God's Doodle Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  ‘As Individual as Faces’

  Lies, Damned Lies and Self-Measurements

  Human Primacy

  Aesthetics, Function and Woman

  Part One Notes

  Part Two

  From Bit Player to Lead

  Seminal Influences

  Religious Phallusy

  Flaunt It!

  Part Two Notes

  Part Three

  Hazards of Ownership

  The Neurotic Penis

  Power Cuts

  A Price to Pay

  Part Three Notes

  Part Four

  The Prick of the Brain

  Two to Tango

  The ‘Precious Substance’ Revisited

  Some Arithmetic of Sex

  Part Four Notes

  Epilogue

  Index

  Copyright

  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 man’s deepest neuroses too. Do women find it, in the erect state, inherently ridiculous? Why can’t 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, there’s the matter of size…

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

  God’s 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.

  About the Author

  Tom Hickman is a long-time journalist who has worked on several national newspapers and magazines as features writer, features editor and editor. He has also worked for the BBC and is the author of several books, including Churchill’s Bodyguard, Death: A User’s Guide and What Did You Do In The War, Auntie?

  He’s got his root in my soul, has that gentleman!

  An’ sometimes I don’ know what ter do wi’ him.

  Ay, he’s got a will of his own, an’ it’s hard to suit him.

  Yet I wouldn’t have him killed.

  Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence

  PROLOGUE

  As one

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a penis will do some of his thinking with it. Physiologically, this is impossible. But as Bill Clinton’s one-time lover Gennifer Flowers observed about the reckless presidential dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, ‘He was thinking with his other head’ – an observation that both acknowledges the phenomenon and emphasises the penis’s ability to override the higher thought processes, despite lacking the 100 million nerve cells that make up the brain’s neuronal highway.

  Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci, the outstanding genius of the Renaissance, puzzled over the relationship that exists between a man and his penis, mirror-writing in one of his notebooks:

  [The penis] has dealings with human intelligence and sometimes displays an intelligence of its own; where a man may desire it to be stimulated, it remains obstinate and follows its own course; and sometimes it moves on its own without permission or any thought by its owner. Whether one is awake or asleep, it does what it pleases; often the man is asleep and it is awake; often the man is awake and it is asleep; or the man would like it to be in action but it refuses; often it desires action and the man forbids it. That is why it seems that this creature often has a life and an intelligence separate from that of the man.

  According to the Athenian tragedian Sophocles, to possess a penis is to be ‘chained to a madman’ – and the madman is capable of seizing control of the possessor’s centre of command. Ven der putz shteht, light der sechel in drerd, runs the Yiddish proverb: When the prick stands up, the brains get buried in the ground. At such moments, the Japanese say, the possessor is possessed, sukebe – a comic fellow dragged along by the mischievous lecher between his legs.

  What cannot be denied is that in some respects penis-possession gives its possessor a monocular understanding of the world. From infanthood he comes to consider his penis as an entertainment centre both for himself and for others, the genie’s lamp which when rubbed fulfils his wishes (he at least wishes).

  He would, of course, indignantly deny that his possession is independent of his psychology and personality: he is, after all, more than the sum of his private parts. But a penis – always – has the potential to inflict humiliation or introduce ethical dilemma. And does the man sport the penis or the penis the man or, to go further, is there truth in the playwright Joe Orton’s mischievous assertion that ‘a man is nothing more than a life-support system for his penis’? It is the basis for a lifetime’s schizophrenia.

  Throughout history, women’s attitude to the penis has been no less ambivalent than men’s. That the penis is capable of coming alive apparently outside the control of its possessor makes women also regard it, on occasion, as an entity in some sense separate from him, which is why, as Simone de Beauvoir observed in the first post-war feminist tract The Second Sex, mothers speak to the infant male of his penis as ‘a small person . . . an alter ego usually more sly . . . and more clever than the individual’, compounding, from the beginning of his life, his belief that he and it are a duality, like Batman and Robin. Later, more aggressive feminists than de Beauvoir, while heaping opprobrium on the penis’s head, haven’t shaken free of this double vision. ‘You never meet a man alone,’ one feminist wrote. ‘There are always two of them: him and his penis’, the aggrieved tone rather suggesting that the penis should be unstrappable, like a six-shooter in a Wild West saloon handed to the barkeep to ensure it causes no trouble. Feminism has alleged that the ‘mere’ possession of a penis has been responsible for thousands of years of male domination of religion and philosophy, of political, social and economic thought, of history itself.

  Such a claim, one might observe, is over at least one of the heads of the penis-possessor.

  Penis size is not really important. Like they say, it’s not the size of the boat, it’s the length of the mast divided by the surface area of the mainsail and subtracted from the circumference of the bilge pump. Or something like that.

  Donna Untrael

  ‘AS INDIVIDUAL AS FACES’

  IN 1963 THE fate of the British government hung on a Cabinet minister’s genitals.

  Harold Macmillan’s Conservative administration was already tottering, having just lost War Minister John Profumo over his affair with the prostitute Christine Keeler, when the 11th Duke of Argyll began divorce proceedings against his wife Margaret, alleging adultery with eighty-eight unnamed men including three royals, three Hollywood actors and not one but two Cabinet ministers. Sensationally, the duke produced Polaroid photographs, then a novelty, one showing his wife, wearing only a pearl necklace, fellating a man in the bathroom of her Belgravia home, and a set of four others showing a man lying on her bed masturbating, which were captioned ‘before’, ‘thinking of you’, ‘during – oh’, and ‘finished.’ Who was ‘the headless man’, as the newspapers dubbed him – unidentifiable in the first Polaroid because the camera had cut him off at the neck and in the set because of the angle at which they were taken? A number of names were bandied about, but quickly the actor Douglas Fairbanks Junior and Duncan Sandys, the Mini
ster of Defence who was also Winston Churchill’s son-in-law, found themselves in the frame, head to head, so to speak.

  Sandys told Macmillan he wasn’t the culprit. But if yet another minister was implicated in a sexual scandal the government almost certainly would be toppled and the prime minister wanted to be sure. He therefore instructed Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, to investigate. Britain’s senior law lord summoned the five most likely suspects, Sandys and Fairbanks among them, to the Treasury, where each had to sign the visitors’ book, and got a graphologist to compare their handwriting with the Polaroid photo captions. While he awaited confirmation, Denning had Sandys visit a Harley Street specialist who confirmed that the ministerial genitals were not those in the masturbatory sequence.

  In the event, Denning was able to tell the prime minister that the handwriting wasn’t Sandys’ either, but Fairbanks’ (something not made public for nearly forty years). For her part, never once in the rest of her long life did the Duchess of Argyll confirm anything. But she did drop heavy hints that two men, not one, were in the photos: the masturbator was not only not the fellatee he was, in fact, Sandys. It may be superfluous to point out that the duchess’s enthusiastic bathroom ministrations made a comparison of one penis with the other impossible.

  When in dismissive mood, some women are inclined to say of penises that once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all, but penises are infinite in their variety in size (sic), shape and colouration. Penises can be long, short, fat, thin, stumpy, straight, bulbous or so conical as to get pinched in the tip of a condom, swerved left or right or up or down, circumcised or not, smooth or as wrinkled as a Shar Pei pup; and they present in rosy pink, caramel, peach, lavender, plain chocolate or gunmetal black, largely dependent on the ethnic origin of the possessor, but not entirely: most penises are of a darker hue than possessors’ bodies, some startlingly so – ‘more suntanned’, as the Danish couple Inge and Sten Hegeler delicately put it in An ABZ of Love, published in 1963, the same year of ‘the headless man’, and the biggest-selling sex manual of the time. Significantly, the Hegelers considered penises to be ‘as individual as faces’. More significantly, in the following decade, Alex Comfort, writing in The Joy of Sex, the biggest-selling sex manual of all time, decreed that penises are also endowed with ‘a personality’.

  Whether penises are as individual as faces or not, in cartoonish fashion the male genital compendium in toto has been likened to a face: the face of a very old man with a particularly ugly nose and an egg tucked into each sagging jowl (undeniably, beyond puberty, every penis looks older than its possessor). Even the head or glans of the penis has been likened to a face, which somewhat stretches the imagination, though perhaps one can see it as ‘early foetal’. ‘Such a serious little face,’ Thelma says of Harry Angstrom’s penis (Rabbit Is Rich, John Updike) in a moment’s rest from fellating him, completing the analogy by noting that his uncircumcised foreskin around the swollen head of his penis is like ‘a little bonnet’. Serious, or more especially sad, penises were so intolerable to the poet Bonnie Roberts, she revealed in her poem ‘Portrait of a Former Penis Bigot’, that she dotted happy faces on her lovers’ with a felt-tip pen; a Smiley badge may never look the same again.

  Down the centuries the urethral opening at the penis’s tip has been referred to as an eye (‘Jap-eyed’ in modern vernacular, though classical scholars in the 1920s grandly referred to the penis as Polyphemus, the one-eyed Cyclops, son of Poseidon, who was blinded by Odysseus) or said to resemble a tiny mouth, and it to this that the Elizabethan poet Richard Barnfield referred in a sonnet that begins ‘sweet coral lips, where nature’s treasure lies’ (it helps to know that Barnfield was homosexual or one might be misled). In Elizabethan England ‘nose’ was popular slang for penis and indeed today, on the other side of the world in Japan, the penis is colloquially referred to by the name of a folklore goblin, Tenggu, unfortunate enough to have an outsize olfactory organ.1

  For centuries men have given penises men’s names, a matter, you might say, of putting names to faces: in England most popularly Peter, Percy, Rupert and Roger – traditionally a name given to stud bulls and rams – and, still current, John or John-Thomas (now more usually, thanks to D.H. Lawrence’s usage in Lady Chatterley’s Lover) and Willy (a foreshortening of William). But interestingly Dick, although as old as any of these, only joined the penile fraternity in the late nineteenth century and then not because it rhymed with prick, but as a shortened form of dickory dock, cockney rhyming slang for cock. Roger is no longer extant as a nickname (one hesitates to say diminutive) but for centuries has been a well-loved verb – the diary of William Byrd of Westover contains the earliest recording: on 26 December 1711 he wrote of his wife ‘I rogered her lustily’, and again on 1 January 1712, ‘I lay abed till 9 o’clock this morning . . . and rogered her by way of reconciliation’.

  Some men give their penises nicknames (can Clinton really have called his Willard?) because, as the joke goes, they don’t want to be bossed around by somebody they don’t know.

  Anglo-Saxon men did not have penises. They were tarse men. Over five hundred or so years, men became pintle men or pillicock men. When these terms from the Middle Ages were considered vulgar in the late sixteenth century, pillicock became shortened to cock (pillicock leaving us with the mildly offensive pillock) and it and prick became the acceptable referents, however surprising to modern ears: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, maids routinely referred fondly to their boyfriend as ‘my prick’. By the end of the seventeenth century, prick dropped out of polite society, as did cock, with wider linguistic consequences: apricocks, haycocks and weathercocks became apricots, haystacks and weathervanes, as in the America of the Puritan Fathers water cocks became faucets and cockerels, roosters. Men now sported the yard – derived from a medieval term for rod or staff carried as an indication of authority, not an optimistic measurement of length.

  When the eighteenth century developed a liking for Latinate terms, yard finally became penis, and tarse, which had hung on at least in literary circles, now bowed out, much to the regret of scatological poets (penis does not rhyme with arse). The classical Roman term for penis was mentula, which one might think had a certain resonance equating as it does to ‘little mind’. But eighteenth-century wordsmiths preferred the idiomatic penis, meaning tail, not just to mentula but to the most popular Roman slang of gladius, or sword – which, as vagina meant sheath or scabbard, fitted nicely.2

  Glans, the Latin word for the head of the penis erect (meaning acorn, which it resembles, somewhat fancifully), was also adopted into standard English – though most people conversationally stuck to the centuries-old knob, helmet, bellend and, of course, head. (‘Come, Kate, thou art perfect in lying down: come, quick, quick, that I may lay my head in thy lap’ – Henry IV Part I, III, i, 226–8.)

  The rest of the compendium also underwent Latinisation. What the Anglo-Saxons and all those who followed them referred to as cullions, ballocks (later spelt bollocks) or stones (used consistently in the King James Bible of 1611), and from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century as cods (from codpiece), were henceforward testicles, from testiculus, witness – Romans thought of their testicles as ‘little witnesses of virility’ etymologists conclude (see Part 2, ‘From Bit Player to Lead’).

  In centuries intimately conversant with the Bible, Adam’s arsenal, Nimrod (the mighty hunter) and Aaron’s rod (the patriarch’s staff, which blossomed and yielded almonds) were among the sobriquets, neologisms and tropes men devised for their genitals – not now likely to be found on Internet sites compendiously devoted to genital terminology. Down the ages men have also applied every synonym imaginable to the penis: assorted vegetables and fruits, small animals or animal parts, and reptiles – the snake and eel are constants in almost every culture, as is the phallic-headed snapping turtle in the cultures of the Middle East. The Italians still refer colloquially to the penis as a bird or fish, just like the Sumerians, the world’s first civil
isation, over five and a half thousand years ago. Specific weapons and tools have always loomed large in the penile vocabulary, ‘sword’ as popular elsewhere as it was in Ancient Rome – Shakespeare employed it as well as such terms as pike, lance, pistol and poll-axe. As weaponry advanced the penis equated to ever-more potent munitions including, in recent years, torpedo, bazooka and rocket.

  But all of this verbal ingenuity aside, cock, prick – and the generic tool and weapon – remain the words most commonly used for the penis in English, as do their equivalents in other languages, with balls and nuts (a foreshortening of the seventeenth-century coinage nutmegs) for the attendant testicles. The British continue to have a fondness for bollocks, knackers (a verb in the Middle Ages meaning to geld, perhaps not the happiest association), cobblers (more cockney rhyming slang, from cobbler’s awls) and, harking back to colonial days in India, goolies (from a Hindi word for any round object). The Americans’ favoured alternative for testicles is rocks, stones being, one assumes, not big enough in a country where everything must be bigger.

  Just as some believe in face reading, phrenology, palmistry or podomancy (foot reading), there are some who believe that the complementary study of phallomancy, which has a long tradition in India and Tibet, can divine both a man’s character and fortune. Tibetans believe it’s unlucky for a man to be over-endowed: should his penis reach the bottom of his heels while squatting, his life will be full of sorrow; should, however, his penis be no more than six finger widths’ long he will be rich and a good husband. Hindus have similar beliefs, expounded in the Brihat Samhita, a Sanskrit astrological treatise written in the sixth century AD. The over-endowed man will be poor and without sons; the man whose penis is straight, small and sinewy will be rich, as will the man the head of whose penis is not very large. The man whose penis inclines towards the left is another who will always know poverty, as will the man the head of whose penis is depressed in the middle – and this man will father only daughters. According to the Brihat Samhita, the man who has perfectly matched testicles will be a king. The compensation for men with mismatched testicles is that they will be fond of sex. The question for non-Tibetan and non-Hindu males who have mismatched testicles and a fondness for sex, is why they think there might be something in phallomancy on the basis of the last reading, yet dismiss the rest as Eastern nonsense.