Authors: Tom Hickman
And what of Franz Kafka? If Law was hard done by and Napoleon traduced, then think of poor, hypersensitive Kafka, a man with bad lungs, a hypochondriac array of other ailments, a fixation about masticating his food, an inability to form lasting attachments with women, and an intense love–hate relationship with his bullying father – but, as far as anybody knows, with
a
penis in no way out of the ordinary. Over 15,000 books have been written about Kafka and none save one has had anything to say on the subject that gives Alan Bennett’s play its sustaining joke. The exception is a work by two psychologists at the University of North Carolina who analysed everything Kafka wrote and concluded on that basis alone that a small penis was at the root of his problems!
Given that they know they inevitably lay themselves open to ridicule about the size of their genitals, however normal they may be, we have to admire actors brave enough to appear naked on stage. When comedian Eddie Izzard appeared in the buff as Lenny Bruce in the West End, one newspaper quoted someone in the audience as allegedly saying ‘He’s obviously not being paid by the inch, is he?’ Another comedian, Frank Skinner, found himself similarly ridiculed when he co-starred with a tortoise in the play
Cooking with Elvis
and was quoted as purportedly saying that ‘being on stage with something small and wrinkly did not bother him. And playing alongside a tortoise was a nice change, too.’ The classical actor Ian Holm had to suffer a critic’s sneer when for the first time in his theatrical life he took off his clothes playing King Lear. But he had his revenge in his autobiography:
Of my stage nakedness, there was little comment, apart from . . . Mark Lawson, who mentioned the shrivelled size of my manhood when I had to wade naked through a pool of cold water. Even disregarding Lawson’s own physical shortcomings (the liver lips, the pudgy, plasticine face, the old man’s prematurely balding dome), I am pretty sure his own equipment would also have dwindled after a cold bath in front of several thousand people. (
Acting My Life
)
While most mockery of men’s penises comes from other men,
women
are adept at verbal downsizing. Paula Jones, to whom Bill Clinton dropped his trousers, said nothing more scathing than that ‘he wasn’t very well endowed’, but by the time her aggressive female lawyer was interviewed, the presidential penis had shrunk. Referring to claims of several affairs, she commented, ‘If he did have sex with those other women they wouldn’t have noticed’ – mirroring Fanny Hill’s remark about a client being ‘of a size that slips in and out without being much minded’. It is the ultimate disparagement and even more withering when delivered by a woman with personal experience of the penis in question. A former mistress of a former British Tory minister, the rotund Lord Soames, delivered a dagger thrust to the groin with the comment that sex with him was like ‘a cupboard falling on top of you with the key sticking out’. An even more devastating dismissal came from the ex-lover of then British deputy prime minister John Prescott whose manhood, she declared, was decidedly marginal – the size, in fact, of a chipolata. The
Sun
newspaper gleefully showed a photo of a two-inch cocktail sausage with the caption: ‘Actual size’.
Vindictiveness may account for some allegations, but it’s well to bear in mind that, as a rule, women see only one erection at a time, which denies comparisons (‘How huge is huge when you have no frame of reference?’ asks Isadora Wing, the heroine of Erica Jong’s
Fear of Flying
), and in urgent circumstances, which militates against detailed linear appraisal; and that a study of sexual relations shows that, while women in love are apt to consider a lover’s penis bigger than it is during a relationship, they consider it smaller after the relationship wilts and the parting is acrimonious. Disillusioned with her dull academic husband Graham, in Julian Barnes’
Before She Met Me
, his wife Ann looks at his genitalia as he sleeps naked on their bed, puzzling that so
much
trouble could be caused by ‘so trifling’ a thing: ‘After a while, it didn’t even look as if it had anything much to do with sex . . . it was just a peeled prawn and a walnut.’
HUMAN PRIMACY
OBJECTIVELY, EVEN BIG
human penises are small, other than in comparison with other human penises; but virtually all human penises are big in comparison with those of the other 192 primate species. Flaccid, the penis of the gorilla and the orang-utan, both with much bigger bodies, is virtually invisible; erect, it reaches 1.5 inches or less; the chimpanzee, man’s closest relative (sharing 98 per cent of his DNA) achieves an erection twice that of the other two apes but still only half the average human one. Why, comparatively, man’s penis is so disproportionately large is a question that engages a clutch of disciplines including archaeology, anthropology and zoology, as well as the evolutionary, psychological and sociological branches of biology. Collectively they remain at a loss to provide what is known as ‘ultimate causal explanation’.
The consensual ‘ological’ view is that when man’s hominoid ancestors came down from the trees 4 million years ago, their penises were of a size with the apes – ‘vanishingly small’, according to archaeologist Timothy Taylor (
The Prehistory
of
Sex)
. Then, however, when upright walking swivelled the sexual focus from rear to front of both sexes, a focus that was intensified by the loss of the majority of bodily hair other than in the genital area, the penis began the process of ‘runaway selection’.
Feminists incline to the view that it happened because females wanted it that way; that when
femina
became
erecta
, the angle of the vagina swung forward and down, moving deeper into the body, obliging the penis, as Rosalind Miles put it in
The Women’s History of the World
, to follow the same principle as the giraffe’s neck: ‘it grew in order to get to something it could not otherwise reach’. On the other hand, the big penis may have evolved because that’s what possessors wanted – a greater attractant to potential mates and a more visible means of warning off rivals. A big penis also increased the male’s chance of inseminating a female who was having sex with other males, by getting closer to the cervix. There are objections to such theories – not least that other primate males have continued to propagate their species with considerably less at their disposal. As to the theory that the penis grew to assist humankind’s imaginative variety of sexual positions, orang-utans and chimpanzees, particularly the pygmy chimpanzee or bonobo (a separate species, found in the Congo, which has a more upright gait and a more ‘human’ skeleton), are equally imaginative in their coupling – and they can do it swinging from trees while man only talks about doing it swinging from chandeliers.
But if science cannot say definitively why man’s penis is so big, it does have an explanation as to why his testicles are the size that they are.
In the early 1980s the evolutionary psychologist David Buss caused widespread excitement among the ‘ologies’ with the hypothesis (in
The Evolution of Desire
) that the more promiscuous a primate species, the larger the testicles of the males belonging
to
it – penis size, he surmised, was less relevant in achieving impregnation of a female having sex in rapid sequence with other males than being able to produce the most copious and frequent ejaculate. Subsequently, British scientists weighed the testes of thirty-three primate species, including man, to assess the testicle–promiscuity link. Interestingly, by this measure, the human male, the primate with the biggest penis, was not the king of the swingers: his testicles, together weighing 1.5 ounces, bore no comparison with those of the chimpanzee, which weighed an astounding 4 ounces, a three-times higher testes-to-body-weight ratio than humans. And the mighty gorilla, the primate with the smallest penis? Again he trailed the field, his testicles little more than half the weight of man’s. As Buss pointed out, the gorilla, with his monogamous harem of three to six females, faces no ‘sperm competition’ from other males. On the other hand, the promiscuous common chimp has sex almost daily with different females and the even more promiscuous bonobo has sex several times a day.
Somewhere between gorilla and chimp comes man, neither entirely promiscuous nor entirely monogamous, his penis evolved far beyond those of his distant ancestors but his testicles or at least their firepower probably reduced – his sperm production per gram of tissue is considerably less than either chimps or gorillas, leading to the ‘ological’ view that, as expressed by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan (
Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality
), he once, when the business of insemination was a contest, had a bigger ‘testicular engine’.
As with all body parts there are racial variations, a subject on which interest focused after Buss’s theory of sperm competition became known and Jared Diamond described it as ‘one of the triumphs of modern physical anthropology’. But measuring testicles was hardly as easy as measuring penises. A finger and
thumb
appraisal is wildly inaccurate: in the folds of the scrotal sac, testicles skitter out of grasp as easily as a bar of wet soap. Even measurement with an orchidometer (a specialised kind of callipers) is difficult – which is why scientists began to accumulate their data at autopsy. The findings confirmed what had been previously regarded as the case on less systematic analysis: that there is no demonstrable difference between the testicles of blacks and whites but that those of Asians are smaller. The extent of the difference, however, stunned the scientific community. It was more than twofold. As Diamond reported in a paper published in
Nature
magazine, where white and black testicles weighed an average 21 grams (there being 28 grams to the ounce), Asian testicles weighed 9 grams – the weight of the testicles of twelve-year-old white and black boys.
Men evidently equate testicles with manly courage (having balls or, as the Spanish-loving Hemingway preferred, ‘cojones’), but, considering that the testicles are the manufacturing plant that helps achieve the Darwinian goal of procreation, they are surprisingly indifferent as to what size theirs are. Put that down, perhaps, to the fact that the testes are not truly visible, and that they have to play peek-a-boo with the penis in front of them, on which men lavish all their attention.
For the record the average black or white testicle is fractionally less than 2 inches long by 0.8 inches wide and is 1.2 inches in diameter, though some are half that and a very few up to half as big again, the largest having just over twice the volume of the smallest (Jane Ingersoll in Rick Moody’s
Purple America
views Radcliffe’s testicles as ‘little cashews, not those asteroids some of her boyfriends have unveiled to her’). Taller and heavier (not obese) men tend to have big testicles, but this is a weak correlation – and there is no correlation to penis size. Hardly surprisingly, men with larger testes manufacture more sperm per day; and they ejaculate more frequently.
Testicular
research of a more sociological kind has deduced that men with large testicles are likely to be more unfaithful, the converse being true of men with small testicles. A woman seeking a reliable long-term partner might be advised to invest in an orchidometer.
AESTHETICS, FUNCTION AND WOMAN
IT’S DOUBTFUL THAT
any penis bears more than a passing resemblance to most of those on Grecian statues. Lifelike in the depiction of all other anatomical detail, the Ancient Greeks so idealised the penis (and indeed its attendant accoutrements) that they tidied up the imperfections. Flesh and blood penises are unlikely to be dainty, slim and pointy-tipped as are those in Grecian art or that of the Renaissance, which was enamoured of the Grecian tradition (Michelangelo’s Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, like God of a weightlifter’s build, is barely sufficiently endowed to propagate the human race); and testicles are virtually never symmetrical and hang in the same horizontal plane (the perfectly matched brace of a king, as the
Brihat Samhita
has it) except, perhaps, when tightened by cold or fear. If one is frank about it, penises at rest generally appear unbalanced in one way or another, the scrotum in its normal state hangs pendulously like an avocado withered on the branch (‘avocado’ comes from the Aztec for scrotum), the testicles within it unequal, the right, with few exceptions, being larger and the left (because the spermatic cord is longer on that
side
) hanging lower, irrespective, curiously, of the ‘sidedness’ (right-handed, left-handed) of the possessor; according to the estimable male outfitters Gieves & Hawkes, some 80 per cent of men find it more comfortable to dress to the left.
Contemplating ‘that capital part of man [and] that wondrous treasure-bag of nature’s sweets’, John Cleland’s Fanny Hill concluded that they ‘all together formed the most interesting moving picture in nature, and surely infinitely superior to those nudities furnished by the painters, statuaries, or any art, which are purchased at immense prices’; Lawrence has Connie Chatterley laud Mellors’ genitalia as ‘the primeval root of all full beauty!’
Sadly, this is transference of masculine wishful thinking. Some women may agree, of course, including the American artist Betty Dodson who once did sixteen drawings of male genitals ‘so men could see all the wonderful variations in their sex organs’ (
Sex for One);
however, as she describes the involved penises as ‘Classical Cocks’, ‘Baroque Cocks’ and ‘Danish Modern Cocks with clean lines’ it may be that her enthusiasm got the better of her. The prostitute in Tama Janowitz’s
Slaves of New York
encounters all kinds of penises including some that are ‘enchanted, dusted with pearls like the great minarets of the Taj Mahal’ – which is almost as rhapsodic. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some women view male genitals with positive distaste, like the poet Sylvia Plath: ‘old turkey neck and gizzards’; or, like Jane Ingersoll in Moody’s
Purple America:
‘the ugliest anatomical part there is, next to goiters’.