framed man can have a big nose, big feet and hands like a bare-knuckle bruiser and still possess a small penis. There’s a weak correlation between penis erectile length and girth, but men are nearly as likely to have a (relatively) thin penis as a (relatively) bulky one and any combination of length and girth, with the qualification
that
the penis of exceptional length is rarely of exceptional circumference. At the risk of stating the obvious, genital size, like all genetic traits, is hereditary, if not necessarily so. There is every biological reason for believing the father of actor Ewan McGregor who, after his son’s impressive appendage was lingeringly displayed in the film
The Pillow Book
, sent him a fax reading: ‘Glad to see you have inherited one of my major attributes.’