God's Doodle (20 page)

1
. A Florentine mob might have emasculated Michelangelo’s Boy David had they got the chance.

In 1504, thirty years after the work was finished, a mob hostile to the ‘new paganism’ of the Renaissance stoned the statue, which had to be guarded for five months until a modesty girdle of twenty-eight copper leaves was attached; the girdle remained in place until 1545.

In 1857 a plaster cast of the eighteen-foot-high David was presented to Queen Victoria, who forthwith donated it to the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert. The museum, believing anecdotal evidence that the queen had been shocked by David’s ‘insistent nudity’, took the decision to have a proportionally sized fig leaf of stone made and kept in readiness for any royal visit.

Such prudery might seem to belong to another age. Yet in 1986 the V&A had the covering on standby in anticipation of a visit by Diana, Princess of Wales.

 
2
. Jews in Hellenic cultures, given to public nakedness in the baths and gymnasium, were often persecuted for being circumcised, which led many, particularly during the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian, to attach a stretching device called the
Pondus
J
udaeus
. Even in periods when Jews were not being persecuted, some men abandoned their faith and got to work with the
Pondus Judaeus
to improve their social and economic standing.

The uncircumcised have from time to time discriminated against the circumcised – and vice versa. In the ancient Muslim world, Africans were circumcised rather than castrated when sold as slaves and any who tried to stretch their remaining foreskin with weights were sometimes put to death. Outbreaks of violence today have erupted in South Africa between the circumcised Xhosa and the uncircumcised Zulu and in Kenya between the circumcised Kikuyu and the uncircumcised Luo. After a disputed election in 2008, roaming gangs of Kikuyu cut off the foreskin of any Luo they apprehended.

During the Nazi era many Jews underwent surgical ‘uncircumcising’.

Skin-graft surgery was once an option but is rarely carried out now because of the different colour and texture of the graft against
the
existing penile skin. But foreskin restoration using weights is still popular among some Jews and non-Jews alike. Restoration can take several years, depending on how much skin was left after circumcision.

 
3
. The world’s first penis transplant was carried out in a Chinese military hospital in 2005, on a forty-four-year-old man whose own organ had been reduced to a centimetre-long stump in an accident. A newly brain-dead twenty-three-year-old was the donor. In a fifteen-hour operation surgeons attached arteries, veins, nerves and the corpora spongiosum, the lagging around the penile piping of the uretha. The penis largely regained its functions.

 
4
. Did Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice
want to castrate Antonio? It’s an interpretation some scholars have made of the Jew’s terms for lending money to Bassanio that if Antonio failed to honour his surety he would forfeit ‘an equal pound of your fair flesh to be cut off and taken in what part of your body pleaseth me’.

By the later trial scene the bond has changed, in Portia’s words, to ‘a pound of flesh to be by him cut off nearest the merchant’s heart’. But the interpretation of Shylock’s initial stipulation can be argued. Elizabethan playwrights including Shakespeare often used ‘flesh’ for penis, and a penis, according to those who postulate the reading, weighs about a pound; that seems an over-generous estimation, though they invariably add, ‘more or less’.

 
5
. The hijras of South Asia are castrated males who dress as women and see themselves as a third sex, neither male nor female. Some are transsexual; others have become hijras simply as a way of surviving; living in communities, on the margins of society, they recruit boys who have been rejected by or fled from their families. Hijras demand money in the streets, sing and dance at weddings and offer sexual services.

 
6
. Male to female surgery has become relatively straightforward. The scrotal sac is cut open and the testicles removed from it. The penis is then cut open, its contents put to one side and the ‘shell’ turned inside out and pushed into the body cavity to form a vagina. The scrotum is then fashioned into a labia and a piece of the erectile tissue from the penis contents used to create a clitoris. The procedure can be so expert it can’t be detected by the trained eye.

Female to male surgery is more expensive and less successful – a fully operable penis isn’t achievable. A scrotum is formed from the patient’s labia and synthetic testicles inserted. The clitoris is elongated, with the help of skin grafts, to become a penis, which can be used for urination but not ejaculation. Some opt for an internal prosthetic device so that the penis can be pumped erect allowing intercourse to be simulated.

 
7
. The legend of a sharp-toothed demon who hid inside a young woman to castrate young men – and who was defeated by the local blacksmith’s ingenuity in fashioning a metal penis to break the demon’s teeth – is celebrated in the Shinto Kanamara Matsuri (Festival of the Steel Penis) in Kawasaki, one of the diminishing number of similar Japanese penis festivals.

 
8
. A woman knows she is the mother of a newborn child. Generally speaking, a man has to take her word for it that he is the father.

Some men have always had reason to worry whether they were a child’s biological father or not. From the 1920s various blood testing methods became available, though they were difficult to perform and often inconclusive. In the 1970s, however, a test of HLA cell proteins was developed, with a 90 per cent probability of establishing paternity. DNA testing – 99.99 per cent or higher certainty – came in the 1980s.

A worldwide survey reported in the
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health
in 2005 found that one in twenty-five fathers was unknowingly bringing up another man’s child.

In Elizabethan England, men had additional anxieties. A man welcomed the birth of twins if they were two girls, or a boy and a girl, but was less pleased if both infants were male: the belief was that one was born from the right testicle and the other from the less virile left, meaning that one son (which?) would be lacking in manly ways. But triplets were a matter of greater concern – triplets meant that another man had had congress with his wife. Curiously, a medical belief in sixteenth-century Italy was that a child could be conceived from the semen of up to seven men, each contributing a portion of his character.

The Hottentots in southern Africa once practised hemicastration – the removal of one testicle – to prevent the birth of twins, which were regarded as bad luck.

 
9
. Did the earth move?Women of the Kagaba tribe in Colombia hope not. Tribal belief is that if a woman moves during intercourse the earth will slip off the shoulders of the four giants holding it above the water.

10
. Europe, like Japan, generally didn’t buy into the hygiene argument. In Britain circumcision remained popular among the better-off, but rates shot up under the new National Health Service set up after the Second World War; they dropped dramatically once parents had to pay for it – the 50 per cent rate of 1950 is almost zero today. America’s enthusiasm for circumcision has only waned in the last decades, from 95 per cent to an overall 60 per cent, though it is half that in the eastern states.

Circumcision is a human ritual going back to prehistory. It’s central to the religion of Jews (who traditionally circumcise at eight days) and Muslims (at puberty), but also to the beliefs of many tribes in Africa and Australian Aboriginals. Among some primitive peoples males are considered neuter until the foreskin, which is seen as being feminine because it bears some resemblance to the labia, is removed. The Greeks and Romans were appalled by circumcision when they encountered it among the Egyptians and Israelites. Esteeming the tapered, fleshy, nipple-like portion of the foreskin as the defining feature of the male, they even passed laws forbidding such ‘mutilation’.

There has been considerable debate as to the sexual pros and cons of circumcision to the adult male. Some specialists consider it beneficial in that it delays orgasm. Others maintain that it robs a man of nerve-rich erogenous tissue and sensation in the permanently uncapped glans, blunted over time to become about ‘as sensitive as a kneecap’. Others have dubbed circumcision ‘penile rape’. The probability is that it doesn’t make much difference either way.

The foreskin is much larger than might be thought: up to 15 square inches.

11
. In Renaissance France the belief was that a man with a grudge against a new bridegroom could make him impotent by calling out his name while at the same time breaking off the point of a knife in the marriage chamber door.

Similar beliefs occur throughout time – Athenian males worried that black magic could be used to harm their penile potency.
Enemies
or sexual rivals often inscribed a lead tablet with a curse aimed at another’s generative organ and buried it in the grave of a boy – the ghosts of the ‘premature dead’ were believed to wander the earth and were prepared to wreak evil until their natural lifespan was fulfilled.

12
. Insult the penis, insult the man – and mankind has been doing that with the phallic gesture throughout history.

Two thousand years ago the Romans were giving each other what antiquarians called the phallic hand, just like the Ancient Greeks: the fist clenched, the tip of the thumb thrust between the first and second fingers like the tip of a penis. The
mano fico
(the ‘fig’) in Latin but fuck you in any language except Japanese – the ever-so polite Japanese don’t have such a gesture, or any swear words either. Probably older is the
digitus impudicus
(impudent finger): the same meaning, with greater economy. The ‘fig’ is still popular in Mediterranean countries, particularly Italy, but the ‘finger’ is almost universal, though with some variants: the first finger instead of the more usual middle one, or the two fingers held up closed together or spread apart. Not so in Iran and some other Middle Eastern countries where the equivalent of the ‘finger’ is what in the West is the cheery gesture of encouragement: the thumbs up. Which can lead to serious misunderstanding either way.

A newer variation is the forearm jerk, in which one hand is slapped down on the bicep of the opposite arm. Another, popularised by the comedian Jasper Carrott, air-sketches a protuberance from the forehead with forefinger and thumb: dickhead – the same meaning indicated by pressing the back of the closed hand against the forehead, with the first finger and thumb extended. A gesture common in some African and Caribbean countries in which the five digits are extended with the palm forward, meaning you have five fathers (you bastard), has been adapted and given more emphasis by holding the hand backwards against the forehead: not just a dickhead, but a dickhead five times over.

In recent years women have favoured crooking the little finger and waggling it: little dick and droopy with it. With much the same psychology behind the Israeli poster campaign of the previous decade, in 2007 the Australian government produced a series of TV commercials in which women gave the (little) finger to male drivers
driving
too fast. When a woman in Sydney emulated the commercials the enraged recipient of her signal smashed a bottle on her car, and pleaded not guilty in court on what he considered the justifiable grounds that his manhood had been impugned.

During the Second World War, the British Political Warfare Executive, responsible for black propaganda, impugned Adolf Hitler’s manhood in a startlingly explicit way. The British people cheered themselves up during the war by singing, to the tune of ‘Colonel Bogey’, that Hitler had only got one ball (true: as medical examination revealed in young manhood, the right testicle of the foetal Fuhrer had failed to make the normal journey from the developing abdomen and down the inguinal canal into the scrotum). But the PWE devised a far greater insult. It took a photograph of Hitler standing on a balcony, put a penis purportedly his, in his hand – a very small penis and circumcised, to feed the rumour that he was a self-hating Jew – and produced a postcard from it captioned ‘What we have, that we firmly hold’, quoted from a speech he made in Munich in 1942. Some two and a half thousand copies were dropped over Germany in March 1944 before the operation was cancelled, a government minister saying he would rather lose the war than win it with the help of psychological pornography.

An intriguing question: is the 22-foot erection of the Cerne Giant, the chalk figure carved into a hill above the English town of Cerne Abbas, a phallic insult or not?

For most of the last three centuries the 180-foot Giant was thought to be a fertility symbol of the Romano-British period, or possibly Phoenician, Celtic or Saxon; and it was the custom during these centuries not only to mount a maypole on the site during spring planting and summer harvest, but for infertile women, newlyweds and couples about to be married to visit it at other times, and perhaps sleep on the Giant’s penis for marital luck. But in the late twentieth century scholars noted that the earliest written reference to the Giant was made only in 1694 (as a three-shilling payment, found in the churchwarden’s accounts, for tidying up the figure); and that in 1774 the Reverend John Hutchins in his guide to Dorset had stated that the Giant was ‘a modern thing’, which had been cut in the previous century by the landowner, Denzil Holles, an MP who opposed Cromwell with great hostility and got thrown into prison by him several times. On this basis, and because the Giant

carries a (phallic) club, scholarly speculation became that Holles’s motive in having the Giant cut was to give form to the epithet by which Cromwell was mocked by his enemies: the English Hercules.

The probability is that the Cerne Giant
is
an ancient fertility figure, and an extraordinary one at that. If it is not, it’s the biggest phallic insult ever made.