Manhood Read online

  M A NHOOD

  The Rise and Fall of the Penis

  MELS VAN DRIEL

  Manhood

  Manhood

  The Rise and Fall of the Penis

  Mels van Driel

  reaktion books

  Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

  33 Great Sutton Street

  London ec1v 0dx, uk

  www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

  The original edition of this book was first published in 2008

  bv Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, under the title Geheime delen: Alles wat je er altijd al over wilde weten

  © Mels van Driel and Arbeiderspers 2008

  English-language translation © Reaktion Books Ltd 2009

  English translation by Paul Vincent

  This publication has been made possible

  with financial support from the

  Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature.

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain

  by Cromwell Press Group, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Driel, Mels van, 1954–

  Manhood : the rise and fall of the penis.

  1. Penis. 2. Men–Sexual behavior.

  i. Title

  612.6'1–dc22

  isbn: 978 1 86189 542 4

  Contents

  Introduction 7

  1 The Testicles and the Scrotum 10

  2 The Penis 34

  3 The Prostate and Seminal Glands 62

  4 Testosterone and Sperm 72

  5 Castration 96

  6 Ailments of the Scrotum 117

  7 Ailments of the Penis 141

  8 Voluntary and Involuntary Sterility 214

  9 Spilling One’s Seed 242

  10 Women 254

  11 Eroticism 264

  Conclusion: That Wraps it Up 272

  Bibliography 274

  Acknowledgements 281

  Index 283

  Introduction

  Everyone knows what it’s like to become hooked on a particular subject. These things never happen purely by chance; in all probability they relate to something in us. We are drawn to the topic as if by a magnet.

  It can reach the point where the person concerned is obsessed day and night. There is a constant stream of new facts, ideas and insights. Of course you’re now probably thinking that the writer himself has, or had, fertility problems or some erectile dysfunction. Well, that isn’t the case, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be at some point in the future. The same is true of all my male readers.

  My broad interest derives mainly from daily contact with men’s

  ‘private parts’. Since mid-1983 I have worked as a urologist, so that I deal more or less permanently with sick people, or with people who think they’re sick. In the last few decades tens of thousands of penises and testicles have been through my hands. Eventually one feels the urge to dig deeper. Why do men come to doctors complaining about these organs?

  Over the years my thinking about men’s ‘family jewels’ has achieved a precarious balance between urological, sexological and psycho logical perspectives, the academic approach, the problems of my surgery, daily life and especially literature. This is what moved me to write this book.

  Wearing several different hats as a writer isn’t necessarily always easy, but it does provide a broad, human perspective, through a kind of internal cross-fertilization. Of course novels and poetry have the last word; art always takes precedence over science. But for a urologist the fact that the testicles and the penis are also organs, which if necessary must go under the knife, is in itself a source of satisfaction!

  Drop the word castration in mixed company and watch all the men grab for their crotch, rather like footballers in a wall protecting them-7

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  selves from a direct free kick. This reflex can in fact be traced back to the ideas of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Having been circumcised, like most Jews and Muslims, he used the term ‘castration’ to denote the removal of the penis, though over the centuries castration has never meant anything anywhere in the world but the removal of the testicles.

  Freud’s successful coup is particularly interesting because in his thinking the testicles had lost all significance: he shifted almost all the focus onto the penis and the symbolic phallus, although the root of fertility and virility lies elsewhere, namely in the testicles. That shift was prompted by another: from sex as a means of procreation to sex for pleasure. In the wake of this development, increasing attention was paid to the penis at the expense of the testicles. This book attempts to redress the balance. The testicles receive at least as much attention as the penis, while the prostate and the seminal vesicles, also important in reproduction, are also briefly discussed.

  In this book the genitalia are linked to such phenomena as religion, death and our craving for sexual pleasure. It describes how people down the ages have thought about the male private parts, and have had themselves castrated and sterilized. In addition it lists genital ailments, some serious, some not, and the relevant treatments. In addition a great number of secrets are uncovered. This information is inter-spersed with the thoughts and experiences of celebrities, poets and novelists. I lay absolutely no claim to completeness or scholarly rigour.

  Not all readers will be aware that the Bible contains everything that life has to offer in terms of sex and love. It includes, for example (in alpha betical order): abortion, adultery, aphrodisiacs, anal sex, bestiality, castration, circumcision, exhibitionism, gang rape, group sex, homo -

  sexuality, oppression of women, phallus worship, partner -swapping, prostitution, Satanic sex, sex during menstruation, sexually trans mitted diseases and, of course, self-abuse. This makes it impossible not to include a number of stories from various books in the Bible.

  The best novels and poems commonly mirror everyday reality. One needs only the slightest familiarity with literary history to know that many writers have celebrated the healthy human body as a rich source of happiness and pleasure. There are, though, also writers, poets and philosophers who have written extremely graphically and evocatively about balls, penises and prostates or about ailments of those organs –

  often in a way that no expert could improve on. Writers and poets, major and minor, male and female, undoubtedly have a broader, more human view of reality. Some female poets eagerly explore the scrotum, while the willy and the balls are mocked with great relish. Sometimes the private parts are dangerous and sometimes a set of toys. It is not 8

  i n t ro du c t i o n

  only writers and poets who provide knowledge and ideas; the same is true of singers, both castrati and others. A long series of interviews, conducted over 25 years with men suffering from major and minor ailments of the genitalia, guarantees a high level of authenticity. Several of these have been included with names deleted as short ‘case histories’.

  Who is this book aimed at? Principally, certainly, at the ‘worried well’, with their fretting about pain, reduced fertility, erectile dysfunction, unusual swellings, undescended testicles, prostate cancer, castration anxiety and so on and so on. It offers women the opportunity of gaining a better understanding of their men. Men and women contem plating sterilization will find this book particularly useful. It offers arguments on who should and should not ‘go through with it’.

  Its diversity of content makes the book resemble a big bag of liquorice allsorts. And as with liquorice allsorts, it’s best not to eat eve
rything in one go. I have kept the tone light – the most effective way to approach ditherers and fretters.

  9

  chapter one

  The Testicles and the Scrotum

  Terminology

  Ancient Greek and Latin had a great variety of terms for the testicles.

  Only a few of these have remained in use. Some years ago two Classical scholars, Horstmanhoff and Beukers, devoted a study to the subject.

  The Greek word for ball is orchis, which is found, for instance, in medical parlance. An ‘orchidectomy’ is an operation for the removal of the testicles, while an inflammation of a testicle as a result of mumps is known in the jargon as mumps orchitis. Orchids are so called because the tubers of the flower show some similarity to testicles. In the Middle Ages it was thought that the man who ate the biggest of these tubers would sire especially large children.

  Testis means witness in Latin, as evidenced by such words as

  ‘testify’ and ‘testament’, a document drawn up by a lawyer and signed in the presence of witnesses. The Dutch expression ‘the lawyer and the witnesses’ for the penis and the testicles recalls this link, as does the phrase ‘the lawyer inside and the witnesses outside’ describing sexual intercourse with the penis in the vagina and the balls dangling outside.

  (Don’t assume that this can be taken for granted: a form of coitus exists in which both penis and balls are inserted in the vagina.) All kinds of factors may give words that were originally neutral in meaning enhanced or diminished status, moving from obscene to scientific or alternatively from respectably descriptive to coarse. The Anglo-Saxon ‘bollocks’, for example, was for centuries a purely des crip -

  tive term (see its use in the medieval translation of Reynard the Fox below), but today is considered vulgar. It refers to the testicles, literally and figuratively, in widespread uses like ‘Bollocks!’ (nonsense), or ‘He thinks he’s the dog’s bollocks’ (He has an unduly high opinion of himself). Neither of these expressions is current in the usa.

  ‘Ball-bag’ and ‘nut-sack’ are current slang for ‘scrotum’, though they have not yet ousted the technical term in everyday usage. ‘Having 10

  t h e t e s t i c l e s a n d t h e s c ro t u m balls’ is synonymous with having backbone and can be extended to resolute women like ex-premier Margaret Thatcher. Other informal words for testicles include crown jewels, goolies, nads and nadgers. In this book ‘testicles’, ‘testes’ and ‘balls’ are used indiscriminately.

  Scrotum remains the standard medical term for the bag of skin containing the testicles. The word is a medieval form of scortum, hide or skin, which in Latin may have referred to a leather quiver. The concept of a scrotal ‘pouch’, less crude than ‘sack’ or ‘bag’, has a long history. The image is found, for example, in the medieval Dutch poem of Reynard the Fox, where Tibert the cat, venting his anger on a village priest, bites off the priest’s ‘stitchless satchel / with which a man rings the bell’ (in the translation of A. J. Barnouw and E. College). This castration scene contains a number of other euphemisms, including

  ‘thing’, ‘innards’ and a little later ‘bells’. In one version of the poem, that used by William Caxton for his 1481 translation, it is clear that the castration is in fact only partial: the priest loses, we are told, ‘his right cullion or ballock stone’. The use of the ecclesiastic image of bells is noteworthy. In Sylvia Hubers’ contemporary poem ‘Of Course!’ the bells make a challenging comeback:

  Of course!

  I’ve got rat-arsed again.

  Of course

  Can’t put one foot in front of the other

  anymore.

  But it’s too late now

  for kiddies’ games.

  Come on now, it’s your turn

  to show me some of that

  bell-ringing

  you’ve spent all evening

  bragging about!!

  In the same way that ‘bag’ or ‘sack’ are not particularly kind terms for scrotum, but are common, the same is true of ‘ball’ for testicle. To turn to failing virility for a moment: ‘brewer’s droop’ is temporary, alcohol-induced impotence, while being ‘out of gas’ may describe a more permanent condition.

  Greek and Latin had a plethora of words for penis, only a few of which are still current. It is often difficult to determine why one word has survived and another has not. Most are metaphors, and the most obvious references are to length, cylindrical form and vertical position.

  Sometimes the image was of the stalk of a plant, the shaft of a spear or 11

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  the blade of a sword, sometimes the upright warp of a woven fabric ( stêma in Greek) or the bronze-plated, wedge-shaped ship’s nose ( embolon) with which vessels tried to ram each other in ancient sea battles. The usual anatomical name for the female sexual organ,

  ‘vagina’ (sheath), is a perfect complement to the blade of the sword, while the term ‘ejaculation’ relates to Latin iaculum (a small spear). So that an eiaculatio is the hurling of one’s seed, like a spear. Ample imagery to choose from. The choice eventually fell on ‘penis’, though the precise origin remains vague. Some philologists see it as deriving from the Latin verb pendere (hang, droop), which might be seen as appropriate in some cases.

  Penis, then, has made it big. Any English-speaker wanting to avoid four-letter words and graphic Anglo-Saxon terms will undoubtedly resort to this scientific designation. The previously mentioned Classicists Horstmanshoff and Beukers regard the now archaic man’s yard, like Dutch roede (rod), German Ruthe and French verge, as loan trans -

  lations of the Arabic al-kamarah, a term used in antiquity in the influential Arab medical literature. Via Latin virga (twig, branch) the image was adopted by Western European languages.

  Sanskrit on the other hand uses completely different metaphors for the male member, while Sheikh Nefzawi’s Perfumed Garden mentions, for example:

  the dove, because the moment it begins to flag, the stiff penis resembles a dove brooding its eggs.

  the tinkler, because every time it enters and leaves the vagina, the member makes a sound.

  the untamable one, because as soon as it is erect it starts to move and does not stop till it has found the entrance to the vulva, which it then shamelessly penetrates without so much as a by-your-leave.

  the liberator, since by penetrating the vulva of a woman who has been thrice rejected, it gives this woman the freedom to return to her first husband.

  the rod, since the member inches slowly up the woman’s thighs towards her mons Veneris and creeps inside, until it has nestled there to its satisfaction and achieves an ejaculation.

  the crowbar, since if access to the vulva is difficult, the member 12

  t h e t e s t i c l e s a n d t h e s c ro t u m as it were forces its way in, breaking and trampling everything in its path, like a wild animal on heat.

  the bald one, since the member is hairless!

  In the Middle Ages, according to the Dutch writer Hans van Straten, the penis was called the caulis, or stalk, referring to its rigid state. A host of designations from Shakespearean times and later include: thing, anchovy, tree of life, shuttle, manhood, artillery, baldpate friar, glister syringe, devil, pintle, yard, jiggumbob, monkey’s tail, bodkin, pego, chitterling, whim-wham, shaft, date, key, robin, bilbo, sceptre, flute, nutcracker, date, maypole, spoon, thorn, wand, mast, quill, touch -

  finger, sword, tarriwang and crest. The wealth of contemporary terms is easily accessible online.

  Fertilization

  For many centuries notions of human reproduction were based on the ideas formulated long before the beginning of the first millennium by two Greek authorities, Hippocrates (460–377 bc) and Aristotle (380–

  322 bc). In his book De Semine (On Semen) the former wrote that both male and female seminal fluid was formed in the brain and sub -

  sequently reached the genitalia via the spine. When both substances united in sexual intercourse, this would produce a c
hild that would inherit the characteristics of either the father or the mother, depending on which of the seminal fluids provided by the father and mother was more powerful. According to Hippocrates the sex of the child was also determined by the strength of the seminal fluid.

  While Hippocrates assigned a more or less equal role to the man and the woman, Aristotle took a different view. Of course he could not help admitting some female input and so argued that woman’s sole contribution was to provide what he called catamenia. This was residual menstrual blood that constituted transformed matter and could basically produce nothing until the man added his seed. The drawings of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) show his brilliant mind still clinging to the idea that seminal fluid came straight from the brain.

  Leonardo drew two ducts in the penis, one for the passage of urine and one for seminal fluid. The white seminal fluid came like mother’s milk directly from the backbone. Leonardo was interested not only in heli-copters, but also in reproduction. In the Royal Gallery at Windsor there is a cross-section drawn by him of a man and woman having intercourse. Above the sketch he wrote, in his familiar mirror writing: ‘I show people the first, or perhaps second reason for their existence.’ For 13

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  his anatomical drawings he used animals such as oxen as a model. This led him astray: he forgot to draw the prostate, which is understandable, since in the case of castration before puberty that organ develops scarcely if at all. Even a genius like Leonardo, then, got it wrong not once, but twice.

  One of the many researchers who tackled the mystery of pro -

  creation was William Harvey (1578–1657), the discoverer of the circulation of the blood. After his appointment as Physician Extraordinary to King James i he concentrated his research on the growth of the embryo in chickens’ eggs and on the uteri of deer from the Royal Deer Park. In 1651, at the age of 73, he published his research findings. In contrast to the views then current, Harvey asserted that animals and human beings came from an egg, with the exception of insects, which, he maintained, were generated ‘spontaneously’ from waste matter. The latter was Aristotle’s ancient notion, to which Harvey adhered in another respect too: he ascribed the development of the embryo to the vital forces in the male sperm.