God's Doodle (8 page)

Yet research shows that almost without exception, irrespective of intellect, education and cultural or ethnic background, men ask women if the penises of previous incumbents of their bed were bigger. To appropriate a remark of the painter Ferdinand Delacroix (who was talking about canvasses), ‘Men are always more given to admiring what is gigantic than what is reasonable.’

Whatever the evolutionary path of the human penis, Jared Diamond observes that it is four times bigger than biologically necessary, and ‘as a structure [is] costly and detrimental to its owner’. And if the functionally unnecessary tissue ‘was instead devoted to extra cerebral cortex, that brainy redesigned man would gain a big advantage’. The truth of that is theoretically undeniable – but one can guess that the men who would be prepared to make the swap would be few and far between. Indeed, as Phillip Hodson pondered in
Men: An Investigation Into the Emotional Male
, if the majority of penis-possessors had the option, they would only be satisfied ‘with Beardsleyesque phalluses of such dimensions they need to be carried in both hands’.

PART ONE NOTES

You will always say of his membrum virile that it is huge, wonderful, larger than any other; larger than your father’s when he used to get naked to take his bath. And you will add, ‘Come and fill me, O my wonder.’

Eighth-century Japanese pillow book

FROM
BIT PLAYER TO LEAD

TOWARDS THE END
of the sixteenth century, a fifteen-year-old French peasant girl named Marie was minding the family pigs when they escaped into a wheat field. Chasing them, Marie leapt over a ditch whereupon, according to the celebrated French surgeon Ambroise Paré, ‘the genitals and male rod came to be developed’. In consternation Marie rushed to the physician and the bishop, neither of whom could offer help. Resigned, Marie renamed herself Germain and went to serve in the king’s retinue. Years later the French essayist Michel Montaigne, on his way to Italy, stopped off to see the prodigy, who wasn’t at home. He had not married, Montaigne was told, but he had ‘a big, very thick beard’.

If Renaissance woman suffered anxiety that strenuous activity might make her prey to gender transformation (‘there is still a song commonly in girls’ mouths,’ Montaigne noted, ‘in which they warn one another not to stretch their legs too wide for fear of becoming males’), Renaissance man was made indignant, at the very least, by the tale of Marie/Germain and others like it. His conviction was that he was born to rule over woman and
the
Bible provided the evidence. ‘The whole world was made for man,’ opined the doctor and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne in
Religio Medici
(The Religion of a Physician) published in 1642. ‘Man is the whole word, and the breath of God; woman the rib and crooked piece of man.’ So did biology. In the first instance, as God had made man in his own image it followed, ipso facto, that God was a fellow penis-possessor, and woman, as a non-penis-possessor, was by definition lesser; in the second, medical authority held, as it had for more than a thousand years, that all foetuses were male: infants that emerged as female had simply failed to achieve masculine perfection. The reproductive organs of the female were male but in a defective state: the uterus was the scrotum, the ovaries the testicles, the vagina the penis and the labia the foreskin. These, save the last, had remained inside the female’s body because she had generated insufficient heat to thrust them outside – a process seemingly not unlike turning a washing-up glove inside out.

To Renaissance man, the penis was God’s ultimate gift; and that a woman might suddenly acquire one was not only an affront to God and to the natural order but to rightful penis-possessors. To Leonardo da Vinci the human body – the male, penis-possessing body – was even an analogy for the very workings of the universe, as depicted in his famous drawing of Vitruvian Man.

You can blame the Ancient Greek physician Galen for woman’s inferior status in Western thought. It was he who erroneously theorised that there was a single model of human physiology, though he’d never seen inside the human body (he’d only dissected dogs and pigs). ‘Turn outward the woman’s [sexual organs], turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man’s, and you find them the same in both in every respect,’ he wrote. And until the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries showed he was talking, well, cock (or balls,
if
you prefer), there simply were no words for female plumbing. Not surprisingly it did strike Galen that it was jolly useful that half the human race were botched males, allowing, as it did, childbirth, not to mention the pleasure of sexual intercourse. The Creator, he thought, would not ‘purposely [have done it] unless there was to be some great advantage in such a mutilation’.

Was woman’s inferiority ever thus? According to some interpretations of prehistory, the situation was very different: woman ruled over man, because she was deemed enchanted: mysteriously, monthly, she bled and yet healed herself; she produced new life from her own body. Be that as it may, once man realised he was necessary for conception to take place, non-penis-possessors became relegated. Until relatively recently, the consensual view was that this happened only when herdsmen and farmers began to control animal sexuality around ten thousand years ago and put two and two together about their own. Nowadays most anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists doubt the timeline, believing it insulting to our ancestors who, ten thousand years ago, had had anatomically modern brains for some one hundred and fifty thousand years.

All is conjecture. What is indisputable is that, if once the penis was only a jobbing extra in the story of life, by the time writing appeared around five thousand years ago, its name was already above the title of the film. ‘Throughout all of history,’ as Isadora Wing percipiently remarks, ‘books were written with sperm, not menstrual blood.’

How true that is, is evidenced in mythology, those supernaturalised chronicles of the dawn of time and the birth of humankind. The Egyptian god Amun, for example, brought the world into being by swallowing his own semen and then spitting it out. The god Atum masturbated to create the Nile, while in Mesopotamia the god Enki, ‘lifted his penis, ejaculated, and filled the Tigris’, and had the stamina to move on to create the
Euphrates
similarly (he dug irrigation ditches with his penis, too). Man was quick to create his gods in his own image: with a penis – three, in some manifestations of Osiris, another of the multiplicity of Egyptian penis deities. The Phoenicians even named their chief god Asshur, meaning penis, ‘the happy one’. And man was already sizeist. The celestial rod of the Indian god Shiva shafted through the lower world and towered up to dwarf the heavens, so impressing the other gods that they fell down in worship.

There were, of course, goddesses as well as gods in the ancient world, and female generative power had its worshippers, but none was dominant in any major culture. The penis erect (ithyphallic, or straight up) ruled the roost and monuments fashioned in its likeness, usually in stone (the Japanese also favoured iron) sprang up like dragon’s teeth across the globe. In Greece by the third century
BC
, the island of Delos boasted an avenue of massive erections, mounted on prodigious testicles, aimed skywards like cannon. Herms, the most famous and sophisticated phallic monuments – smooth stone square pillars that sported the bearded head of Hermes, the messenger of the gods, and, halfway down, an erect ‘penis stick’ – were placed at every crossroads to offer protection to the traveller, frequently anointed with wine and oil and constantly touched for luck. Herms stood at roadsides (as did the Japanese counterparts, the
dosijinas
), on every street corner and inside every home, as did their counterparts among the Egyptians, Hindus, Hebrews, Arabs and other Semitic peoples. The Scandinavians and the Celtic tribes of Europe placed phallic stones at strategic points on boundaries and at entrances.

The Romans adopted the herm and scattered it across their empire – and in echo had their gravestones carved with the likeness of their own head and genitals. Rome adopted the Grecian god Priapus, too (as Liber), a god permanently at awesome attention – though ‘phallus’, the word describing the
penis
in an erective state, derives from the god Phalles, whose cult of tireless sexual activity was rampant among young men. Greek, Roman and other cultures sculpted penises on the walls of their cities, houses and public baths to ward off bad luck, just as they protected their fields with replicas – and sometimes the real thing, removed from executed criminals and enemies. They decorated their household objects with phalluses, baked phallic cakes during festivals and wore phallic amulets –
fascina
in Greece, the word derived from yet another phallic deity 𔉏 both to enhance their sexual potency and to protect them against harm.
¹

Images of phallic gods were carried in sacred processions, equipped (according to the Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the fifth century
BC
) with movable members ‘of disproportionate magnitude’, to which were attached cords to control their movement. Many had a large eye painted on the glans, an early version of the all-seeing eye of providence, and women smothered them with garlands and kisses.

There is no exaggerating the reverence which once was bestowed on male genitalia, or the potency with which representations of them were considered to be imbued. Victorious Roman generals entered the city with a replica penis of great size suspended upon their chariot: symbol of victory but also a talisman against the envy of others. In the Middle East it wasn’t unusual for a new king to eat the penis of his dead predecessor to absorb his power. In Kyoto, Japan, young men on the festival of a troublesome local goddess who tried to break up young lovers – carried her image through the streets without wearing their loincloths, to keep her under control by the mere sight of their manhood. Greek and Roman men and women sometimes held seeds
resembling
testicles in their hand during sex to increase their lovemaking. Worldwide historical records and archaeological evidence show that in almost every culture young women were known to mount a stone or wooden phallus, the lingam in India, before their wedding night, giving their virginity to their gods (or sometimes, as the scornful Roman poet Lactantius wrote, that a god ‘may appear to have been the first to receive the sacrifice of their modesty’); so did older women as a cure for infertility.

Among the Egyptians, Romans, Semitic Arabs and Hebrews, male genitals were so esteemed they were even a basis of civil law. Men clasped themselves and swore upon what they clasped. ‘O Father of Virile Organs, bear witness to my oath,’ the Arabs intoned. Romans made oaths in like manner, holding their testicles or ‘little witnesses’ – by extension not just to their virility but to their probity. The Hebrews went further, men making a pledge by clasping the genitals of the man to whom the pledge was being made. ‘Put thy hand under my thigh,’ Abraham in Genesis orders his servant, ‘and swear by the Lord . . . that thou shall not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites.’ There are other such instances elsewhere in the Old Testament; when, for example, Solomon was crowned king over all Israel, as related in Chronicles, ‘all the princes, and the mighty men, and all the sons likewise of King David, gave the hand under Solomon’. Biblical translators, in a muck sweat over the issue, resorted to opaque circumlocution. There’s no evidence that the Ancient Greeks testified genitally, but in Athens older men openly fondled the testicles of those not yet old enough to grow a beard when greeting them in the street. ‘You meet my son just as he comes out of the gymnasium, all fresh from the baths, and you don’t kiss him, you don’t say a word to him, you don’t even feel his balls!’ complains a character in Aristophanes’ comedy
The Birds
. ‘And
you
’re supposed to be a friend of ours!’
²