God's Doodle (7 page)

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 Male 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!

The corollary, of course, is that some women positively dislike the large penis, like Sandra Corleone in Mario Puzo’s
The Godfather:

When I saw that pole of Sonny’s for the first time and realised he was going to stick it into
me
, I yelled bloody murder . . . when I heard he was doing the job on other girls I went to church and lit a candle.

But what of the majority of women? Da Vinci thought that ‘woman’s desire is the opposite of man’s. She wishes the size of the man’s member to be as large as possible, while the man desires the opposite for the woman’s genital parts.’ Leaving the second observation aside, da Vinci was contradicted on the first by Masters and Johnson, who in the 1970s concluded that size was unimportant to a woman’s sexual satisfaction. Researchers, now, are in some disagreement with that finding. If a penis is bulky (as opposed to lengthy), it makes greater contact with the outer parts of the vagina and therefore, it’s thought, sends vibrations to the clitoris, the trigger of female sexual gratification. The ongoing debate is whether this is physiologically significant – or whether the bulky penis is only a psychological predilection. What is not up for reassessment, however, is that penis length is of secondary importance. ‘If things aren’t too bad in other ways I doubt if any woman cares very much,’ the American playwright Lillian Hellman (
Pentimento
) observed.

As Alex Comfort makes clear in
The Joy of Sex
, ‘female orgasm doesn’t depend on getting deeply into the pelvis’. There’s a good purely physiological reason: only the first two inches of the vagina are rich in nerve endings. The long and short of it, therefore, is that unless there’s a startling abnormality, no erect penis is too small to surmount what the Chinese poetically call ‘the jade terrace’ and make adequate contact where it matters. And only in very, very exceptional cases is a penis too long, and virtually never too thick. A young man, weeks away from marriage, wrote to Kinsey explaining that his penis was 7.25 inches erect and 6 inches in circumference, which led him to be ‘afraid that my organ is too big for intercourse with an average woman’. Kinsey wrote back, ‘We have never seen a solitary instance in which the dimensions of the penis caused any difficulty in intercourse. Certainly we have records of successful adjustment where the penis measures two or three inches more than your own.’ In being reassuring Kinsey was not being entirely accurate: elastic as the vagina is, a penis ‘rare’ in the Kinseyan sense can touch the neck of the cervix and the posterior fornix, causing pain; a man with such a penis may have to wear the equivalent of an outsize tap washer to reduce his intromittence. That said, the experienced Phoebe was entirely accurate in telling the inexperienced Fanny Hill that she ‘had never heard of a mortal wound being given in those parts by that terrible weapon’. The vagina is highly accommodating – it can give passage to a baby at birth, after all – and closes upon whatever size penis is presented to it.

Women, of course, do have preferences about body parts, just like men. Some, for instance, have a taste for the circumcised penis, finding it neater, some for the uncircumcised penis, because the foreskin is another element and that it rolls back on erection adds intrigue. But in the final analysis whether a man is ‘Roundhead’ or ‘Cavalier’ is likely to be of scant
significance
– as is size. Whether women have a partiality for ‘bigs’, whether in one dimension or the other or both, this isn’t likely to top their wish list. What does, if a woman has feelings for the penis-possessor, is that she has no preferences – she accept his penis as it is, part and parcel of him: ‘how innocently part of him it seemed, and not a harsh jutting second life parasitic upon him’ in Updike’s telling phrase (
Couples)
. Anyway, a sensible man should give due cognisance to the fact that a woman is more likely to be turned on by broad shoulders and pert buttocks (should he have these) and by his ability to make her laugh than she is by his genitals. And, remembering Abraham Lincoln’s dictum that a man’s legs need only be long enough to reach the ground, he should be at ease with what he has. After all, what really matters is that he employs his penis to his partner’s satisfaction as well as his own.