Next time you’re stuck for conversation at a dinner party, why not use one of these fascinating facts to break the ice?
1. In mammalian terms the male of Homo sapiens is spectacularly endowed – his penis, when erect, being roughly three times larger than a 400lb gorilla’s.
2. In Pharaonic Egypt, Egyptian men were so fearful of vaginal blood that they would hire Aethiops (famed for the blackness of their skin and the enormousness of their members) to deflower their brides.
3. The biblical ‘sin of Onan’ had nothing to do with every teenager’s favourite pastime but in fact referred originally to ‘coitus interruptus’.
The reason onanism has for so many years been used to mean something else is the subject of an influential essay published in 1758 by a Swiss doctor called Samuel-Auguste Tissot. Onanism: Or a Treatise on the Maladies Produced by Masturbation was not the first tract to claim that wanking made you (inter alia) blind. But it was argued with such passion that it caught the public imagination, especially after its cause was taken up by Tissot’s friend Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Perhaps you knew this already. Perhaps you knew why it was that St Augustine’s teaching effectually managed to banish the penis (save that of the infant Christ) from Western art for 800 years, what Peter Abelard did to Helo•se, where Freud got his ideas, what Andrea Dworkin and Susan Brownmiller contributed to the feminist debate and how British doctor Giles Brindley introduced his proto-Viagra drug to a convention of urologists in Las Vegas. But if you don’t you’re going to find this book far more than just another collection of wicked willy statistics to be kept in the downstairs loo. For by Friedman’s fascinating account the history of the penis is (well, almost) the history of civilisation itself.
Fascinating indeed. It turns out to derive from fascinum, the penis replica found almost everywhere in ancient Rome: on chariots ridden by triumphant generals, in public bath-houses, in amulets worn round boys’ necks. Like the Greeks, Egyptians and Sumerians before them, the Romans were willy-mad. ‘Hic Habitat Felicitas,’ it says on the walls of Pompeii above and below a picture of an erect penis. But then this carpe diem attitude was only to be expected when the average life expectancy was 25.
Suddenly, too late, I realised what fun I might have had if only I’d persisted with my Latin and Greek. I might have found out about the two cultures’ conflicting views of penile perfection – the Greeks preferred them small and slender; the Romans valued big ones to such an extent that their generals sometimes promoted soldiers on the basis of penis size – and about the pondus Judaeus, a weight apparently used by socially ambitious Jews to stretch their foreskins so as to pass as Romans.
It was only with Christianity that the hapless penis began taking a battering, transformed by St Augustine from mystical rod of fertility and male power into shameful symbol of original sin. After the Renaissance it was briefly redeemed when first Leonardo, and later men of science like Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (in 1673 the first person to see individual sperm under the microscope), recognised its marvellous ingenuity as a reproductive engine. But then onanomania broke out and it was back to the dog-house.
Not everyone fell for the anti-masturbation line. Mark Twain fought a heroic rearguard action, inventing classical quotes on the subject.
Caesar, in his Commentaries, said, ‘To the lonely it is company; to the forsaken it is a friend; to the aged and impotent it is a benefactor; they that be penniless are still rich in that they have this majestic diversion
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