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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I sing, for my daughter, of shanks and shafts and the endearing contrast between the mind's affairs and the body's undiscriminating inclinations.
Jul 4, 2001 | This is a midget and perhaps very foolish ode, I kid you not, to the erection. I'm writing it for my baby girl, who's just now taking an afternoon nap inside her exemplary body on the big bed she was born in. I take on the expedition, too, for her friend Charlotte, who just turned 2 in April, and for the companions the both of them will have in the years to come.
I was myself a doe in the headlights when it came to sex. I was a grasshopper on the windshield of a Dodge Durango. I was a wee strawberry below the steel-toed boots of some mean-assed fisherman. My parent did sit me down for "the talk" when I was about 11, and my father, a painter, even got out his paper and his pencils. But what my parents covered that afternoon was menstruation and ovulation. And while there is nothing wrong with menstruation and ovulation, it was erections that dumbfounded me, erections that were the trump cards in the deck.
Thus I take them out here and lay them -- ace of spades, of hearts, of clubs and of diamonds -- on the table.
Beyond the horrid euphemisms of insipid romance novels, in which the erect penis is most commonly referred to as "throbbing manhood," I have never read any sentence in any font referring in any specific, informative way to any erection -- not in the singular, not in the plural, not on an American man, not even on an Italian guy. The only joke I know about the erection is not even a joke about the erection. It goes like this: "Why do men name their penises?" The punch line, as you may already know, is that they would hate for their most important decisions to be made by a complete stranger.
If I type "erection" into the window of a good Internet search engine, I am led, first and foremost, to countless Web sites concerning impotence and Viagra. This leads me to understand even more completely what I have understood since I was 18, and that is that men are altogether dedicated to the health and well-being of their own erections. My Internet search also leads me to Web sites on erecting steel towers, and to pornographic pages single-mindedly allegiant to the masturbatory practices of gay men.
In the process of uncovering all this information, I saw a photo of a creature called a "shemale": a man/woman with two breasts and a (flaccid and rather small) penis. Whether shemales are creatures of nature or chemically induced, I can't imagine. All I know is that the Internet is too distracting -- an underwater tunnel full to the brim with newer and stranger fishes. Thus I prefer to limit this discussion to my own library, memory and imagination, and to the more general area of old-fashioned speculation, which is where I do my fanciest footwork anyhow.
If someone wanted to find out what, in exacting biological terms, an erection is, if she wanted to learn what a man wearing an erection feels about it or how best to inspire erections without lifting a hand or what some common feminine responses to erections might be or how long erections stay erections before and after orgasm or what men do to annihilate their own erections when they emerge in disagreeable places or even read the most embarrassing erection stories ever told, my 1971 edition of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" would be of no use to her. There are three indexed references to erections in my edition of that famous book: one describing the four "phases of the sexual response cycle" of men, one in respect, somehow, to the Pill and the third in a discussion of the pros and cons of sterilization.
Or I could canvas one of the baby books. As the mother of three children ranging in age from 14 years to 14 months, I have a fairly extensive collection. "What to Expect in the First Year," a highly annoying, biased and stuck-up little book that I bought at a yard sale, has a section on the erections of baby boys. The authors say:
"All baby boys have erections sometimes (though their mothers may not be aware of them), but some have them more often than others. Such erections require no particular notice on your part."
This is not very useful advice, as it fails to mention how alarming a baby boy's erection can be to the mother who has just given birth to him. It also fails to mention that the new mother will typically keep her alarm to herself during her regular pediatric appointments, since it is usually embarrassing and perhaps even impossible to say the word "erection" to strangers, even if those strangers are physicians who are paid large sums of money to enter the arduous conversational realm of the body's means and manners. Besides, my own early erection concerns never had much to do with my baby boys. They centered, perhaps obviously, around the bodies of grown men.
