Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis (7 page)

In the drama
Acharnes
the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes (
c
. 446–
c
.386 bc) tells the story of the procession marking the private Dionysian celebration held by the good Dikaiopolis together with his daughter and his slave Xanthius on the occasion of the armistice between Athens and Sparta. In advance of the procession he instructs Xanthius to hold the phallus pole straight in front of him, and then sings the following phallic hymn:

Oh, Phales, companion of Bacchus,

life of the party, old goat,

lover of women and boys,

with peace in my hands I greet you

and rejoicing return to my village.

The great city festivals of Dionysus were important civic events. They were accompanied by much pomp and ceremony and drew spectators 37

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from miles around. Not only were countless phallic images carried in procession, but the participants also tied on large artificial penises.

However, it was precisely the Greeks who drew a sharp line between the phallus in its symbolic meaning and the same organ as an anatomical component. The phallus was used only symbolically and ritually.

An Egyptian creation story tells of the primordial god Atum, who created the world by masturbating while standing in the primeval sea, encouraged by Hathor, the goddess of love: from his phallus he spewed Shu and Tefnet, the god of air and the goddess of liquid, brother and sister, and with that creation was complete. Moreover, in Egyptian mythology there was a god of male sexual power. His name was Min and he was of some importance. He is usually depicted with his left hand round his phallus and his right hand raised in an inverted v-shaped structure, supposedly representing coitus.

In the Hindu creation myth a phallus is also described. In 1959

Paul Thomas devoted a book to the subject: on the day of their crea tion, when the gods Brahma and Vishi appeared out of nowhere, they were bewildered, but ‘soon they saw a dazzling lingam of huge pro por tions, whose extremities reached vast distances’.

The phallus also played an important role in the religion of other ancient peoples. Not only in Baal worship (Baal was the phallic god of the Canaanites), but in Islam and Judaism too the circumcision of the foreskin became a sign of the link between the man and Baal, Allah and Jahweh respectively.

It is worth mentioning that in chapter 20 of the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, which concerns those who shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord, there is mention of ‘he that is wounded in the stones [testicles], or hath his privy member cut off’. Obviously such injuries were a problem even then.

According to the etymologist G. R. Scott the Bible translators deliberately replaced the word ‘penis’ with the euphemism ‘hip’ and later ‘loin’ or ‘thigh’. An obvious example is found in Genesis 24:2–3, where Abraham addresses his eldest servant: ‘Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: and I will make thee swear by the Lord, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth, that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son . . .’ In Abraham’s time it was simply the custom when swear-ing an oath to touch one’s own penis or the penis of the person most closely involved. The circumcised member, after all, was the sign of the bond between man and Jehovah.

In Christianity the penis gradually faded into the background as a religious symbol, although traditionally, especially in France, powers for the cure of impotence were attributed to certain saints down to the 38

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end of the nineteenth century. In one’s hour of need one could address one’s prayers to them.

Until 1805, when the village was buried by an earthquake, a pic-turesque pilgrimage took place annually on 17 September in Isernia (near Naples). In the cathedral the relics of St Damien were displayed.

On the great day these were carried in procession to the local fair. Wax phalluses of every shape and size were on sale, and worshippers were required to hang one in the chapel while intoning a particular prayer.

The proceeds of course went to the church. There were many other places where the Catholic Church sanctioned phallus worship, more details may be found in
A History of Phallic Worship
by R. Payne Knight and T. Wright.

Leonardo da

Vinci’s cross-

section of a

fornicating

couple.

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The beginnings of science

One of the first people to study the penis and erection scientifically was Leonardo da Vinci. The most incisive mind in human history took a keen interest in the sexual organs.

In his view the genitalia both of the man and of the woman were so repulsive that, were it not for the beauty of the human body as a whole and irrepressible sexual desire, the human race would long since have died out. Through his anatomical studies Leonardo fell foul of the ban on dissecting corpses. This brilliant man – with a personal erotic preference for his own sex – refuted the medieval notion that an erection came about as a result of an accumulation of air. After research on hanged criminals, he rightly concluded that erections in man were caused by an accumulation of blood.

However, this is not the case with all mammals. In birds, for example, erection results from lymph congestion. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of such creatures are not in possession of a real penis, that is, an organ containing masses of erectile tissue. Only the Ratitae, including ostriches, and the Anseres (swans, geese and ducks, which copulate under water) have penises containing erectile tissue. The Argentine duck has a penis that when fully erect averages 43 cm in length, making it longer than the duck itself. What’s more, this bird not only has a huge penis, but also turns out to have a very active and promiscuous sex life – too beastly for words. The assumption that the duck’s enormous penis was aimed at attracting females proved incorrect. It is simply a well-hung species that not even the ostrich can match.

If any reader is ever in Iceland, I would advise them to drop in at the Phallological Museum in Reykjavík, the only one of its kind. Every normal utilitarian object is here remodelled in the shape of a penis. The handle of a door, the strong box, the pens, everything. In addition there is an exhibition of 137 penises from forty different species. The largest is that of a sperm whale, and measures 1.7 metres. The museum is also hoping for a penis from Homo sapiens. Whatever happens it seems sure of acquiring one, since three men have promised to leave their manhood to the museum after their death. A wax impression of the member of one of them is already hanging on display. Meanwhile the geysers continue to arouse great interest with their spouts of steam . . .

The anatomist Costanzo Varolio (1543–1575) wrote about erection some decades after Leonardo. One of his conclusions was that the erection was the result of a
stase
of blood. In his view muscles on the underside of the penis played a major role. The scholar Reinier de Graaf from Delft, discussed above, had invented a type of syringe with which he carried out many different kinds of research on dead 40

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The long

corkscrew penis

of the Argentine

duck.

bodies. To his amazement, when he injected the
arteria hypogastrica
he saw the erectile tissue in the penis filling up, confirming Varolio’s conclusion.

In 1668 De Graaf completed his study of the male sex organ. He rushed the report to the printer together with an article on the use of enemas and anatomical injections, so anxious was he to pip his teacher, Leiden professor Johannes van Horne, to the post. De Graaf was well aware that the male sex organ was a tricky subject, since ‘disrespectful, lewd people will try to misuse what I publish for wanton images and smutty jokes’. His defence was that he had presented his finding in as decent a way as possible, so that ‘no one can take the slightest offence, unless they are determined to do so’. De Graaf’s book, with the catchy title
De virorum inservientibus, de clysteribus et de usu siphonis in
anatomi
(Treatise on the Reproductive Organs, and the Use of the Hypo dermic Syringe in Anatomy), contained a summary of the ana tomy of the penis, but also a description of his method of injecting cadavers with ink in order to make the blood vessels visible.

De Graaf was born in 1641 to Roman Catholic parents. His mother came from a wealthy family and his father was a successful ship-builder. Although Catholics were allowed to practise their religion in the Dutch Republic, the state was Protestant and De Graaf had no prospect of ever becoming a professor. The young prodigy, who must have realized from an early age that he belonged to a minority, first attended the Catholic University of Leuven, before moving on to a preparatory course at the University of Utrecht, and in 1663 went to 41

m a n h o o d

Leiden to study medicine. Matthew Cobb, in his book
The Egg and
Sperm Race
, creates a vivid picture of student life at this period. In his view it was remarkably similar to that of the twenty-first century, although there were no female students. Students lived in cramped quarters, sometimes ten to a house, and just as today often changed addresses. Student life consisted of study, drink, dancing till the small hours, and sex. Every social event was an excuse for getting drunk, and the university authorities actually encouraged the consumption of alcohol, promising would-be students an annual tax-free alcohol allowance of 194 litres of wine and approximately 1,500 litres of beer!

In the smoky taverns medical students were often teased about the bad reputation of their intended profession. ‘We don’t need a doctor, we’d rather die for nothing,’ was a typical dig.

Reinier de Graaf died aged only 32. Nothing is known about the cause of his death, but over twenty years later Antonie van Leeuwenhoek claimed to have heard at the time that he had been taken ill after an altercation with his scientific rival Jan Swammerdam.

Back to the main story. In 1863 the German physiologist Conrad Eckhardt (1822–1905) demonstrated that an erection could be induced by stimulating the sacrum. The erection centre was located in the lowest part of the spine – that much was certain – but it was to be a long time before any more became known about the process. Even at the time when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, we still had only a vague notion. In the 1940s German researchers discovered that not only adult men but also male babies have nocturnal erections. So obviously such erections are not in themselves linked to testosterone levels, which after all only start to rise in puberty. In the 1950s equipment was gradually designed for the objective measurement of erections. Naturally such advances were abused: in Czechoslovakia an erection meter served to expose men pretending to be gay in order to avoid national service.

The recruits were shown hard-core hetero porn while attached to an erection meter, and quickly gave the game away!

In Britain the erection meter was still in use in the 1990s, but in the psychiatric assessment of long-term sex offenders. The prison psychiatrists showed their patients perverse or violent videos, while the sensors hidden in the tapes that had been attached to their penises gave an accur ate record of whether or not they were still aroused. In the case of arousal their release into society was delayed. Only a short while ago I was approached about using a similar diagnostic method experi -

mentally . . .

Sometimes it is the patient himself who insists on nocturnal erection readings. An example is a 42-year-old man accused of having 42

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sexual relations with his stepdaughter. The court had already sentenced him to several months’ imprisonment. However, he maintained to his lawyer, his gp and myself that he had been impotent for years and for that reason could not be guilty. He wanted this confirmed and hence was briefly admitted to hospital for nocturnal erection monitoring. The readings were normal, and that was the end of that.

The shrinking penis

The fact that in the distant past there were so many different ways of delivering sperm cells – with some male animals surpassing others by developing methods of getting as close as possible to the ovum – led to the evolution of the penis. It was to play a crucial role in reproduction.