Penises I Have Known

SMALL, HUGE, SHORT, LONG, RED, WHITE, BLUE, VEINY, CURVED, CIRCUMCISED,

UNCIRCUMCISED, FRIENDLY, THREATENING, UNDENIABLE. A CELEBRATED BELLE-

LETTRIST CATALOGS THE MANY SPLENDORS OF THE MALE MEMBER

I. SIDLING UP TO THE MATTER AT HAND

The problem, for starters, even before we get to the fact that it's difficult—impossible, even—for any single manifes­tation of this indubitably male organ to live up to its reputa­tion, is how to deal with the word itself so that we're not all blushing or smirking. Penis. If you say it quickly, pass your eye over it glancingly as though it were not a Rubi-rosa of a word, you have accomplished nothing other than a grown-up game of peekaboo: I don't see you, big feller, bulging over there in the middle of the sentence. If, on the other hand, you give the thing its due and enunciate it fully, pee-mis, draw it out, acknowledge that it is an awkward quasi-scientific coinage, pretending to be at ease with itself under the enormous metaphoric burden it carries—bearing the weight of the phallocentric world between its legs—you are left having to deal with the (often incredulous) attention you have drawn by insisting that everything, but everything, is a stand-in for the phallic principle: cars, buildings, pen­cils, tails, fruit, literary images, even certain flowers like the anthurium. Take Dylan Thomas's "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower": It can be read as a poem

about the life-giving power of a divine force, or in my view, it can be read as a poem about the life-giving force of pe-nises, the surging motile energy of the male orgasm.

But here I am, getting stuck in an apologia pro vita erot­ica mea before I have even begun to observe that there are penises so memorable you never get over them—J.C.'s for instance, a perfect edition worthy of my rapt contempla­tion, or so it seemed to me when I lay next to him on his 1970s-style platform bed on an unmemorable Manhattan side street years ago. And others you would like to recall (the one belonging to your first lover, the one who cracked your geode, as the man with the red socks put it) that seem to have eluded your visual grasp through no fault of their own. How to talk about your personal history with penises without sounding Mae West-sassy (the old "Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?" routine). Or all fluttery and awed, like a hitherto untouched heroine in a bodice ripper—or perhaps like the touched but hitherto unorgasmic heroine of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover—by the supernal Otherness of the thing? "Now I know why men are so overbearing," Constance Chatterley

says of her gamekeeper, Mellors, or, more specifically, of Mellors's penis, which he refers to as his John Thomas, as though it were indeed a third person in the room, observing the action: "But he's lovely, really. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely, really!"

There are countless designations for penis, of course, just as there are many terms for its equally klutzy-sounding female counterpart, the graceless vagina. (Given a choice, I'd pick cunt over pussy, notwithstanding John Updike's observa­tion by way of his vagina-focused anti-hero Rabbit Angstrom that "cunt would be a good flavor of ice cream.") These designations include all those one-syllable terms that sound like blunt, wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am objects, such as dick, prick, cock and dong (I've never trusted the erotic sensibility of women who use the word cock as opposed to dick and prick, which sound less grandstanding), as well as the half amused, half abashed Yiddish approximations like schmuck and putz. "Putz is worse than schmuck," Maggie Paley declares in The Book of the Penis, a veritable font of information

on points of lesser and greater interest, including the etymology of penis, which is Latin for "tail" and a relatively late entry into the vernacular. (She adds that the two terms "are now used almost en­tirely to mean jerk.") Not to overlook Humbert Humbert's fancy description of his throbbing pecker: the "scepter of my passion," which he allows his first love, Annabel, to hold "in her awkward fist." I've always warmed to Johnson myself, and the ironic—or what I take to be ironic—majesty of rod speaks to the 18th century serving girl in me. And yet there is something about the word penis in all its obdurate two-syllabled out-thereness (I'll take one penis, if you please) that seems to rise above itself, if only because the stiffly protruding qual­ity of the first syllable [pee) followed by the curled-up flaccidity of the second (iiks) seems to mimic the dynamic of charge and retreat embodied in the piece of male anatomy being alluded to.

To be sure, this extended patch of throat clearing—or if you will, this high-minded introductory musing on the stric­tures of our erotic lexicon—is nothing but a symptom of the larger predicament of inarticulateness that I, an ordinarily voluble creature, find myself facing when

in the presence of this subject. Despite their apparent demystification, penises themselves retain an odd aura of unspeakableness. For all the huge strides we appear to have taken in our discus­sion of sex—mainly by making it into a discussion about body and gender—the discourse doesn't seem to have advanced much since Lytton Strachey first dropped the word semen into one of those Bloomsbury discussions he and his friends, including Virginia Woolf (then Stephen) and her sister Vanessa, used to have in one another's houses on London evenings in the early 20th century. Which is why trying to talk about penises still feels, even after Erica Jong's zipless fuck, Monica Lewinsky and Sex and the City, like smashing through glass, as though one were daring to touch a precious and lovingly curated object behind its protec­tive pane with the audacity of mere lan­guage. To talk about penises as a woman is to turn yourself into an outlaw and the conversation into smut even before we've gotten to the age-old question of whether size matters. (Once and for all: Of course it does, although in less significant and

subtler ways than men may think.) For in­stance, Ernest Hemingway's infamously strutting account in A Moveable Feast of being called upon to reassure F. Scott Fitzgerald that his equipment was ade­quate despite Zelda's ballbusting insinu­ations—the anecdote comes from a chapter with the insufferably coy title of "A Matter of Measurements"—seems bogus on many accounts, not least of which is the suggestion that anxieties about the male signifier to end all signi-fiers can be put to rest in quite so con­crete a fashion. But the topic makes for easy send-up, as in the brand of con­doms that offers a variety of prophylac­tics (the Nightcap, the Weekender and the Extended Stay), all in boxes with the word huge printed on them.

Penises, that is, deserve to be wor­shipped or envied—or if need be, en­couraged—but they don't deserve to be nattered on about. This is still sacred male territory, and women enter it at their own literary peril. The potholes are everywhere you look, waiting to trip you up into porn or parody, or perhaps the high-gutter baby talk of D.H. Lawrence. Which is not to suggest that Lawrence didn't, despite what is clearly a complicat-edly ambivalent attitude toward women,

manage to move the conversation more radically forward than most. There may be something laughable about the way Mellors and Lady Constance talk about his John Thomas in Lady Chatterley's Lover, but there is also something both daring and poignant about Lawrence's attempt to win over his straitlaced and corseted readers to his rhapsodic spin on the liberating effect of erotic naked­ness. His late phase, which includes Lady Chatterley's Lover and the short novel The Man Who Died (first published, by the bye, as The Escaped Cock) shows him having taken a decisive step beyond what speculum-gazing Kate Millett and others have decried as his worship of the phallus into a more psychologically ex­pansive view of carnal matters.

Lawrence may have been singular among his contemporaries for naming women's body parts and for attempting to depict female orgasm, decades before Norman Mailer and Harold Brodkey got around to trying their hand at it. But discussion of men's body parts by wale writers had been in evidence centuries before Lawrence came along, even if it

was coded or euphemistic. It was, rather, the existence of female writers who al­luded to women's body parts that was noticeably absent. So Virginia Woolf could observe in a speech she gave to an audience of 200 women in January 1931 (almost a year after Lawrence's death) that it would take another 50 years before "men have become so civilized that they are not shocked when a wom­an speaks the truth about her body." Whether or not we have arrived at this juncture depends, I suppose, upon your sense of how shockable we remain under our contemporary posture of jadedness, but please do note that Woolf's specu­lation makes no mention of a woman speaking the truth about his body. It is as though this was a possibility not even to be hinted at except on a different planet than the one men and women are destined to live on together. Which puts us right back where I began, unwilling to consign myself to the outpost of raunch yet unsure whether a seat will be found for me inside the clean, well-lit rooms of polite company.

II. THE MATTER AT HAND

It is to be asserted, then, that very few women talk (continued on page 124)

PENISES

(continued from page 80)

about the specifics of penises: the too shortness, longness, thinness, fatness, curviness, redness, veininess, whatev-erness of them. Nice girls aren't sup­posed to take note of the individual penis in all its clinical details (its poten­tial for beauty or hideousness as well as defining characteristics like length, girth and color)—for fear, I suppose, that the whole delicate scaffolding, the prerequisite of a cock-of-the-walk confidence if a man is to be able to perform in the bedroom, would come crashing down around us (some would argue it has already begun to happen, what with Bob Dole hawking Viagra on TV and the general cultural anxi­ety about the wilting of the male libido). Or perhaps it's simply that no woman wants to know what her husband's or lover's penis really looks like when seen through the keyhole, because it's too heavy a responsibility—like carrying around a state secret with you all the time, burning a hole in your pocket, imperiling future lives. An article I read in a women's magazine about how to maintain strong friendships advised readers not to step over the other per­son's "comfort zone" and went on to cite a conversation about penis size—in which a friend of the writer's revealed in a whisper over lunch that the man she was dating and whom she would eventually marry had a very small penis ("It's, like, miniature")—as its first and most glaring example of an inappropriate revelation. The writer felt burdened with this indiscretion forever after and can't, apparently, see this friend alone or together with her minusculely endowed husband without feeling overcome with mortification.

Indeed, I have sophisticated female friends who to this very day continue to insist there's no difference between one penis and the next. This claim always makes me feel morally suspect, as though I were a foot fetishist or a frequenter of bondage chat rooms— someone mired in trivial and immature considerations, measuring the circum­ference of a banana while everyone else has moved on to fretting about global warming. And yes, I know that on the grander existential scale, or even on the less-grand functional scale, it doesn't matter all that much, but then again neither does breast size nor the shape of your ass, and men never tire of dis­cussing these. One may conjecture that whereas the male gaze makes us femi-

nine, confirms heterosexual women in their sense of their own desirability by the very act of assessing it (weighing breasts like so many sacks of potatoes and coming up with ideal waist-to-hip ratios as if women were Barbie dolls made real), the assessing female gaze has the opposite effect. It unmakes the masculine principle in a man, threatens to render him into mere part-objects of desire (the breast standing in for the woman, the penis for the man) rather than a whole glorious being, He Who Does the Desiring. We in turn collude with men in treating the detached assessment of sexual organs as an exclusively male prerogative by look­ing away and talking of the ardor or duration of men's sexual performance rather than the prescribed nature of their equipment, whether crooked or straight, daunting or drooping.

Then again, there is no way not to take notice of what is often first perceived to be an absurd and even ungainly appendage—before, that is, its emblematic significance to the human race is factored in, like bonus points giving added erector-set value. Not even I, brought up in an Orthodox German-Jewish household where my mother went wild if I or any of my five siblings failed to put on robes ("dress­ing gowns," as we called them), could successfully overlook the penises sur­rounding me. It's one thing to deliber­ately blind yourself to the reality of your father's penis—which, with the excep­tion of girls who happen to be brought up around nudists, is what I think most of us do. To the extent I wondered about my father's penis, I ascribed to it my feelings about him, which would have made his penis unlikable and scary at once (albeit not scary in a curiosity-inspiring way). But it's another thing altogether to overlook the penises of three brothers, especially if you hap­pen to sleep in the same room with two of them until you are eight years old, at which point a psychiatrist suggests to your mother that it might be better for your already faltering mental health if you slept either by yourself or in a room with your two sisters.

I don't know whether I suffered from any adverse comparisons I made between my own body and my brothers' bodies— whether, that is, I was affected by what used to go by the formal appellation of penis envy—but I do know I felt outmus-ded by them and that I studied the crotch

of their pajama pants when I thought no one was looking; I was vastly intrigued by the odd way the cotton gathered in this area as though it were holding a small cluster of grapes while my own pajamas had to make no such accommodations. Years later I would be reminded of this disparity when I read one of Flaubert's tirades against the treacherous nature of women: "Women have no notion of rec­titude. The best among them have no compunctions about listening at doors, unsealing letters, counseling and practic­ing a thousand little deceits, etc. It all goes back to their organ. Where man has an Eminence, they have a Hole! That eminence is Reason, Order, Science, the Phallus-Sun, and the hole is night, humid­ity, confusion." No wonder Madame Bovary gave up and swallowed arsenic.

And sometimes, it must be admitted, even after such calculations are made, after one has an idea of what penises can get up to, they still pose themselves as less than sublime. I think of a conver­sation I had not long ago, sitting around the kitchen table with my adolescent daughter and my 40-year-old Filipina housekeeper, concerning the physical noncharms of the penis. Of the three of us, I'm quite sure I was the only one who had seen an adult penis up close and thus could draw on the evidence of my senses rather than the evidence of visual images. But no matter: My daughter and my housekeeper were in cheerful agreement as to the unre-generate ugliness of penises—the sheer aesthetic silliness of the design, as they saw it, especially when you took into account the whole picture, including the surrounding hairiness and the exis­tence of those two undignified balls.

I listened with some amusement to their remarks, envisioning us in a bawdy scene out of Chaucer, set in a dim, low-ceilinged room lit by sputtering candles rather than in my linoleum-floored kitchen awash in recessed lighting, three girls sitting around the hearth, speaking the unvarnished truth about men. But I also felt a slight sense of unease, even foreboding, at the dismissive tone that was being taken. What, I wondered, if men (any man. the father of three across the hall, say, or the doorman who guarded us from potential marauders and always greeted us as though he were genuinely happy to see us again) knew that they were being viewed in this way—that it was even possible to size up their most prized credential with so much irreverence?

I understood that my unmarried (and possibly virginal) housekeeper had little use for men, but how had I failed in transmitting to my daughter the neces­sary sense of gravitas about the subject, without which she would clearly be doomed, giving off the wrong signal, a

slew of insufficiently dazzled pheromones? It wasn't, after all, as though I were con­sciously trying to raise a rampaging shrew, a Lorena Bobbitt or, going back several decades, a maddened man hater like Val­erie Solanas, who first penned the SCUM Manifesto and then shot Andy Warhol. Heaven forfend. I had loved men in my time, including my daughter's father; I had loved penises, sometimes more than the men they were attached to. Presum­ably I would do so again, but meanwhile I saw the line I had to adopt. It was up to me to put matters right, to defend the maligned organ. "It's actually quite nice," I heard myself say as we all scraped the last of the mint-chocolate ice cream from our bowls. I moved gingerly from the particular to the general, trying to walk a line between a discriminating embrace and wholehearted sluttishness: "They sort of grow on you." And then as the coup de grace, I—who had gone through life half resistant and half in thrall to men and their effect on me, especially in bed; who had resisted the "privileging" of the male sexual organ even as I marveled at its ability to transform itself from some­thing soft and passive into something hard and driven and capable of filling you up like a stopper in a bottle—came out openly as an advocate. As my daugh­ter and my housekeeper first stared at me and then at each other, I stated it baldly: "I like them." Just in the nick of time, I retracted a bit, lest I sound as if I were a come-one, come-all appreciator of penises, the sort of woman who liked all flavors of ice cream as long as they were cold. (If cunts would make a good flavor of ice cream, then so would cocks—take that, John Updike.) "I mean," I equivo­cated, "some of them."

III. THE MATTER IN HAND

Sooner or later, it happens. They exert their charms, persuade you that your Hole needs their Eminence. Or if not

quite that, they prove indispensable to your feeling more vivid and less alone, no longer adrift in the vastness of the world but grounded in the snug fit of the erotic moment. In my case, the pivotal moment arrived, in the manner of many belated recognitions, with a compensatory force, so that for a while in the latter half of my 20s I found myself walking around in a haze of penis longing. After holding on to my virginity (at least technically) until the age of 25 with a slightly deranged fervor indicative of equal parts fear and desire, I acted as though I had awakened to a new morning. The world seemed charged not with God's grandeur, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins had it, but with the grandeur of erections. I liked the feel of a penis growing firm in my hand (it would be years before I was truly comfortable putting a penis in my mouth), and I loved the feel of an urgent penis inside me, pushing through beyond my usual bar­riers to the hopelessly receptive and wet Lady Chatterley core of me. I thought they—the confederacy of penises—were close to amazing in their ability to change shape in so dramatic a way. I imagined it to be a special effect that kept happening just for me, over and over again. It was hard to believe that other women—scads of other women—could produce this same result.

The penises I became acquainted with were uniformly circumcised—I had wan­dered away from my religiously observant upbringing, but not that far—yet early on I noticed small differences between cir­cumcised penises, differences that turned out not to be so small. Once or twice I got out of bed midway because the penis in question was too big or stocky or hazard­ously curved, like a scimitar. Once I fled the Plaza Hotel because a minor movie producer with a legendary reputation as a cocksman not only appeared to be hung like the proverbial horse but had a slightly glazed look in his eye that, together with

his musings on the wonders of anal sex, scared me back into my clothes. Several years later this same man and I went to bed in a hotel in Beverly Hills, and I remember feeling appreciative of the vigor with which he made love, his penis no longer striking me as gargantuan but rather as generous.

I watched him afterward as he sat naked on the edge of the capacious hotel bed, singing some ditty he had learned in military school decades earlier. He began to get dressed by pulling on a pair of red socks, and for a moment, before he put on the rest of his clothes. I felt a great sense of loss. He was leaving me in my expensive room—taking his penis, which I had become fond of, with him. For a moment I thought of asking him to stay, or of asking him to leave me his penis as a memento. We women become quite attached, you know, which is both our triumph and our defeat. If I had to make a guess as to what it is that we become attached to, I would end up fumbling for the right words, talking in slightly abject terms about the feel­ing of being filled, which sounds suspi­ciously as though 1 believed in Flaubert's antiphonal Holes and Eminences, when what I really believe in is something vaguer, something along the lines of a certain kind of need being met by a cer­tain kind of virile understanding. Not to get too Lawrencian about it, but I sup­pose I might say we are all composed of psychological Holes and Eminences and that sometimes a man comes along wearing red socks—or maybe it's really the penis by way of the red socks—and he's the one you've been searching for all these years. At which point you're a goner, and the penis on hand, whatever its workaday reality, looks like the very model you've been lusting after without even knowing it.

TO TALK ABOUT PENISES IS TO TURN YOURSELF INTO AN OUTLAW AND THE CONVERSATION INTO SMUT EVEN BEFORE WE'VE GOT­TEN TO THE AGE-OLD QUESTION OF WHETHER SIZE MATTERS.

To know what one's husbancVs or lover's penis really looks like is like canying around a state secret.