The Inevitable Penis Column

Above The Timberline

by Wayne Mergler

Wayne Mergler is still on temporary medical leave: this column originally ran in 2010, but who can resist reading it again: I couldn’t. The Editor

ANCHORAGE Alaska—(Weekly Hubris)—10/17/11—On a recent “Oprah Winfrey Show,” devoted to medical issues, the popular Dr. Oz, her physician-guest, took questions from the audience. Women, for the most part, asked the expected questions about health concerns—breast cancer, cholesterol and heart issues, menopause, aging, blood pressure. But the men almost always wanted to know about their penises. Later Oprah expressed amusement and surprise that men seemed primarily concerned, above all other issues, about their penises.

On a later show, comedian Denis Leary told Oprah that he had accessed her website and that the first thing he typed into her health section was the word “penis.” (“I am a middle-aged man with a 15-year-old boy’s mentality,” he confessed.) This caused Oprah to laugh again and marvel that men seemed to be obsessed with their penises.

Well, that’s no news to those of us who actually possess such an organ. I once read an article about prostate cancer which revealed that most men are far more alarmed about the impotency that often follows prostate surgery than they are about the cancer itself. Ask any man who is old enough how he reacted to the John Wayne Bobbitt case more than a few years ago now, where his wife went crazy on him and cut off his penis with a kitchen knife. They will tell you that that seemed a fate far worse than death.

Lorena could have been kinder to poor John: she could have plunged that kitchen knife into his bowels or cut his throat. But to cut off his. . .! Every man who heard about it cringed in fear and horror. Later, when John Bobbitt became a porn star in order to show the world that his reattached penis still worked just fine, thank you, men all over the world sighed a huge collective sigh of relief. Relief, that is, if you can be assured that some nice group of paramedics is going to comb the grass of the park searching diligently for your severed member. Oh, the horror! The horror!

So, yeah, we are obsessed with our penises. It can’t be helped. It’s ingrained into our very fiber. We are helpless. They make us helpless. I read somewhere that two men talking will mention their penises at least once every 20 minutes. And that they think about them even more often than that. And though men are obsessed with those quirky things, women, I contend, are, if not obsessed, at least morbidly fascinated by them, themselves.

Freud (I think it was Freud, I’m no real student of psychology) introduced us to the concept of penis envy. I don’t know how real that is. I know some women who go into a rage at the suggestion of it. But, at the very least, there is a fascination there. I remember once hearing a group of professional women talking together about this very subject. One said, laughing: “If I had one of those things I think I’d play with it all the time!” (Well, yep, we pretty much do, I silently responded.)

Another said: “I would think it would get in the way. Doesn’t it get caught when they try to sit down?” (Well, no, they seem to accommodate any position. Getting it caught in your zipper, however, is a real bummer.)

There is such interest in the penis that I remember a particular party, many years ago, that my wife and I attended, made up largely of young marrieds in their 20’s and 30’s. As a party game, we had to list on paper all the synonyms we could think of for penis. It turned out to be an amazing experiment. Collectively, we came up with pages and pages and pages of alternative names. Apparently, there are more synonyms for penis than any other word in the English language.

We started out with the predictable and the mundane: dick, prick, cock; then moved to the more clinical sounding: member, phallus; then to the odd use of calling them after boys’ names: peter, rod; then to the more poetic: loveroot, manroot; to the infantile and cloying: peepee, wienie, do-whacky. Well, you get the idea. The list went on. And on. All this was done with great hilarity, helped out with liberal doses of alcohol, yet we could not help but be reminded of how much time and energy is spent in our culture thinking about male anatomy. Oh, we think about female anatomy, too, of course. But I challenge you to try to find as many names for breasts as there are for the penis. You can’t do it.

All this stuff seems to start immediately, even before birth. A young couple looking at their unborn child’s first ultrasound are actually looking for one thing—a penis (or the lack thereof).

When my son Seth was born, the very moment that the doctor placed his slippery little body into my arms, before he even had time to cry, he promptly peed in my face. That was his first act in this life. Not only did it set the tone for our future relationship, but he had clearly and positively asserted his maleness to the world. That little thing was already getting him into trouble. He learned very quickly that he was gifted with something that his two older sisters didn’t have. His obsession had begun.

I remember very well an evening at the swimming pool when Seth was about three years old. He and I were in the men’s locker room, changing and showering after our swim. A nice-looking young man was quietly taking a shower nearby. Seth gleefully trotted over to the young man and said, with joyous discovery: “You have a penis!”

“Well, um, yes, I do,” the young man replied.

Seth cackled with delight. “I have a penis, too!” he proudly announced.

“Yes, I see that,” said the young man.

“Yours is really big!” Seth praised.

“Uh, well, thank you very much,” said the young man.

“My daddy’s is big, too!”

“Oh, well, good for him!” said the more-than-patient young man.

During all this, I, with a beet-colored face, tried profusely to apologize to the young man, but he just laughed.

“No need to apologize,” he said. “I used to be a little boy, too. And, besides, I don’t usually get such praise.”

Little boys may view all this with exuberance, but little girls seem to take a much more clinical approach. How well I remember a little girl named Elise. I was about five years old then, or maybe a little younger. I know that I had not started school, yet. Elise lived two doors down from me. She was already in the first grade. An older woman, a sophisticate. We played together almost every day that summer. One day, behind the garage, Elise bluntly and abruptly said to me: “Show me your thingy!”

I was taken aback. My. . .thingy? I had never heard that word before, yet I knew immediately what she meant. Apparently unable to think of a reason not to, I complied. She stared in silence for a very long time at my, um, thingy, and then I put it away and we continued with our play. But the next day she wanted to see it again. And then again the day after that. And so on for much of the summer. Usually she would just look at me for a long time, never saying a word, but sometimes she offered commentary, such as: “Hmm. I think it was bigger yesterday.” (Everybody’s a critic.) Finally I got bored and exasperated with showing Elise my thingy. One day I refused to cooperate and she went home in a huff. That night at the dinner table, I told my parents that I didn’t want to play with Elise anymore.

“Oh, why not?” my mother protested.”Elise is such a nice little girl. And you’ll hurt her feelings if you don’t play with her anymore! Aren’t you having fun?”

“No, she isn’t any fun,” I fumed. “All she ever wants to do is look at my thingy!”

Needless to say, my play dates with Elise abruptly ended. In fact, I don’t recall ever seeing her again after that. I do recall, though, a long lecture my father gave me, telling me that just because a young lady wanted to see my thingy didn’t mean that I had any obligation to show it to her. Alas, in the years that followed, I usually found that wise advice very difficult to follow.

Fast forward about a dozen years or so. When I was in the first flower of young manhood, between the ages of 18 and 21, I worked, off and on, as an artist’s model, posing in the nude for college and private studio art classes. I would stand there, in all my youthful glory, on an elevated platform, with three spotlights shining on me, hoping and praying that I would not suddenly be afflicted with an erection. One thing about that experience has always puzzled me. When it was time for me to take my break, I would always put on a robe, get a cup of coffee or a Coke, and wander around the studio, looking at the different artists’ interpretations of my body.

I was flabbergasted to discover that many of them, male and female artists alike, seemed to have a serious problem with penile perspective. Invariably, they portrayed me with a penis far larger than anyone could ever really possess. They were a class full of amateur Toms of Finland! I never knew, still don’t know, if they actually saw me that way or if they were using some sort of poetic license or pornographic fantasy or if they simply were so freaked out at having to stare at and draw a penis that they lost all sense of perspective. I vividly remember one middle-aged woman whose drawing made me look like a tripod.

“Is this really how you see me?” I asked her.

She smiled. “I think it must be how I see all men,” she replied.

OK. I thought it best not to pursue that one.

Two years ago, I attended a New Year’s Eve party. As New Year’s celebrants go, ours was really a pretty staid and quiet group. No party games about penises or anything. But later in the evening, a young man happened to mention that he had recently gotten a genital piercing, a Prince Albert. Such things, by the way, still fill me with horror. Shades of John Bobbitt again. Not since circumcision, when I was a day old, have I let anyone near that part of my anatomy with sharp instruments.

But, of course, several women wanted to see his Prince Albert. So. . .he unzipped and treated us all to his pierced member. All of these middle-aged Elises oohed and ahhed and uttered words like “interesting” and “fascinating.” “Doesn’t it hurt?” one asked. And I was struck at once by how far we have come since my father gave me that lecture, 60 years ago now, about keeping things discreetly in my pants. If I whipped mine out at a New Year’s Eve party, I would be hauled off to jail as a perv. But if you have an inch of shiny steel piercing your shaft like an arrow, you become, apparently, an objet d’art.

Well, I guess, weird though it all is, we are healthier for our new sangfroid. I remember when the word “penis” couldn’t even be said in polite society. When television censors allowed the word to be spoken on TV some years ago, “Saturday Night Live” did a hilarious sketch where the men in the cast all sang a song, the lyrics of which were: “Penis, penis, penis, penis, penis, etc.” for about three minutes. And, oddly enough, it was incredibly funny.