by Tom Hickman
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’.
Perhaps in expressing a view somewhere between extremes Esther Vilar (The Manipulated Man) speaks for most of her gender in saying that ‘To a woman, the male penis and scrotum appear superfluous to the otherwise symmetrical male body’ (considering the pandemic of obesity, ‘symmetrical’ being a theoretical concept, but let that pass). Certainly virtually all women find the female body, unencumbered by external sexual plumbing, infinitely more pleasing aesthetically; as Molly Bloom muses in her pre-slumber reverie, the female statues in the museum are ‘so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf’ (Ulysses, James Joyce).
Men’s feelings about all this are confused and contradictory. Possessors’ affection for their penis is so great it’s unlikely were they to be asked to name either their crucial external organ or their largest that they would reply, their skin; only propriety, perhaps, prevents many from displaying a sign in their car’s rear window: I MY PENIS. Yet pride is underlain by varying degrees of anxiety. Eric Gill suffered none of this; he confided in his diary that he thought ‘A man’s penis and balls are very beautiful things.’ Others may agree and, like Sebastian in Romeo and Juliet, consider themself ‘a pretty piece of flesh’ (flesh, of course, a biblical euphemism). But most men probably think the journalist A.A. Gill wasn’t off the mark in describing male genitalia as ‘the gristly cruet set’ and wonder, despite their affection, whether theirs are inherently ridiculous to behold – classic Adlerian fear of mockery.
‘Does your penis horrify women?’ shouted an FHM magazine cover line, playing on this insecurity, a feature inside (‘Are you ugly downstairs?’) asking four women to assess their partner’s penis against others when they were all thrust through holes in a screen. If hardly scientific, the exercise showed that the women easily identified their partner’s (a small proof, tangentially, of penile individuality) and expressed affection for it – but mostly because it belonged to their partner, not because it was an attraction in itself. And while they recoiled somewhat from the three unfamiliar organs (‘like a snake that’s swallowed a football’, ‘too much skin flailing around’, ‘something in a butcher’s window’), they found all of them rather funny, ‘theirs’ included. Women do; penises per se can be seen as something the Creator doodled in an idle moment. ‘There’s nothing so ridiculous as a naked man,’ the very proper actress Jane Asher once remarked, a sentiment echoed by Debora from Derby when she appeared with her boyfriend in a television series on foreplay: ‘The mere sight of Dave’s penis’, she said, ‘has me in stitches.’
But Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex) was undoubtedly right when she observed that a penis-possessor, while regarding the idea of another man’s erection as ‘a comic parody . . . nonetheless views it in himself with a touch of vanity’. In truth, she understated the case because a penis-possessor’s erection – ‘man’s most precious ornament’ (Eric Gill again) – is his lion’s mane and his peacock’s tail, the source of his identity, the psychological and physical centre of his being, the very badge of his masculinity. To the penis-possessor his erection is a thing as wondrous as the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, even a recurrent miracle. His erection is
a marvel of hydraulic engineering. In its enduring, reliable and repetitive efficiency it may be compared to the Gatun locks of the Panama Canal, which since 1914 have been raising ocean liners with swift and safe smoothness to 85 feet above the Atlantic and Pacific swell. The unstoppable power of the penile mechanism matches in ingenuity the channelling of mountain torrents, which since 1910 have whirred the turbines brilliantly to electrify the lamps of innumerable distant towns. The clever simplicity of penile erection, in applying fluid pressure to achieve motive power, recalls the mechanics of the hydraulic ram, or of the water-mills once scattered across the land . . .
Penis-possessors would not want this positively Rabelaisian logorrhoea from John Gordon’s The Alarming History of Sex to be ironical. And what they want from women on their erect penis’s behalf, and which almost certainly they cannot articulate, is awe. Awe is what all males in the animal kingdom crave, Lorenz Konrad, Nobel prize-winning zoologist and father of ethnology, extrapolated from his study of tropical fish – the ‘cichlid effect’ notion of physiology. This, from D.H. Lawrence, complete with tumescent thicket of exclamation marks:
‘Let me see you!’
He dropped the shirt and stood still, looking towards her. The sun through the low window sent a beam that lit up his thighs and slim belly, and the erect phallos rising darkish and hot-looking from the little cloud of vivid goldred hair. She was startled and afraid.
‘How strange!’ she said slowly. ‘How strange he stands there! So big! And so dark and cocksure! Is he like that?’
The man looked down the front of his slender white body, and laughed. Between the slim breasts the hair was dark, almost black. But at the root of the belly, where the phallos rose thick and arching, it was gold-red, vivid in a little cloud.
‘So proud!’ she murmured, uneasy. ‘And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing. But he’s lovely, really. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really! And he comes to me!–’ She caught her lower lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement. (Lady Chatterley’s Lover)
Connie Chatterley’s reaction is exactly as it should be, men are likely to think at some level of their being (and approve of the thicket of tumescent exclamation marks too). Sadly again, what we have here is the projection of more male wishful thinking.
The penis erect, according to Esther Vilar, ‘appears so grotesque to a woman the first time she hears about it that she can hardly believe it exists’. A first encounter is not likely to improve the situation for, as Inge and Sten Hegeler gently put it, ‘an erect penis bears no resemblance to the kind that they have seen on statues in parks or on small boys paddling by the seashore’. Isadora Wing is remarkably unfazed by her first encounter with a ‘phallos’ (like Lawrence, Erica Jong favoured the Greek spelling); indeed she is intrigued by its ‘most memorable abstract design of blue veins on its Kandinsky-purple underside’ (well, she is an arts major). But most women are more likely to find echoes of their own experience in an article written by Lorraine Slater for FHM magazine:
The first time I actually saw a real, live dick with my own eyes will be etched in my memory for ever. I was 15 and a few Pernods over the eight, squashed against a wall with my new guy, when all of a sudden he tried to force my hand down his keks. For some reason, he wanted me to fondle a smooth, rounded growth near navel-level. As I looked down I saw a glistening, angry-looking peeled plum thing glaring at me from above his belt-buckle. ‘Jesus,’ I remember thinking, horrified. ‘That’s his bell-end?’ My mind whirled. How the hell did it get up there? Why don’t they warn you about the colour? And the gloss finish?
As far as Maggie Paley (The Book of the Penis) is concerned, you can say that in spades: ‘it was as ugly as a monster from outer space, and it seemed to have him in its power’. Kinsey (Sexual Behavior in the Human Female) found that a very small number of women are so repulsed by the aroused member that their erotic response is forever inhibited, an unhappy situation in which the advice given to a character in Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce might be apposite: ‘My mother used to say, Delia,if S E X ever rears its ugly head, close your eyes before you see the rest of it.’ The vast majority of women, of course, come to terms with the reality of masculine sexual mechanics: a rite of passage. Being practical by nature, they see an erection for what it is, the reflex of a body part that is fit for purpose: having sex – even if they are likely to be in agreement with Esther Vilar in thinking that ‘It seems incredible . . . that a man cannot withdraw his penis after use and make it disappear like the aerial on a portable radio.’ Yet, as Susan Bordo (The Ma
le Body) observes, ‘What other feature of the human body is as capable of making the welling of desire, the overtaking of the body by desire, so manifest to another?’ It is a matter of constant fascination, and flattery, that they themselves are instrumental in conjuring the penis into life.
Unsurprisingly women are intrigued to know what having an erection feels like from penis-possessors’ side of the sexual equation and penis-possessors find that almost impossible to explain. ‘It seems light and heavy at the same time, like a piece of lead piping with wings on it,’ suggested Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer); ‘On the borderline of substance and illusion,’ offered John Updike (Bech: A Book). Most men would say that words are inadequate. At its greatest intensity a man may feel he is all erection and, perhaps, like Boswell, feel a ‘godlike vigour’ in its possession. In her night-time reverie, Molly Bloom ponders what it would be like to be a man ‘just to try with that thing they have swelling upon you’. It isn’t really a serious proposition – penises are for women to share, and give back. A few years ago, a publisher asked thirty women to contribute to a book entitled Dick for a Day and Germaine Greer in her response spoke for womankind in writing: ‘The best bit would be getting rid of it.’
Is penis size important to women? This female contributor to FHM magazine was in no doubt:
In case you’re one of those guys who’s been mollycoddled by a sympathetic girlfriend, the question ‘Does Size Matter?’ is not up for debate. The jury delivered its verdict on that long ago, and yes – it bloody well does. Cocks don’t do handstands, cook gourmet meals or speak Urdu. They go in-out, in-out. Size matters!