by Tom Hickman
Game, set, mismatch
Men may have grown out of the past’s wilder dreads about women’s sexuality.8 But however experienced, however at ease with the dimensions of their penis and their confidence in its cooperation, they enter unknown territory in every sexual encounter, sometimes even with a partner they know well.
Their dilemma is the mismatch between women’s sexuality and their own. Inherently, women require stimulation involving their whole body, which takes time; inherently, men just want friction applied to their penis and to move to intercourse as quickly as possible, which is why two thousand years ago Ovid counselled them ‘not to sail too fast and leave your mistress behind’. Penis-possessors’ interest in foreplay, unless they have developed consideration and restraint, can be limited: ‘a quick rub at the clitoris as if to erase it’, as one woman has put it, ‘and some prodding about for the G-spot – if they have heard of it’, before they get down to the business of penetration and ejaculation. For many men, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld wrote, ‘any other loveplay is a ridiculous nuisance’.
When they do, on average, they’re finished five times more quickly than women take to reach the tipping point (see Part 4, ‘The Violent Mechanics’); ‘The Violent Mechanics’); little wonder women often think that men are plain selfish (‘The activity, the orgasm was all his, all his’ – Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence). The actress Lillie Langtry, mistress of Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales, when asked if he was a considerate lover replied, ‘No, a straightforward pounder.’ More men than not probably are.
Do men lack the emotional intelligence to understand women’s sexual needs? The charge has frequently been made (feminism has described the penis as ‘the eye that sees everything and understands nothing’). Despite decades of information that the female orgasm is clitoral, not vaginal, men find it difficult to accept the paradox of Darwinian biology that the site of a partner’s sexual satisfaction, the clitoris, is divorced from the site of intercourse; and the unpredictability of a woman’s orgasm remains a mystery to them. And many continue to at least half believe that it’s the penis deep inside a woman’s body that should make her swoon. And swoon she should, like the heroine Jordana in Harold Robbins’ The Pirate (just a typical for-instance) who, when the ‘beautiful ten inches’ of the gigolo Jacques ‘slams into her like a trip hammer’, predictably ‘Somewhere in the distance [hears] herself screaming as orgasm after orgasm ripped her apart’ so that ‘Finally she could take it no more. “Stop,” she cried. “Please stop.” If a woman doesn’t swoon – and according to the voluminous Sex in America survey of 1994 only half of all women ever orgasm, only half of these do so regularly, and 19 per cent never orgasm at all – men tend to think it was because she wasn’t ‘putting her mind to it’ (Kinsey). And they feel resentment – which is why, according to Sex in America, half of all women fake it (‘Yes, yes, yes!’) out of consideration. Heterosexual men sometimes have a sneaking suspicion, however the sex has turned out, that their partner has got more out of it than they have. Hardly irrefutable supporting evidence, but the mythological Greek prophet Tiresias, who spent seven years as a woman before regaining his male gender and, supposedly, being in a unique position to know, informed Zeus that when it came to the pleasure of sex, a woman scored nine out of ten to a man’s one.
Hurtful as penis-possessors may find it, a 2009 survey found that 29 per cent of women said they get more out of food than sex.9
Yet women have greater latent sexuality than men. After a single orgasm men need time out; their penis goes limp and their responses switch off. But women are capable of leaping from orgasm to orgasm, skimming like a stone across water, until they’re physically drained, even into the foothills of old age: Kinsey recorded the case of a woman in her sixties who through intercourse and self-masturbation had twenty orgasms in as many minutes.
For decades feminists have asserted the superiority of women’s sexuality – and in particular of the clitoris over the penis. The bud-shaped little organ hidden in the upper folds of the labia they have claimed is not only virtually inexhaustible but is ‘the only human organ purely for pleasure’ – and it carries up to twice as many nerve endings as the penis. Freud, they’ve argued, had he not thought that ‘the sun revolved around the penis’ (Erica Jong), might instead have theorised about male envy of the clitoris, not the reverse. That, feminists have pointed out, is in essence what the Aranda tribe of central Australia do by practising ritual subincision, in which the underneath of the penis is sliced open, often along its entire length, the initiate thereby ‘menstruating’ and thus stealing women’s power – ‘split penis’ in Aboriginal derives from the word for vagina. Adding insult to injury feminists have also stressed that the default setting of human life is female – that every penis in the womb starts as a clitoris before hormones ‘sex’ the brain of the to-be male and maleness, therefore, is a kind of birth defect. The penis is ‘only an elongated clitoris’; and it retains the mark of its female heritage: its dark underskin and the thin ridge or seam, known as the raphe, which runs from scrotum to anus, are remnants of the fusion of the vaginal lips.
Feminists have also delightedly emphasised Kinsey’s finding that while males reach their sexual peak between fifteen and seventeen, women are not fully responsive until thirty, by which age men are in decline.
Emphasising the penis’s unpredictability and limitations, feminists in the ’70s extolled the virtues of the vibrator, with which, Masters and Johnson found, women were able to reach fifty consecutive orgasms. A full-page advert in an English newspaper read: ‘It [the vibrator] doesn’t stay out with the boys. It’s never too tired. And it’s always available.’ In America feminists gleefully exclaimed, ‘No penis goes at 3,000 revs a minute nor is it available with external clitoral stimulator’, and suggested that men were an encumbrance to a woman’s sexual pleasure with the curiously memorable slogan: ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’ A man might respond that the vibrator is to the penis what the moon is to the sun: similar to look at but lacking heat. But many men are likely to react as did a group at an exhibition of sexual paintings by Betty Dodson, who were ‘hostile and competitive’ in front of one that showed a woman using such a device, ‘one virile stud saying emphatically, “If that was my woman she wouldn’t have to use that thing”’ (Sex for One).
Whatever penis-possessors’ underlying anxieties about penis size and penile aesthetics, they are exceeded by anxiety about something else: their performance. Yet their capacity for self-deception is greater still. They are like the golfer who remembers those shots which hit the green in one and go down in two, convincing himself that they represent his normal game and choosing to forget the numerous hacks into the rough. Sexually speaking, most men like to believe they play off par; that, like a character in Lysistrata, their ‘cock is a veritable Heracles invited to dinner’. To which the feminist historian Rosalind Miles has a retort: Phallus in Wonderland.
Spend, spend . . . spent
For centuries men were told that their supply of semen was severely limited and that frequent ejaculation not only drained this supply but damaged their blood vessels, made them weak (and, in China, deprived their brain of nourishment) and could even shorten their life. In the East men practised yoga techniques to enjoy intercourse without emission – an Indian adept, it was said, was able to smoke a pipe during coition without being troubled to climax.
Such a disciplined approach was not for Westerners: they ejaculated every time they got the chance – and only then worried that their ‘spends’ (an Elizabethan coinage) would put their account in the red.
Intercourse was not the only source of withdrawals, of course: there were involuntary nocturnal emissions; and voluntary masturbation.
Nocturnal emission so worried some Greek and Roman men that they slept with flat lead ingots against their genitals, the ‘comparative chilly nature’, Pliny the Elder recorded, helping to keep them from arousal to ‘venereal passion
s and the libidinous dreams that cause spontaneous emissions’. Nocturnal emission so worried penis-possessors in the Middle Ages, convinced that if it occurred a succubus (female demon) had had intercourse with them in their sleep, that they placed a sponge dipped in vinegar between their thighs on next going to bed; a safeguard, they believed or hoped, against demonic night-time sexual assault. Less malodorously, Victorian physicians advised men that nocturnal emission could be avoided by ‘keeping dreaming thoughts pure’.
The Greeks and Romans thought masturbation a bit unmanly but that it didn’t matter much. (The ascetic Greek philosopher Diogenes masturbated in the open air rather than be hostage to ‘unkindled desire’ and was praised for his reasoning. He recommended masturbation because it was easily available and inexpensive. ‘If only,’ he wrote, ‘one could satisfy one’s hunger by rubbing one’s stomach.’)
Most religions including Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism and Taoism have always been relaxed about masturbation. The Hebrews on the other hand, instructed to go forth and multiply, deemed the activity a crime, even meriting death. Judaism isn’t keen on it now. As Shalom Auslander related in Foreskin’s Lament, when he was young a rabbi told him that ‘when I died and went to Heaven I would be boiled alive in giant vats filled with all the semen I had wasted during my life’. Christianity trod much the same early path, even teaching that masturbation was a graver mortal sin than adultery. Some theologians taught that masturbation was possession by the devil.
It would be difficult to say whether the early Church fathers abhorred woman or the penis more. Woman caused the fall from Eden that made man want sinful sex – which was any sex that wasn’t intentionally procreative. Until then, it was taught, Adam had known sexual desire but not sexual craving and erected only by will. To Tertullian in the second century, woman was ‘the gateway of the devil’ and ‘a temple built over a sewer’.
But the penis was complicit in carnal desire and curbing its activities in the Middle Ages reached frenzied heights. Intercourse with a wife was forbidden when she was menstruating, pregnant or nursing; on Fridays (the day Christ died), Saturdays (in honour of the Virgin Mary), Sundays (the Resurrection) and Mondays (in memory of the dead); on feast days and fast days; and during Lent, Advent, Whitsun week and Easter week – which ruled out most of the year. Only one position was permitted, the man on top – and pious men and women were instructed to wear a chemise cagoule, a heavy nightshirt with a hole in the genital area so that bodily contact was as limited as possible. Intercourse was never to take place in daylight or with either partner naked.
The list of penances for transgressions was long. Nocturnal emission, for example, seven days’ fasting; masturbation, twenty days. Intercourse with the woman on top incurred a penance of partial fasting for seven years. Intercourse ‘not in the proper vessel’ (anal) or oral attracted the same penance as murder. Coitus interruptus was punished by two to ten years’ penance with the alternative, during the eleventh century, of self-flagellation for monks – who routinely flouted the rules of chastity – or whipping by the parish priest for the laity.
‘It is hardly too much to say,’ wrote the authoritative G. Rattray Taylor in Sex in History, ‘that mediaeval Europe came to resemble a vast insane asylum.’
The emphasis on sin diminished by the Enlightenment; the age, however, introduced a new sexual neuroticism. Dusting down the centuries-old belief that a man’s semen was finite, it proclaimed masturbation, the most frequent and wasteful means of loss, to be a specific and crippling disease. By Victorian times the disease had a name, spermatorrhoea, and now its causes included all illicit and even excessive sexual activity. Spermatorrhoea was claimed to damage the nervous system, lead to impotence and, in the final stage when a man’s ejaculation become uncontrollable and non-orgasmic, to idiocy and death. So obscure was spermatorrhoea’s aetiology that everything from tuberculosis to a red nose was diagnosed as a symptom of it.
There was more cause for worry. The medical profession revived the ancient haematic theory – which postulated that semen was extracted from blood in the testicles – and earnestly cautioned men to greater ejaculatory frugality, pointing to the high cost of manufacture; an ounce of semen, it was claimed, was the equivalent of losing two pints of blood. If men needed further prompting, some physicians held that the semen a man retained was reabsorbed into the blood, thereby increasing his vigour; others went further, maintaining that retained semen was vital for the maintenance of secondary masculine characteristics.
How often a man could have ejaculatory intercourse became an issue. A thousand years earlier the Chinese gave detailed instructions. ‘In spring [he] can allow himself to emit semen once every three days in summer and in autumn twice a month,’ advised the Principles of Nurturing Life. ‘During winter he should save it and not ejaculate at all. The loss of yang energy by a winter emission is a hundred times greater than spring.’ The Secret Instructions Concerning the Jade Chamber was rather more liberal. Strongly built men over fifteen could safely ejaculate twice a day; thin ones once a day. Strongly built men of thirty could ejaculate once a day, weaker men once in two days. But at forty a man was to limit himself to once in three days, at sixty once in twenty days and at seventy once a month – ‘except the weak ones who should not ejaculate any more’. Victorian physicians were more prescriptive. Most advocated once a week as safe; other voices warned that more than once a month was not, and they included the strident Americans Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg (both of whom blamed meat-eating for all carnal passions and each of whom created a foodstuff to dampen ardour – Graham the sugared brown biscuit still sold under his name, Kellogg the cereal flake). Some physicians counselled wives to lie still during intercourse so that husbands expended as little semen as possible.9
What was misguided mainstream medical belief and what was outright charlatanism is impossible to disentangle. Quacks abounded – treating the guilt-ridden bourgeoisie was highly lucrative. A common swindle was to detect semen in a man’s urine under the microscope, indicating ‘leakage’ and the onset of spermatorrhoea. One reputable physician said that two-thirds of his male patients either had or thought they had the disease.
On the basis that prevention was better than cure, devices were developed to prevent masturbation, denounced as ‘self-pollution’, and the lesser evil of nocturnal emission. Some were rudimentary: a tin ring with a serrated inside edge that slipped over the penis and caused the wearer pain should night-time erection occur (a quality product in steel with individual spikes also available). Others were more intricate: lockable cages that prevented the wearer from making contact with his genitals or constrained ‘longitudinal extension’; galvanic belts of zinc and copper plates, which generated a current if activated by ‘secretions of the body’; rubber drawers through which water or cold air was pumped. An ingenious invention was a harness that activated a phonograph on erection, to awaken the wearer with music and save him from himself; should the male be an adolescent, the device could set off an electric alarm in the parents’ bedroom.
A few men went so far as to have their foreskin pierced with silk threads that they fastened together on going to bed.
There were a variety of procedures to deal with spermatorrhoea or masturbation. Physicians embedded potassium and chloral hydrate in men’s penises ‘to blunt the venereal appetite’; blistered perineums with poison and applied suction cups to draw blood; applied hemlock poultices to the genitals and injected tepid water into rectums; inserted metal, rubber or porcelain ‘eggs’ into rectums to massage prostates into health. Circumcision was popularly prescribed, much to the satisfaction of extreme moralists on both sides of the Atlantic, including John Harvey Kellogg who was so enthusiastic about the treatment that he advocated it should be done without anaesthetic ‘as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind’.
Until the nineteenth century Western culture had no tradition of circumcision. It became fashionable among the ari
stocracy of continental Europe after King Louis XVI of France was operated on for phimosis (a too-tight foreskin that makes erection agonising, even impossible), which prevented him from intercourse with Marie Antoinette for seven years. Queen Victoria chose to have her sons circumcised, making it de rigueur among the English upper classes.
What made circumcision common among the proliferating nineteenth-century middle classes on both sides of the Atlantic was the hysteria about masturbation; removing the foreskin helped its prevention, doctors declared, and also cured bed-wetting and other conditions. By the outbreak of the First World War such claims had diminished and the medical profession touted circumcision as being ‘hygienic’ – fathers were not only encouraged to have their newborn sons snipped, but to belatedly enjoy the benefits themselves.10
At the height of the panic about spermatorrhoea, many of society’s ills were attributed to the moral degeneracy it brought about. Anti-masturbation movements were formed; families were urged to expose adults who habitually indulged in ‘the deed of shame’. A boy who did, it was advised, could be identified by ‘his shifty glance and the way he pulls his cap down so as to hide his eyes’.