God's Doodle (3 page)

Racial assortments

Kinsey collected his data exclusively from among white Americans. That he didn’t include black males was governed by the socio-political climate of his time: post-war America was still a racially segregated country. Had he incorporated African American data he certainly would not have been able to draw racial comparisons from it that might have allowed some interpretation of black ascendancy. Even a quarter of a century later Beth Day, writing
Sexual Life between Blacks and Whites
, was nervous about addressing the issue. Only noting that studies of comparative genital size were few and inconclusive, she went no further than to cite Masters and Johnson’s finding about larger penises tending to increase less on erection, concluding: ‘Considering this apparent equalisation, the major difference, then, in genital size between black males as a group and white males as a group is psychological.’

The negroid/caucasoid question has arisen throughout time. In the second century
BC
Galen, physician to three Roman emperors and until the Enlightenment the standard medical authority, wrote that the black man ‘has a long penis and great merriment’. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans arriving on the African continent were struck by the natives’ ‘large Propagators’, which the French army surgeon and anthropologist Jacob Sutor was convinced
were
caused by circumcision, the foreskin being, he thought, a kind of compression cap. In 1708 the English surgeon Charles White wrote, ‘That the PENIS [his capitalisation] of an African is larger than that of a European has I believe been shewn in every anatomical school in London. Preparations of them are preserved in most anatomical museums, and I have one in mine.’ Richard Jobson, treasure-hunting along the Gambia River in West Africa, wrote that the Mandingo tribesmen were ‘furnisht with members so big as to be burdensome to them’. Others recorded ‘terrific machines’ of as much as 12 inches in length, the kind of measurement that at the beginning of the twentieth century made the homosexual British consular official Sir Roger Casement tremble with excitement while in Peru. Casement (who converted to Irish nationalism and was hanged for treason in 1916), wrote in his
Black Diaries
, suppressed until 1956: ‘saw the young Peruvian Negro soldier leaving barracks with erection under white knickers – it was halfway to knees! Fully one foot long.’

Evidence of a more clinical nature was published in 1935 by the authoritative
L’Ethnologie du Sens Genitale
, but it wasn’t until thirty years after Kinsley ducked the issue of the negroid penis (as did Latou Dickinson in 1949, in his
Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy
, which contained hundreds of drawings of penises but not one of them black) that the institute Kinsey founded, which was and remains the leading authority in its field, felt able to release material on the black/white issue. This – which coincidentally downgraded the non-black erection from 6.2 inches to 6.1 – indicated that the average black counterpart was longer (6.4) and thicker (4.9 against 4.8), and that almost twice as many blacks (13.6 per cent) as whites (7.5 per cent) pushed beyond the 7-inch barrier. But the institute’s basic conclusion, which wasn’t exactly a surprise, could hardly be termed definitive: while by this time (1979) it had 10,000 men
on
its database, only 400 of them were black. Understandably, the institute emphasised that comparisons required caution. A decade later, however, and under no politically correct restraint when contributing an article entitled ‘Race Difference in Sexual Behavior: Testing an Evolutionary Hypothesis’ to the
Journal Research in Personality
, academics John Philippe Rushton and A.F. Bogaert, having averaged ethnographic data from all available sources, concluded that the erections of caucasians were 5.5 to 6 inches in length and 4.7 inches in circumference and of blacks 6.25 to 8 inches (6.2 inches in circumference) – while those of ‘orientals’ were 4 to 5.5 inches (3.9 inches in circumference). Data from among mixed-blood males in the French West Indies indicated that penis size increased proportionate to the amount of black blood.

For a decade, Rushton and Bogaert’s extrapolations were definitive enough for everybody until the Internet made more detailed research possible and two significant on-line surveys were launched in the 1990s – one by the makers of Durex condoms (whose interest was condom fit and the incidence of slippage and breakage), the other, the Definitive Penis Survey (which despite its frisky title was acknowledged by Durex as a serious research source), by medical researcher Richard Edwards. Both anticipated analysing the information they gathered by ethnicity. Neither was able: too few of the 3,000-plus participants each website attracted were non-white. The Definitive Penis Survey, however, offered ‘tentative’ conclusions. Extraordinarily, one was that average
white
erections are longer (6.5 inches) than black (6.1 inches). Offsetting that, however, was the observation that where Kinsey’s all-white data indicated that three men in a hundred have an erection less than 5 inches, the number of black males in this category is
statistically
immeasurable although, undoubtedly, they exist: the law of averages cannot be gainsaid.

‘The dozen or so jungle bunnies I have trafficked with were perfectly ordinary in that department . . . in fact, two were hung like chipmunks’, comments Gore Vidal’s vitriolic – and racist – transsexual protagonist in
Myra Breckinridge
, though to suggest that in a random sample of a dozen black males none would be bigger than average and two would be smaller is statistically nonsensical. Of course, many black males are statistically average and the British TV chef Ainsley Harriott is one who was happy to say so. A decade or so ago, after he’d done a
Full Monty
strip for the Children in Need charity, a journalist observed that he was not exactly Lynford Christie in the lunchbox department (see Part 2,
‘Accessorise – or Aggrandise?’
). To which Harriott retorted amiably: ‘I’m not twenty-eight with a six-pack. I’m forty-one with two kids. But I like to think my chest isn’t that bad.’

What is not disputed in any major survey is that the black penis is observably more visible in the flaccid state than the white – the Kinsey Institute gives figures of 4.3 inches long and 3.7 inches round, against 3.8 and 3.1. A theory about this relative inequality is that, while the penises of men from colder climates spend more time drawn closer to the body’s heat, penises of men in warm climates simply hang – ‘as long as whips’, thinks Harry Angstrom, the eponymous hero of John Updike’s quartet of
Rabbit
novels (the black penis gaining disproportionately from the simile). The hot–cold theory appears to be borne out by a research project that equates African American males more closely with the statistical American norm than with males from the Caribbean. Against it, however, is that Asians who come from warm climates are not beneficiaries of it.

Statistics show that the penises of those from the Far East, South East Asia and the Indian subcontinent are smaller than the world median; and according to available data and much anecdotal evidence, a large Asian penis is exceptional.
Investigating
Asian penis size, an Asian Los Angeles writer, L.T. Goto, found a Japanese American who hoisted a 7-inch erection, something so ethnically rare that it had gained him ‘instant notoriety after dating someone in the Los Angeles Asian American community’. The Definitive Penis Survey (which appears to have been moribund since 2002) had difficulty attracting Asian interest, rather indicating that Asians have better things to do than measure their appendages. The one ethnographic observation that the Durex survey has allowed itself to make is that the erect penises of males in the Far East are up to 20 mm (just over 0.75 of an inch) less in both length and girth than whites – although other survey material substantively indicates that this is a little generous to Indo-Chinese.
³

Where most people are prepared to see racial variations in penis size as just another racial diversity, there are some who deny that such variations exist, on racist grounds. The topic was given fierce airing in the mid-1990s with the publication of Rushton’s
Race, Evolution and Behavior.
In this work of speculative biology, Rushton, a professor at the University of Western Ontario and a Guggenheim Fellow with two doctorates from the University of London, used over sixty variables in a comparative study of Asians, whites and blacks. By all of these, including brain size and intelligence, he deduced that the three groups always rank in that order. It was not this that got him vilified: it was his conclusion that there is a correlation between the size of the organs of generation and cogitation – that Asians have small genitals and high intelligence, that blacks are their opposite and, as by every other comparative measure, that whites occupy the middle ground. Most critics decided that Rushton had been sidetracked by an aberration, concluding that the socio-biological value of a big brain and a small penis is no clearer than that of the alternative arrangement, however
popular
, given a choice, that would be among at least some males everywhere – including, you can be sure, many Asians.

In the decades since his death, Kinsey’s institute has continued to amass and correlate penile information extrapolated from many sources, including other research in which it engages (most recently the psycho-physiological sexual response in men) and the work of urologists involved in the relatively new area of augmentation phalloplasty (see Part 3,
‘Desperately seeking solutions’
). It has backed away from the question of ethnicity. The institute website, sensibly one might think, does not give a single figure for the average worldwide erection, preferring to declare that this is between 5 and 7 inches, with a circumference of 4 to 6 inches – the founding father’s findings have not been invalidated by black highs and Asian lows.

Size Matters?

The importance of penis size is sowed early in the male mind. When a very small boy comes face-to-face (perhaps literally) with the adult penis, he is disbelieving: it cannot be that his own small tag of flesh bears any relation to something that appears to have more in common with the Gruffalo. Does such an encounter, wondered Alexander Waugh (
Fathers and Sons
), ‘puncture or augment the sexual confidence of young males?’ When he caught his young son standing on a bucket outside the window to catch a glimpse of his
‘zones privés’
Waugh composed a verse that he made his son memorise, reading in part:

For he is but a craven fool

Who muses ’pon his father’s tool,

Or creeps and peeps and tries to spy

What lies within poor Papa’s fly.

But a boy needs to
know.
And whether he finds out by accident or design, when he establishes that one day his, too, will look like this, he can hardly wait, like Portnoy, who wants to exchange his ‘fingertip of a penis’ for something the equal of his father’s ‘schlong’, which

brings to mind the fire hoses coiled along the corridors at school. Schlong: the word somehow catches exactly the brutishness, the meatishness, that I admire so, the sheer mindless, weighty and unselfconscious dangle of that living piece of hose. (
Portnoy’s Complaint
, Philip Roth)

The worry that his penis will not make the transformation into the alpha version is excruciating to most males in early, hormonally concussed pubescence, a state neatly caught in this confessional piece by a contributor to
Cosmopolitan
magazine:

The year was 1984. I was 12. One day, a few of my fellow 12-year-olds and I were in the changing room when an older and shall-remain-nameless rugby player strolled in. He stripped and was walking to the shower when he noticed several pubescent boys staring at him, flushed and slack-jawed, upon which he turned in our direction and announced: ‘What’s the matter, boys? You never seen 18 inches of swaying death before?’ Let’s just say, there’s not a woman alive who can make me feel
that
small.

The outcome is that few males when grown to man’s estate free themselves entirely from some preoccupation with penis size, which, Alex Comfort noted in
The Joy of Sex
, is ‘built-in biologically’ and labelled by the anthropologist Jared Diamond, when professor of physiology at the University of California, as an ‘obsession’. Yet it appears that whereas for centuries this
has
played out as meaning ‘big’, among the Ancient Greeks the reverse was the case. Penile taste in Athens ran to the small and taut (in the plays of Aristophanes, diminutives such as
posthion
, little prick, were terms of endearment) with big penises considered coarse and ugly and only possessed (the Athenians said) by barbarians and, in their own mythology, satyrs, which were comic in a slapstick way, though we derive our more subtle ‘satire’ from the word. ‘Our modern stag party jokes of well-endowed men’, wrote Eva Keuls (
Reign of the Phallus
) ‘would have been lost on the Athenians’. The Romans, however, thought little differently to modern man; they had a predilection for big penises – Roman generals sometimes promoted men on the generosity of their genital addenda. ‘If from the baths you hear a round of applause,’ wrote the creator of the epigram, Marcus Martialis (known in English as Martial), ‘Maron’s great prick is bound to be the cause.’ And like modern man, the Romans heaped ridicule on the head (sic) of anyone plainly below the average, as did the poet Catullus of a fellow Roman ‘whose little dagger, hanging more limply than the tender beet, never raised itself to the middle of his tunic’ – mockery that 2,000 years later finds an echo in a magazine article by a journalist sent to write a piece on a nudist camp, who spied ‘a shy little thing, a nouvelle cuisine portion of garnished mollusc’, which made him think that if he were the possessor ‘I would be at home in a darkened bedroom, battling with the weights and measures’.

Covertly, throughout time, men have competed with other men with their penises. If their distant ancestors beat their penises against their abdomens to discourage competitors or shook them in the face of inferiors, as some primate species continue to do, men have maintained the practice, if only figuratively – in Japanese art, which is characterised by immense exaggeration of the sexual organs, men are often seen duelling
with
them. The American politician Walter Mondale once said after some political disagreement with Bush senior, ‘George Bush doesn’t have the manhood to apologise’, to which Bush felt compelled to retort, ‘Well, on the manhood thing, I’ll put mine up against his anytime’ – sounding rather like Grumio in
The Taming of the Shrew
who responds to Curtis’s insult about his appendage by saying, ‘Am I but three inches? Why, thy horn is a foot; and so long am I at the least.’ No man wants to be taken for what Shakespeare termed a ‘three-inch fool’, a truth not lost on the Tel Aviv advertising agency which in 1994 devised a poster campaign aimed at the city’s notoriously bad drivers: ‘Research proves aggressive drivers have small penises.’ No wonder so many penis-possessors have a compulsion to give their penis a surreptitious tug in the changing room when other men are around – as Alan Bates and Oliver Reed admitted they did before filming the nude wrestling scene in
Women in Love
– to make sure it looks its competitive best.