Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis (32 page)

Then the tormented engineer describes his attempt to satisfy his wife sexually, which was a miserable failure. The therapist explains that it was not so much the long abstinence but the sudden pressure behind his resolution that was to blame for the fiasco:

‘You still had one foot in your profession, so to speak. You must forget that as quickly as you forget this crisis. Just as you have to devote yourself completely to your work to make it succeed, so you must give yourself over completely to love. A long holiday with your wife is the best thing for you. Far away from it all, you have the best chance of regaining what you’ve forgotten,’ said his therapist.

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It is still true that some men are in love with their job, and in fact the practice ought to be banned in a collective wage agreement, though those involved wouldn’t stand for that. Doctors too can work too hard or too much, disrupting their love lives.

Only a minority of men are able to use sex to recharge their batteries: however tired, they are always up for it (President John F.

Kennedy was a case in point). That does not apply to most of us.

Wandering thoughts

What is your record sustained erection time in sexual intercourse? was the question put by Kinsey to several thousand American students. And what was the result? For 4 per cent it was under five minutes, for 18 per cent between about six minutes and a quarter of an hour, for 19 per cent between a quarter of an hour and half an hour, for 26 per cent between half an hour and an hour, for 14 per cent between one and two hours, for 5 per cent between two and three hours and for 4 per cent for three hours or more. Older readers will undoubtedly have to think hard, since you establish your record in your youth. Quite a few men lose their erection prematurely because they unconsciously assume the ‘onlooker’s role’. Their thoughts wander, they cease to participate in intercourse and their erection droops. In his
Confessions
(1781) Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) describes such an experience, a failed adventure with the Venetian courtesan Giulietta, at length.

Full of passion, he appears at her bedside, but no sooner has he been able to see her in all her beauty than a thought arises in him that moves him to tears and completely distracts him from his original intention. He develops the thought more and more fully and his desire evaporates: Suddenly, instead of the fire that devoured me, I felt a deathly cold flow through my veins; my legs trembled; I sat down on the point of fainting, and wept like a child.

Who could guess the cause of my tears, or the thoughts that went through my head at that moment? ‘This thing which is at my disposal’, I said to myself, ‘is nature’s masterpiece and love’s. Its mind, its body, every part is perfect. She is not only charming and beautiful, but good also and generous. Great men and princes should be her slaves. Sceptres should lie at her feet.

The adventure eventually ends in a shameful fiasco. The young Jacques notices that the courtesan has a malformed nipple. He describes it at length and, inevitably, places the responsibility for his impotence at the door of the courtesan:

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I beat my brow, looked harder, and made certain that this nipple did not match the other. Then I started wondering about the reason for this malformation. I was struck by the thought that it resulted from some remarkable imperfection of Nature and, after turning this idea over in my head, I saw as clear as daylight that instead of the most charming creature I could possibly imagine, I held in my arms some kind of monster, rejected by Nature, men, and love. I carried my stupidity so far as to speak to her about her malformed nipple. First she took the matter as a joke and said and did things in her skittish humour that were enough to make me die of love. But as I still felt some remnant of uneasiness, which I could not conceal from her, I finally saw her blush, adjust her clothes, and take her place at the window, without a word.

The scene ends with the now proverbial exclamation by the disappointed and angry courtesan:
Lascia le donne e studia la matematica!

(Give up women and study mathematics!)

Injuries to the penis

Erectile dysfunction may also be the result of a trauma to the penis. An unexpected movement during intercourse, unforced or otherwise, or during masturbation can cause a tear in the wall of the erectile tissue.

The position in which the woman mounts the man back to front is the riskiest: the penis may bend in half against the woman’s pubic bone.

The tear is usually accompanied by a snapping sound, which is why urologists refer to it as a ‘fracture of the penis’. An operation to stitch the tear is the only correct remedy.

A woman threatened with rape is therefore best advised to try to break her attacker’s penis with her hand. Another option is to tense the pelvic floor so strongly that the man breaks his penis in his forced attempt at penetration. If a man presents with a fracture of the penis, a urologist with a sexological background will always keep the possibility of a sexual crime or at least rough sex at the back of his mind.

In the urological literature there are regular reports of human bite wounds to the penis. Oral sex has obviously still lost none of its popu larity. These types of bite wound are quite frequently complicated by a bacterial infection, and there is also a risk of transfer of a hepa -

titis or hiv virus. One of the potentially unpleasant results of oral sex is described in John Irving’s novel
The World According to Garp
, which evokes the life of a young writer in 1960s America.

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Garp’s wife Helen, in revenge for Garp’s infidelity, has begun an affair with one of her students. While Garp is away at the cinema with the children, Helen tries to convince her lover, Michael, of her intention to end the affair. They are standing in the driveway of the Garp family home. Michael finally agrees to disappear from her life for good provided she gives him one last blow-job – in the car – as they have often fantasized about: He let one hand stray to the back of Helen’s neck, which he gripped very tightly; his other hand opened his fly.

‘Michael!’ she said, sharply.

‘You always said you wanted to,’ he reminded her . . . ‘But it wasn’t safe, you said. Well, now it’s safe. The car isn’t even moving. There can’t be any accidents now,’ he said.

Michael Milton had allowed her to see himself with what struck Helen as necessary vulgarity.
Suck him off
, she thought, putting him into her mouth, and
then
he’ll leave.

She realizes that after ejaculation men usually quickly cease their demands, and her experiences in Michael’s flat had taught her that in his case it wouldn’t take too long. And time is of the essence. If Garp and the kids have gone to the shortest conceivable film, she has just twenty minutes. So she sets about it with determination, as if it were the last phase of a tiresome chore . . .

Garp and the kids return from the movies earlier than expected: the film turned out to be a dud. As usual, Garp drives the last stretch with the lights and engine off and turns into the driveway. But there is already a car in it . . . and the inevitable happens: Helen’s head was flung forward, narrowly missing the steering column, which caught her at the back of her neck . . . Helen’s mouth was snapped shut with such force that she broke two teeth and required two neat stitches in her tongue.

At first she thought she had bitten her tongue off, because she could feel it swimming in her mouth, which was full of blood; but her head ached so severely that she didn’t dare open her mouth, until she had to breathe, and she couldn’t move her right arm. She spat out what she thought was her tongue into the palm of her left hand. It wasn’t her tongue, of course. It was what amounted to three quarters of Michael Milton’s penis.

Garp breaks his jaw in the crash and cannot speak for quite a while. In one of the notes he uses to communicate with his wife, he writes: ‘Three quarters is not enough!’

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Fortunately injuries to the penis cause generally only temporary problems. A well-known example is getting the penis caught in one’s zip. In a hospital surgery department the zip problem is usually solved by removing the piece of foreskin that has caught in the zip with a knife, which has proved to be the least painful way. The zip has a double symbolic message, which can be summarized in two adjectives:

‘mechanical’ and ‘sexual’. And it is the combination that makes it powerful: mechanical sexuality, but also injured sexuality. The zip is an instrument of seduction and an instrument by which the penis, erect or otherwise, can be injured.

Urologists are sometimes subject to great stress. A Romanian colleague of mine lost control when during an operation on a patient’s testicles he accidentally severed the urethra. It was the last straw for the stressed-out doctor. He took a scalpel and, cursing, amputated the whole penis.

While his female assistant looked on in astonishment, the surgeon placed the member in a tray and (chop! chop! chop!) sliced it up like an expert cook. Dr Naum Cioran is reported to have been fined 153,000 euros.

In the early 1970s there was a rash of non-medical penis amputa-tions: in Thailand over a hundred abused women saw this as the only way of solving their problems. The penis was usually thrown out of the window, after which the ducks could gorge on it (the local houses were on piles, and ducks were kept underneath. Only in eight cases was reconstructive surgery carried out. In 1993 the whole of America was enthralled by the ‘penis trial’. Lorena Bobbitt, a 23-year-old manicurist, was put on trial for cutting off her husband’s penis. While drunk, he had repeatedly raped her – until she could take no more.

The proceedings turned into a parade of expert witnesses, doctors, psychologists and criminologists. There were hours of discussion on the significance of the penis as a power symbol. The case was regarded by a number of feminist groups mainly as a ‘battle of the sexes’.

Although her crime was not condoned, these groups maintained that any sentence would be a slap in the face for all women who had ever been abused. Lorena fortunately stayed out of prison – it was no coincidence that the feminists had threatened to castrate a hundred American men if she were put behind bars!

Nine months later – predictably – the video film
John Wayne
Bobbitt . . . Uncut
was released. As part of the publicity campaign ex-nightclub worker Bobbitt made no secret of how wonderful it was to star in a porn video. When asked if it wasn’t taking things a little far to use a porn film to show that his penis was working normally again, he replied that since everyone was curious anyway, he could convince them that he was in perfect working order. ‘Despite the fact that sex still hurt a bit now and then,’ said Bobbitt.

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After Lorena, taking revenge on one’s partner by cutting off his penis became quite popular: on average, one penis was amputated every two weeks.

I know of one literary story that shows some similarity with Lorena’s. In ‘Something Completely Different’, Giuseppe Culicchia describes what a woman is capable of if she is treated with indifference by her husband. The woman is desperately unhappy, and cannot believe she was ever in love with her husband. Swearing and getting drunk is all he’s now capable of. Moreover, he is pathologically jealous of his wife, whose career is flourishing; he is getting nowhere in his own job. One day the woman happens to go into an iron -

monger’s and sees an electric saw on display. On impulse she asks the salesman if the saw is really sharp, and when he says yes she decides to buy it, without yet really knowing what she intends to do with it.

One day her husband comes home drunk yet again and after a stream of verbal abuse, followed by rape, he falls asleep. Then she decides to use the saw:

She unwound the long cord and plugged it in after unplugging the television. Then, very slowly, she pulled back the sheets. As usual Guido was sleeping peacefully. He always slept soundly.

He had hairy legs. Barbara pressed the red button. The young guy in the shop was right. The electric saw cut like a knife through butter.

Women can also, as was shown by a newspaper report, cut their husband’s penis off out of love. In 2006 Uta Schneider, a 65-year-old woman from Stuttgart, cut off the penis of her deceased husband. She wanted to preserve the sex organ as a souvenir of a very happy 35 years of marriage. She used a butcher’s knife to relieve her dead husband Heinrich (68) of his member. She wrapped her booty in foil and was about to take it home in a lunchbox, when she was intercepted by a nurse and arrested for mutilation. ‘It was the best part of him and gave me so much pleasure,’ she said. ‘I wanted to preserve it and keep it forever. We used to call it his “joystick” and I wanted that part as a memento,’ she was quoted in
The Sun.

War and torture

It is not only in war that gunshot wounds to the penis occur. Recently a fifteen-year-old boy was admitted to our hospital after being sprayed with buckshot by a pimp, and wounded in his private parts. How did this happen? Together with some boys of his own age he had got talking to 171

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a prostitute sitting at a window. Not only in her view, but also in that of her protector the conversation went on for too long. They didn’t get down to business, so the youngsters were told to leave. They were foolish enough not to do as they were told, and the dramatic result was a blast of buckshot in the crotch. One of the eight bullets on target hit him in the middle of the right erectile-tissue compartment. After circumcision the skin of the penis was stripped off – the way one cleans an eel – and after much searching the piece of buckshot could be removed. Fortunately the urethra was undamaged.

During the Arab–Turkish conflict at the beginning of the twentieth cen tury the Arabs had the gruesome habit of amputating the penises of Turkish soldiers killed in battle and stuffing them in the victims’