Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis (8 page)

There are many different kinds of penis: the
aedeagus
of flies, mites and butterflies, the protuberances that some frogs have near their anus, the tiny organ with which the drone of the common-or-garden bee copulates (it breaks off and costs the drone its life, but does prevent others from mating with the queen), the
embolus
of the golden spider, the anal fin of fishes, the double penises of snakes, the proboscis of the dragonfly. Ostriches are particularly well equipped, and at the turn of the twentieth century walking sticks were made from their penises.

Male organs vary from little protuberances to whale penises, which, though they are usually hidden in the body, can reach a length of almost 2 metres. In the fearsome cold encountered on an expedition to find the North-East Passage led by Willem Barentsz in 1596, the ship’s doctor tanned the only part of a whale’s skin that is fit for tanning and made it into a waistcoat. Calvinist that he was, he had his Bible bound in the same material – penis leather. The phallus, death and religion are, after all, closely connected.

Leather can also be obtained from the human penis. Sceptics should visit Wieuwerd in Friesland. This village, built on a large mound, has a mysterious crypt (discovered by accident in 1765) in a small church dating from 1200. The corpses interred there centuries ago have never decomposed. One of the mummified bodies on display – that of the goldsmith Stellingwerf – has a virtually intact but completely leathery penis!

The penises of the dead can sometimes literally lead a life of their own. There are many stories in circulation about that of the deceased French emperor Napoleon – many and varied stories, comparable to the Arthurian legends. It is a historical fact that a post-mortem was carried out on the late emperor in 1821. It emerged that he had died of stomach cancer, quite a common occurrence in his family. The doctor conducting the post-mortem stated that the imperial reproductive 43

m a n h o o d

organs were small and insignificant and clearly shrivelled and desic-cated. ‘It should be pointed out, for the sake of historical truth, that the deceased must have been completely impotent before his death.’

In his book P. Roobjee mentions that a priest who had been present at the post-mortem somehow acquired Napoleon’s penis and describes what happened thereafter:

It suddenly turned up again in the 1950s, after a mysterious odyssey of almost a hundred and fifty years, at Christie’s Fine Art Auctioneers in London. The imperial member, one inch (2.54 cm) long, bore, according to a member of the staff who assisted at the sale, a strong resemblance to a very small seahorse.

The auctioneer actually spoke of an insignificant, dried-up object.

There turned out to be no interest in the penis, on offer for £13,300.

Shortly afterwards the member was offered for sale in the catalogue of a mail-order company, but again there were no takers. In 1961

Napoleon’s penis finally acquired a worthy permanent owner, an American urologist, who paid out approximately $3,800,000 for the tiny object. Unfortunately the owner of the jewel was not able to enjoy the sight of the Corsican-bred tufted-gilled seahorse for very long, succumbing shortly afterwards to thrombosis and embolism of the lung. Since then the member has begun a second secret odyssey and to this day Napoleon’s body lies – minus a penis – in the crypt beneath the Dôme des Invalides.

The average length of the erect male penis is approximately five times greater than that of an adult gorilla. Man’s proportionately huge penis gives an indirect indication of the sex lives of our forefathers. If we bring evolution into the picture, a relatively long penis may have been intended to scare off other males. While this is true of a few species of monkeys, it probably doesn’t work like that in man. Or is a long penis intended to lure women? To heighten sexual pleasure? Neither of those possibilities seems probable.

Evolutionary biologists argue that in the case of females who mate with several males, the male with the longest penis delivers his sperm cells most safely, and in other words has the best chance of fathering progeny. Therefore the so-called sperm competition theory offers the most elegant explanation of the dimensions of the penis. The vagina is, believe it or not, a dreadful place for the sperm cell, an acidic torture chamber, which is why a penis that can reach the back of the vagina has an advantage over one that delivers its content less close to 44

t h e p e n i s

the ovum. Male seminal fluid is fortunately sufficiently alkaline to neutralize the acid. Because it is an advantage if a large quantity of sperm cells can be delivered close to the ova, in terms of evolutionary biology a condition has been created to make the penis grow in length.

But a penis that reaches further than the mouth of the uterus no longer offers any extra advantage.

Koro

A very specific form of impotence, called
koro
, occurs in China and South-East Asia. The word is of Malay origin and means the head of a tortoise. It describes a psychiatric syndrome, in which the usually older patient becomes convinced that his penis is shrinking and will disappear into his abdomen (like a tortoise’s head), finally resulting in death.
Koro
may be an expression of schizophrenia, a serious depression, epilepsy, a delirium, but may also occur in withdrawal from heroin, and very occasionally is the result of a brain tumour.

The Chinese term for the phenomenon is
suo-yang
, which means

‘shrivelling penis’. There are various explanations for the fact that
koro
apparently occurs mainly in China. One of these is connected with Chinese philosophy and its yin–yang principle. According to this philosophy, man, the world and the cosmos are assigned two fundamental forces. Yang stands for hardness, firmness, the heavens, light, god, truth, drought, the left-hand and front side, and masculinity. Yin stands for the earth, calm, softness, the moon, darkness, deceitfulness, liquid, the right-hand and rear side, and femininity. For the man this means that both a drastic loss of yang and an excess of yin can lead to problems. According to this view nocturnal emissions and masturbation cause a loss of yang. Normal coitus, between man and woman, that is, results in a ‘healthy’ exchange of yin and yang fluids.

More than in other cultures extensive use is made in China of potency-enhancing medicines. Quite understandable if one knows that male potency is directly related to the cosmic characteristics of the yang principle.

Koro
also occurs in Western culture. In 1985 an article appeared in the
International Journal of Social Psychiatry
about an American patient in his fifties. He had reported to an emergency clinic with extreme anxiety, palpitations and hyperventilation. Shortly before he had visited a prostitute, who before giving him oral sex had washed his glans and penis – according to the patient – with a strange chemical substance. Immediately afterwards, he claimed, his penis had started to shrivel. He had seen a strange smile on her face, and felt as if he were under a spell. It emerged that he was afraid of dying suddenly. He 45

m a n h o o d

was admitted, after which it gradually became clear that he followed a solitary, schizoid lifestyle, and also drank far too heavily. Such stories were recorded in Europe too as far back as the fifteenth century, though not by psychiatrists, but by notorious witch-hunters. As is almost always the case, it is the woman who was demonized!

Misunderstandings about the glans

First, a few misunderstandings need clearing up: one, that the penis is a highly sensitive organ. That is totally untrue: the number of free nerve endings, compared, for example, with the lips, is extremely small. Only underneath the glans are there a relatively large number of free nerve endings.

The second misunderstanding is that the penis has to be active to become erect. This is also untrue: on the contrary, in order for the penis to stay flaccid the smooth muscle cells in the erectile tissue of the penis are contracted virtually all day long. At night during the rem sleep phase, and in sexual arousal, these smooth muscle cells relax, the spongiform network in the erectile tissue can enlarge and there is an erection.

The third, most serious misunderstanding is that the sole purpose of the glans or head of the penis is to be sucked on. It’s true that the glans is soft, but for a quite different reason. In the view of the gynaecologist Robert Latou Dickinson (1861–1950) it had become soft in the course of evolution so as not to put too much pressure on the woman’s internal sex organs during intercourse. However, this proved an incorrect interpretation.

The glans forms the end of the
corpus spongiosum
, the mass of erectile tissue surrounding the urethra. Just as in the twin sections of erectile tissue, the
corpora cavernosa,
the pressure in the corpus spongiosum increases during erection, but to a much lesser extent than in the corpora cavernosa. Otherwise the urethra would be squeezed shut so that the sperm could not be discharged at its intended destination.

Relatively little attention has been paid to the glans in poetry. Only the short-lived, doomed, alcoholic poet Paul Verlaine sang its praises in

‘Hombres’ (1891): ‘my choice morsel, with its gush of divine phosphorus’. The poem is part of a collection published clandestinely after his death, in which this famous poet presents himself licking and gorg-ing, revelling in sex with women, but also yearning for homo sexual love.

In Ancient Greece competitors in the Olympic Games were naked.

However, it was forbidden for them to display their glans – that was considered vulgar. So a ribbon was bound round the foreskin, for what reason is not entirely clear.

46