Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis Read Online Free PDF Page B

regarded as the epitome of animal horniness, spray their own beards with sperm and urine. The Ancient Greeks dreamt up all kinds of hybrids of man and billy-goat, such as the demi-god Satyr and the forest god Pan, and the physical attributes of these sensuous figures (horns, hoofs and beard) were adopted by Christianity to depict the Devil. Billy-goats, however, have some surprisingly female aspects.
    If one massages their nipples for an extended period, a milk-giving udder appears in front of the scrotum!
    The American jazz musician Charles Mingus compared the texture of sperm to cream: ‘She gulps and slurps the cream out of me while I melt and she sucks hard at my tree.’ John Hunter, a nineteenth-century English surgeon, observed in one of his essays that ‘if one holds sperm in one’s mouth it gives a warmth like spices’. The celebrated sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) wrote that many primitive peoples, particularly the Australian aborigines, made potions from sperm, which were given to sick or dying members of the tribe. In addition he mentions the Manicheans and the Albigensians, who sprinkled the bread used for Holy Communion with human sperm. In the seventeenth century sperm was regarded as an effective defence against witchcraft and a precious aphrodisiac. The church, however, refused to tolerate it, and in his book Ellis records prison sentences of seven years for the offence.
    According to reliable sources it is not unusual for young women today in a get-together in the pub to admit whether they ‘swallow’ or not. They’re not talking about E, amphetamines or suchlike, but whether or not they swallow sperm. There is some similarity between suckling and fellatio, between mother’s milk and sperm: just as an infant can taste whether its mother has eaten garlic, a woman who
    ‘swallows’ can taste the garlic that her partner has eaten the day before.
    Sperm is both stronger in flavour and more bitter if a man smokes and 26
    t h e t e s t i c l e s a n d t h e s c ro t u m drinks a lot of coffee, while the sperm of vegetarians reputedly tastes better than that of carnivores. Kiwi fruit particularly are supposed to improve the flavour. A famous (male) Dutch comic duo felt that truly emancipated women should immediately spit the sperm out again. I can’t remember why, nor do I have any ready-made answer on the subject. I do know, though, that only three men in every thousand can suck themselves off.
    While we are talking about ejaculation and secretion, this is the place to mention in passing the glands about which the English physician William Cowper was the first to publish in 1702, situated a little upstream of the prostate and also issuing into the urethra, which in a state of arousal produce the so-called preseminal fluid. In women the corresponding glands are named after the Danish researcher Bartholin (1585–1629).
    The smell of the scrotum
    The degree of hirsuteness and the smell of the scrotum vary – a topic that was raised as early as the 1870s in the work of the American feminist novelist and campaigner Lois Waisbrooker (1826–1909). Some of today’s racy pulp novelists, one feels, should have been made to study Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1974) as prescribed reading. In the latter book, with disarming frankness and great literary panache, Jong (1942–) evokes the physical attributes of her lovers, ephemeral and more significant:
    I once adored a conductor who never bathed, had stringy hair, and was a complete failure at wiping his ass. He always left shit stripes on my sheets. Normally I don’t go in for that sort of thing – but in him it was OK – I’m still not sure why. I fell in love with Bennett partly because he had the cleanest balls I’d ever tasted. Hairless and he practically never sweats. You could (if you wanted) eat off his asshole (like my grandmother’s kitchen floor).
    And later:
    We lay on his bed and held each other. We examined each other’s nakedness