Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis (48 page)

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birth very hard. For the rest, a
cul de Paris
, or a well-stuffed cushioned pillow, can provide a great deal of relief.

Too narrow a vagina, natural or acquired, can also cause problems.

When a gynaecologist operates on a prolapse, he or she will make sure that the vagina remains at least two fingers wide, the approximate thickness of the average penis. Smit wrote of the naturally narrow vagina:

Too narrow a sheath, as is sometimes found in very delicate, thin women, makes intercourse painful, unpleasant and fruit-less. In one case, where after several attempts over nine months the well-endowed man was able to penetrate only as far as the glans, the couple were obliged by pain on both sides to cease all further attempts. Dr Thilenius ordered an injection of almond oil morning and evening and left an easily extractable, four-inch-long piece of sponge, which had been coated with oil, in the vagina.

Men who are equipped with an exceptionally strong glans, may be congenial to women of experience, but until deflora -

tion, for the pleasure of young innocent girls, they are very unsuited. If the young husband encounters such a distressing situation, it is permissible for him to prepare the way with his finger.

With his surfeit of male sex hormone and high stress levels the man lives on average a few years less than the woman. Many men are dependent on a woman not only for their birth, but also for geriatric care. An unknown Englishman once wrote: ‘Without this good friend

[the woman] the dawn and evening of life would be helpless, and its mid-day without pleasure.’

Women receive the fertilizing sperm, help the embryo develop and bear our children. However you put it, reproduction is closely linked to love, loving, sexuality. In all kinds of ways women are
the
experts.

Not so long ago some women in the Bandjoema tribe had an important role to play in this respect. Before a young man was granted the right to marry, he had to take a sexual exam. The young man had to prove that in marriage he would be able to do his reproductive duty.

The female examiner, called a
sentondang
, had to give a report to the father. Such reports were usually formulated as follows: ‘Father, your son is a complete man.’ If she did not consider the test successful and wanted a ‘resit’, she said: ‘Father, I can’t say much yet.’ What wisdom in such a culture! Things are very different with some Western women.

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My former partner once told me very vividly how her grandmother prized the sexual performance of her grandfather, who was then nearly eighty. Granny said: ‘He still wants it every week, but there’s not much left, you know. He almost has to shove it in with a fork.’

A former gp told me about a very respectable widower who late in life met a strapping Flemish woman. He married her, but unfortunately he proved to be impotent. Time after time she made fun of him and belittled him to his face. On one occasion she said: ‘Shall I do a hand-stand, so you can hang it in there.’ The gp referred the man to a famous sexologist, with a letter of referral in which he wrote that the wife was

‘stiffening his lack of resolve’. Of course there are also men who talk deprecatingly about their wife’s genitals. Generations of feminism and political correctness have not yet ousted ‘cunt’ as a term of abuse (for both sexes) in English.

The art of seduction

In our culture many men tend to ‘instrumentalize’ sexuality: they concentrate on certain parts of the body rather than the whole woman.

Women generally focus more on the man as a ‘person’, and the vast majority find it hard to give themselves unless they have been touched emotionally. One cannot say it often enough: in contrast to what men may think, most women are basically not that interested in the penis, not even in that of their sexual partner. No more than a third find the dimensions of the penis important and then, whatever men may think, what matters is the girth, not the length. The crucial thing is that the glans should be clean. Some women, whether lesbian or not, have long since replaced the penis with a pipette full of sperm. ‘Penis-centred’

men – known in sexological jargon as ‘pistils’ – do not interest them at all. Strangely enough, in the plant world pistils are female and stamens male!

Modern men are rather poor at seduction, at the ritual of courtship that precedes lovemaking. Going straight up to a woman and telling her you think she’s sexy, a turn-on, fit, etc., isn’t seduction. Nor is delug-ing her with love letters, phone calls, bunches of flowers or invitations to candlelit dinners. Nor are long walks on the beach, although it is beginning to look like it. In the 1990s a gay newspaper summed up the ideal (for gays?):

It is letting desire develop, like a slowly germinating plant, the seed of which was planted without anyone noticing. Then you cultivate that desire, water the plant, but ensure that there is still an edge of thirst. You let it grow, fertilize it, prune it and 256

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whisper sweet words to the emerging blossom, and all without the plant knowing. Then, when the day has arrived, the bud bursts open and the flower turns towards the light. And lo and behold: the plant comes towards you, it gyrates with pleasure on your windowsill and offers you everything that you could never have obtained by asking. That is real seduction.

The psychologist Erick Janssen asked both male and female test subjects to put a number of ‘separate’ components of a lovemaking session in what they considered to be the normal order: stroking of the breasts, removing underpants/panties, kissing, undoing bra, intercourse, fellatio, etc. The replies of men and women, as expected, corresponded almost exactly. Next the subjects were asked to give the separate components a rating, indicating the degree of arousal per component. It was found that in men the degree of arousal ran in parallel with the

‘normal’ order (on which men and women were agreed). With the female test subjects, however, this was not the case: with components where in accordance with the ‘normal’ sequence they were expected to do something with the penis (take your pick), the arousal level plunged!

It would appear that most women are really not that interested.

So is the penile erection redundant? No! Though one might almost be inclined to think so, especially when reading women’s magazines, according to which women have a distinct preference for men who are both empathetic and good listeners. They adore household chores and the children, while remaining sexually faithful and in bed are devoted to their wives. They have a natural aversion to porn and aggression, feel no need for power and attach no importance to winning or being proved right. In short: a pretty weird collection of qualities for the average man. The articles confirm the stereotypical image that women do not go for strong, potent men. Intercourse, they would have us believe, scores very low on the female list of priorities. The journalist Sarah Verroen believes that is all nonsense. She conducted her own tv survey on the ideal lover. Thirty women from the fields of art, science, journalism and prostitution were approached about taking part in this – it must be said, totally unrepresentative – mini-survey.

The results were striking. In answer to the question of what women found most satisfying sexually, 29 of the 30 women put a cross against

‘a good, hard fuck’, and one chose ‘extended lovemaking with lots of attention to my needs’, while no one found ‘vanilla sex’ appealing. 24

of the 30 wanted ‘bold, knows what he wants and what you want’,

‘dominant and a bit of a brute’ had five crosses against it, while ‘tender and completely focused on your desires’ was chosen by only one woman. Verroen decries the wishy-washy taste of vanilla sex and makes 257

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it clear that at least some women are in favour of making love with men with a firm erection, of the phallus with its male attributes of effective -

ness, power and penetration. In her view eroticism exists by the grace of generosity: it is the smouldering flame that unexpectedly catches fire.

The new impotence

In the early 1970s there was talk of the ‘new’ impotence. Partly because of advances in medical science in the preceding two decades the 1970s were to be the age in which the women’s movement would demand equal sexual rights. Women began making demands on intercourse. It wasn’t a matter of quantity as it had been for the Queen of Aragon (who demanded sex six times a day), but of quality. The annoying thing was that many men proved unable to cope and replied with impotence.

The world gradually became feminized, and women started laying down the rules. Some men no longer knew what it meant to be a man, and became totally confused. Some of feminist demands were indeed baffling. One moment the man had to overpower the woman, but the next caress her tenderly. But, and here comes the crunch, the man had to intuit for himself when to adopt which strategy: For that moment when they enter Ela, men feel in control, for it is their erection which excites her. That glory evaporates as they get busy deciding what tempo to follow, which parts of her body are most sensitive, how to use their muscles, weight, skin and memory to satisfy her, how long it takes her to come, how to time their orgasm to coincide with hers. They blank out their pleasure to concentrate on hers. They delay their sensations and carefully plan to start with a bit of finger and tongue.

This is how Greek-born feminist Eurydice Kamvisseli puts it in her novel
F/32
(1990).

Like today’s liberated women, medieval witches, as previously mentioned, were accused of causing impotence. They did it with a ligature.

That is, the art of putting a knot in the lace of a man’s breeches which led the man to become impotent through a kind of transferable magic.

Preferably it should be done at the time the marriage was celebrated.

This involved the witch pronouncing a magic formula, after which the lace was hidden. At the same time the witch threw two coins over her shoulder, as a symbol of the disabled testes. The impotence continued until the unfortunate victim found the lace, failing which the impotence was permanent.

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In the seventeenth century this ritual provoked such violent terror in certain areas of France that many couples had their marriage solemnized at night or in a neighbouring village, in order to avoid the knotting of the lace. The seventeenth-century Dutch poet and moralist Jacob Cats mentions in his
Touchstone for the Wedding Ring
how a certain Martin Guerre ‘was incapable for a full eight or nine years of paying his wife the due attentions; and that because of certain evil arts that in France are called the knotted lace’. Witches could also bring about impotence with the aid of magic potions, and could reverse the process in the same way, making them excellent sex therapists.

Undoubtedly the same applies to today’s liberated women: men badly need these modern witches! It is no longer the case that men are keener on sex than their female partners, or that women stare at the ceiling and make mental shopping lists during sex. Women want an orgasm, preferably two or three in succession, the way the women’s magazines promise them so temptingly. ‘And this is precisely when men are more and more often turning off in bed, and would sooner bury their head in a book than in her bosom,’ as a feminist once wrote.

In feminist confessional literature men generally take quite a beating. The novelist Erica Jong, in her bestselling
Fear of Flying
, exorcizes her penis envy and emphasizes the fantastic qualities of the female genitalia in contrast. She turns a ‘spineless guy’ into a ‘spineless prick’, a cruel description she uses repeatedly. Erica maintains that she has been a feminist all her life, but her biggest problem is to reconcile her feminism with her insatiable hunger for male bodies, which proves far from easy. In addition it becomes increasingly clear that men are basically terrified of women, some secretly, others openly. What could be more poignant than an emancipated woman eye to eye with a limp prick. In her eyes the major issues of history pale beside the two essential facts: the eternal feminine and the eternal limp prick. A typical fragment:

The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick that lies down on the job. The ultimate weapon in the war between the sexes: the limp prick. The banner of the enemy’s encampment. The symbol of the apocalypse: the atomic warhead prick which self -

destructs.
That
was the basic inequality which could never be righted: not that the male had a wonderful added attraction called a penis, but that the female had a wonderful all-weather cunt. Neither storm nor sleet nor dark of night could faze it. It was always there, always ready. Quite terrifying, when you think about it. No wonder that men hated women. No wonder they invented the myth of female inadequacy.

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Erica Jong takes a very sharp and humourless view of male impotence.

Not very cheering for a man – but then that probably was her intention.

As has been said, taking the initiative sexually is no longer the prerogative of the man. These days women make demands which their partner simply has to meet. Some direct their bedfellows as if they were football coaches: stroke me a bit more to the left, a bit harder, a bit softer, etc. In the past the man called the tune in bed, and the woman more or less complied, but today’s woman is not content for her partner to ejaculate after a few minutes and then roll over on his side. In the view of some experts women’s demands lead to ambivalence and uncertainty about male identity. Be that as it may, the fact remains that according to influential sexologists some men even today don’t like sex with the woman on top! Man’s sexual emancipation has only just begun!

If he’s not in the mood

According to recent American research 40 per cent of men don’t feel much like sex and regard lovemaking with their partner as a duty, more work than play. It is no accident that the first self-help manual on this nettlish topic recently appeared in the United States. ‘Making sure you’re properly equipped’ plays an important part in it, but that is easier said than done. There is also a career to be worked at, a mort-gage to repay. Eating out and sports club membership are expensive, and you have to pay for all that.