God's Doodle (21 page)

Love is a matter of chemistry, but sex is a matter of physics.

Anon

THE PRICK OF THE BRAIN

THAT BLOOD ENGORGES
the penis to make it erect seems too obvious to mention. But this was not always what was believed. The Ancient Greeks thought that air rushed from the liver to the heart and down the arteries to inflate the penis in much the same way as we pump up a bicycle tyre. The medieval Church wanted to believe that the spirit of God elevated the organ for procreational purposes but could hardly convince itself: too many erections quite evidently arose when procreation was the last thing on the penis-possessor’s mind.

In the late fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci recorded what really made the penis stand on end, after attending the dissection of a hanged man and subsequently dissecting other hanged men himself. He wrote in his diary that he had seen dead men who have the member erected . . . all of them having great density and hardness and being quite filled by a large quantity of blood’.

Why a hanged man dies with an erection was not properly understood until four hundred years later, when the role of the nervous system in normal erectile functioning became clear –
and
from which it could be deduced that the sudden fracture of a hanged man’s cervical vertebrae produced a violent stimulus of the nerve centres, springing open the penile blood vessels (it can also happen in other types of violent death). The first definitive description in Western medical literature of the part blood plays in erection was published by French physician Ambroise Paré (unaware that da Vinci had got there before him seventy or eighty years earlier). Whether in the years between da Vinci and Paré the rumbustious Rabelais came to know that blood, not air, raised the penis, he certainly knew that a hanged man’s gave a final salute. ‘Isn’t it a jolly death,’ he wrote cheerfully (
Gargantua and Pantagruel
), ‘to die with a stiff john-thomas?’

Primate penises vary from species to species: that of man’s closest relative, the chimpanzee, for instance, is conical, rather like the cardboard horns blown at parties and New Year, whereas man’s is cylindrical. And man is alone among the primates in producing his erection entirely through blood pressure: other primates, like most mammals, have a penile bone – a baculum or os penis – which is deliberately flexed when an erection is required; far quicker, and more reliable, than human hydraulics. Evolutionary biology deduces that man’s early ancestors must have been so equipped: humanoid females, like most other primate females, would have copulated with numerous partners in succession and speed for the male was of the essence because of the likelihood of being hustled aside by the next in line. Perhaps many impotent men now would lament, as did (the potent) Henry Miller (
Tropic of Cancer
), that ‘the bony structure is lost in man’. But why was it lost? An unusual interpretation of Genesis suggests an explanation: that it was from Adam’s penis bone, not his rib, that God created Eve. The basis for the speculation is that men and women have the same number of ribs – men aren’t
missing
one – and, anyway, biblical Hebrew had no specific word for rib: the word used,
tsela
, means any supporting strut. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins theorises that the loss of the penis bone was down to female selection: a bone-dependent erection said nothing about the penis-possessor’s health, whereas an erection dependent on blood pressure alone spoke volumes: poor rigidity was a warning that a male might be genetically weak and unlikely to father healthy offspring.
¹

Life, as penis-possessors become frustratingly aware, would be so much simpler if getting an erection was a matter of will, as it was for Jean Cocteau, poet, painter, playwright, novelist, designer and cineaste, whose party piece as a young man was another manifestation of his versatility: lying naked on floor, table or chaise longue, he would bring himself to full ejaculatory orgasm, without touching his penis, by the power of imagination alone – to applause all round. There are few Cocteaus able to override the parasympathetic wiring into which erection is hooked, just like breathing and digestion. Erection is involuntary: it is not under the penis-possessor’s command, but a reflexive response to multiple psychogenic and sensory stimuli. The best erections, of course, travel both the physical and psychological pathways.

Things happen when such stimuli zing down the spinal column. Local nerves release nitric oxide to make the penile arteries open and blood floods into the thousands of tiny, sinusoid veins fanning out from the arteries, filling the penis’s central corpora spongiosum (through which the urethra runs) and the corpora cavernosa, the twin, sponge-like chambers either side of it. Like a flower in slow-motion photography, the penis swells, lengthening, thickening from base to tip, elevating. And as the blood presses against the penis’s casing
(tunica)
, ‘lock-in’ is created, the penile head, where most feeling is centred, glistening slightly from the blood beneath – it isn’t skin but membrane, similar to that of the inner eyelids and lips but remarkably thinner.

It takes only two ounces of blood to fully charge an erection, which is eight to ten times the amount of a penis’s normal supply. In a young man the process takes seconds, in a man of fifty at least twice as long, and in those of advanced years, time can only be calculated in patience – but with physical encouragement the ageing penis, like an old warhorse, can respond to the trumpet.

The pressure of blood in the fully erect penis is at least twice that in the main circulation; cross-cultural research, however, indicates racial differences in the erections that result. Generally speaking black penises are less hard than white penises, which in turn are less hard than Asian penises. And, generally speaking, when penis-possessors are in a standing position, the erections of blacks hover at the horizontal, those of whites a little above it – though one in five reaches 45 degrees – and those of most Asians rise vertically, more or less tight against the belly. There can be a correlation between rigidity and elevation, but not necessarily. The erection of a very, very few men is so powerful that they can carry heavy objects suspended from it – Armand in Jean Genet’s homosexual novel
The Thief’s Journal
lifts a heavy man on the end of his. Such penis-possessors are often eager to demonstrate their prowess: national servicemen in the army during the 1950s tell tales of individuals who could support the billet’s galvanised metal fire bucket, even in some cases with a pair of army boots inside it; at Princess Margaret’s house parties on the island of Mustique in the 1960s former gangster John Bindon is alleged to have balanced a full half-pint glass or suspended five empty ones by their handles. Sexually speaking, of course, the optimum erectile state is that which
allows
satisfactory penetration.

The human male doesn’t even wait to be born to have erections: he has them, as ultrasound scans show, in the womb. So many newborn males greet the world with an erection that the sexologist William Masters in his earlier obstetric days set himself the challenge of trying to cut the umbilical cord before it happened.

Mothers become hot and bothered because their infant son has erections and take his hand away from his penis, yet sometimes they stroke it to soothe or to lull him to sleep; in some cultures, women suck the infant penis – ‘the open secret of every ayah, “the native treasure” on whom the British memsahib relied so heavily for the care of her children in the days of the Raj’ (Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy,
The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny)
. And, sometimes, ambivalently, mothers play with the infant penis, as did the nurses of Rabelais’s Gargantua who, ‘when he began to exercise his codpiece’, rubbed it between their hands ‘like a roll of pastry, and then burst out laughing when it raised its ears’. When he was a small boy, the nurses of the French king Louis XIII similarly amused themselves, making him so proud he showed his governess, saying: ‘My cock is like a drawbridge. See how it goes up and down.’ He tried to show his father but could not pull off the trick. ‘There is no bone in it now,’ he said mournfully. ‘But there is sometimes.’

The adolescent male is prey to frequent and indiscriminate erection. Sights, sounds, smells, anything or seemingly nothing at all can do it, including innocent activities such as sliding down the banisters or riding a bicycle; in his autobiography, William Butler Yeats wrote that at the age of fifteen, after going for a swim, he covered his body with sand and ‘Presently the weight of the sand began to affect the organ of sex, though at first I did not know what the strange, growing sensation was. It was only at
the
orgasm that I knew . . . It was many days before I discovered how to renew that wonderful sensation.’ The motion of a bus or train is often the inciter, as is acute self-consciousness. ‘It seems that I can’t go up to the blackboard in school, or try to get off a bus, without its jumping up and saying “Hi! Look at me!” to everybody in sight,’ confesses Philip Roth's Portnoy.

The experience can be embarrassing – and humiliating if spontaneous ejaculation follows.

The majority of males experience their first ‘spend’ by masturbating; most of the rest find it happens involuntarily while they sleep and dream; but a few are unfortunate enough to be caught out in public. Even many of those who think themselves sexually aware find that the sudden sensation of loss from the body, and the violent pounding of their heart, fills them with anxiety that something is wrong with them. As he recounts in his autobiography
Flannelled Fool
, man of letters T.C. Worsley had the daylights scared out of him by his housemaster at Marlborough who remarked: ‘You might find some white matter extruding from your private parts, Worsley. Don’t worry about it. It’s only a sort of
disease
, like measles.’

In adulthood spontaneous ejaculation is rare but it can happen: it happened to that practised philanderer James Boswell while he was playing kneesy with a woman at the opera. Erections caused non-sexually become rare too (there are exceptions: the party piece of the poet Rupert Brooke was to dive into the River Cam and emerge with his penis at the perpendicular – it impressed Virginia Woolf no end when they went skinny-dipping), but they can spring a surprise at any time. As the middle-aged writer in Hanif Kureishi’s
Intimacy
is aware at the yoga class he attends with his wife, the sight of attractive women in bright leotards reflected in the long wall mirrors ‘taking up adventurous positions’, makes his penis press against his shorts ‘as if to say “Don’t forget that always I am here too!”’

Such a wilful erection merely flickers; others more wilful still can blatantly firm, especially if physical contact is made, unintentionally and unavoidably as can happen in a crowded lift or the crush of an underground train. Some penis-possessors seek such contact, deliberately rubbing up against women in public places, as indulged in by Samuel Pepys and others before him and since. Frottage, as the act is termed, and known with coarse good humour by the Victorians as ‘bustle punching’, is today a preoccupation of Japanese salarymen in Tokyo, where every year over two thousand arrests are made for various forms of molestation.

Dance halls legitimise a kind of frottage, when couples dance close together. If flickering or firming occurs there is likely to be discomfort on at least one side of the occurrence, or possibly both. Or not. At seventeen the poet Sylvia Plath wrote in her diary about a partner who ‘On the dance floor held me close to him, the hard line of his penis taut against my stomach,’ adding, ‘And it was like warm wine flooding through me.’