Tom Hickman - Gods Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis

Contents

About the Book

Throughout history man has revered his penis as his most precious ornament.

Yet, ambivalently, his penis has always been the source of mans deepest neuroses too. Do women find it, in the erect state, inherently ridiculous? Why cant a man be certain his penis will stand and deliver when he commands? If and when it steadfastly refuses, what can he do to remedy the situation?

And then, of course, theres the matter of size

To possess a penis, Sophocles said, is to be chained to a madman. Gods Doodle examines the schizophrenic relationship between man and this madman and the joint relationship this odd couple has with the female sex.

Gods Doodle is the tale of the penis and the ups and downs of history the macabre and the bloodcurdling, the funny and the sad, distilled from myth, world cultures, religion, literature, science, medicine and contemporary life all told with mordant wit.

PART ONE NOTES

. In Shakespeares Antony and Cleopatra, a soothsayer reads the fortune of two of Cleopatras handmaidens and tells one, Iras, that her future is the same as the other, Charmian. Iras wheedles: Am I not an inch of fortune better than she? Interjects Charmian: Well, if you were an inch of fortune better than I, where would you choose it? To which Iras retorts: Not in my husbands nose. A reader unfamiliar with the Elizabeth colloquialism is likely to assume that Iras, by innuendo, would like the addition exactly where she does not.

. It intrigued the quintessential word manipulator, the Irish author James Joyce, that losing a word space gave the dubious synecdochic maxim The pen is mightier than the sword an even more dubious, phallocentric meaning not that he would have disagreed with Simone de Beauvoirs remark to all male sexual supremacists that the penis is neither plough-share not sword, only flesh.

. In the wake of the Durex and DP surveys and irritated that Asians were treated as one big group, an Asian website came into being with the ambitious hope of identifying variations between Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Thais, Burmese, Malays, Indonesians, North and South Indians, Sinhalese, Pakistanis, Bengalis and Nepalese. It attracted only a few hundred replies and soon disappeared.

. In the mid-1990s the honeymoon home video of American rock musician Tommy Lee and ex-Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson was stolen, turned up on scores of Internet sites and Lees penis for a time became the most viewed penis on the planet. Admittedly it was only of secondary or perhaps tertiary interest, but Andersons assertion that it had her name tattooed on it, and when he gets excited it says, I love Pamela very, very much, shes a wonderful wife and I enjoy her company to the tenth degree, was clearly not entirely uxorious hyperbole, not that it stopped them subsequently getting divorced.

PART TWO NOTES

. During the First World War the Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando wore a fascinum on a bracelet to ensure victory for the Allies a residual belief in penis power, perhaps, or just a case of covering all the bases.

Today in certain cultures men have similar phallic amulets. In Thailand, one or more are worn hanging near the penis from an intricately woven cord around the waist under the clothes, to absorb any negative energies directed by others to their genitals, and to increase their sexual attractiveness (and maybe bring gambling luck too). The Thai name is palad khik honourable surrogate penis.

. A male baboon says hello to another by pulling on his penis, the courtesy being reciprocated; proto-human man almost certainly did likewise. The Walbiri of central Australia today hold the penis of a visitor as the equivalent of shaking hands.

A hangover from the practice of genital oath-taking still exists in rural areas of Mediterranean countries, men clutching or touching themselves when emphasising the veracity of what they are saying, or to avert bad luck.

. The primary biological function of the penis is to deliver semen to the vagina, to accomplish fertilisation a function, however, that occurs in negligible ratio to its use purely for pleasure and even less in expelling urine from the bladder to the porcelain of the outside world, as John Gordon phrases it in The Alarming History of Sex. That semen travels the same penile piping (though not, of course, at the same time) Gordon regarded as an example of natures recurrent economy; an obverse view might be that when it comes to genitalia, God is not a sanitary engineer.

Women are exasperated by mens cavalier attitude to urination (as a character in Laurie Grahams novel The Ten OClock Horses says, a man having a jimmy couldnt aim it down the Mersey Tunnel), but the German psychoanalyst Karen Horney over fifty years ago believed it indicated fantasies of omnipotence, especially those of a sadistic character.

Modern Swedish women would seem to agree. In 2000 they demanded that men use the toilet sitting down, partly for hygiene reasons but more crucially because standing up was deemed to be triumphing in [their] masculinity and therefore degrading women. Feminists at Stockholm University campaigned to scrap the campus urinals, and primary schools began to get rid of the wall-fixed porcelain to acclimatise young males to the new order.

The campaign has spread to Germany where, a survey suggests, 40 per cent of men now sit, the same percentage as in Japan.

. A variation in the seventeenth century was that conception was the result of magnetic energy produced by the friction of intercourse, the female reproductive tract being magnetised by the male spark. In the middle of the following century the word spunk, the principal meaning of which is courage, became a colloquialism for the safety match which requires friction to spark, leading, two stages removed, to its slang use for semen. Mettle, also slang for semen, derived from it having the same proper meaning as spunk.

. Yinyang is a dominant concept in Chinese philosophy, representing the two primal cosmic forces in the universe. Yin (moon) is the receptive, passive, cold, female force, yang (sun) the active, hot, masculine one. Summer and winter, night and day, health and disease, woman and man all things follow the principles of yinyang and are in some way related to each other.

. Japan, an overtly phallic culture into the twentieth century, still celebrates fertility festivals that give a good idea of what went on in medieval Europe. Men carry a giant wooden (or, increasingly, pink plastic) penis in procession to a local shrine, with many wearing papier mch penises on the front of their costumes, and woman cradling wooden penises; phallic ice creams, lollipops and other snacks are on sale to the crowds. At some festivals a giant phallus of straw is set fire and plunged into a straw vulva, as milk-white sake is spattered about. Many festivals have disappeared in recent times again, Westernisation.

. When Rasputin was murdered in 1916 by a group of nobles fearful of his influence over Tsarina Alexandra, they hacked off his penis. What happened to it during the next half century is unaccounted for but, according to Patte Barham who helped Rasputins daughter write her biography, it was kept in a velvet box from which in 1968 her co-authors Parisian maid produced it, looking like a blackened, over -ripe banana, about a foot long. Nothing more was heard of it until the Russian museum of erotica opened in St Petersburg in 2004 with Rasputins alleged organ as its prime exhibit.

. Unlike many big-penised men, the affable comedian/actor Milton Berle was modest about his appendage, though Sammy Davis Junior once confirmed even down its world class. Asked by Davis how big his penis got erect, Berle replied, I dont know, I always black out first bringing to mind the observation of another actor/comedian, Robin Williams, that God gave every man a brain and a penis but only enough blood to make one work at a time.