Five minutes into Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" leads me to this passage in which Miller talks about his "golden period" in France, "when [he] had not a single friend." He says:

"Each morning the dreary walk to the American Express, and each morning the inevitable answer from the clerk. Dashing here and there like a bedbug, gathering butts now and then, sometimes furtively, sometimes brazenly; sitting down on a bench and squeezing my guts to stop the gnawing, or walking through the Jardin des Tuileries and getting an erection looking at the dumb statues."

There are hundreds of references in contemporary fiction to these sorts of erections -- erections intended to make a character's sexual arousal or nature more concrete and discernible, or, more commonly, to establish a contrast between the mind's affairs and the body's undiscriminating inclinations, as is the case here.

Although I can't be certain, it seems to me that otherwise fine writers often call erections "bulges." I can't imagine why they would be so hideously possessed. Most male writers would consider an essay on the erection an absurd waste of time and energy, besides. You might as well write an essay on the eyelash, they would say, or a few things about the vagina.

Well, I just might, I'd tell them. Don't tempt me.

During my short-lived dating years before and after my first marriage, I had a few erection experiences with mentally ill and/or drunken men, and all I can say is that I do not recommend either these men or their so-called erections. I've also had experiences with men whose habit of manipulating their penises was a sort of dysfunction, turning what should be a collective endeavor into an autoerotic nightmare.

They turn their backs to you and stroke themselves, perhaps sticking out their furry tongues for inspiration. Then they turn around again to face you with an idiotic grin on their faces. But by this time you're already offended and pouty and would rather watch reruns of "Little House on the Prairie" than have sex, would rather scrub the scum out of the sink or drink undiluted coffee grinds than part your legs for the dumb, man-inspired and thus highly N/A erection lying there beside your could-not-care-less thigh.

And as for teenage sex -- well, teenage sex is so contained within the dark, musky leather of the back seat of some boy's car in the middle of the darkest of all dark nights, or within the dark folds of a dark couch inside a dark basement or movie theater or the dark corner of a dark yard at a friend's pool party, that I don't think girls actually see the erections they're contending with for a good many years. I know I didn't.

I don't remember looking at any erections at all until I was perhaps years into my first marriage. I remember the first erection I ever felt, and it was a horrible, ghastly, absurd thing indeed. Perhaps I thought that since it felt horrible, it must look horrible, and therefore decided not to look at it until I was mature enough to handle the fright.

Anyway, for whatever it's worth, we were in a car, and it was after midnight. By then I'd read "Gone With the Wind" three or four times, and maybe even "Wuthering Heights." But I'd never heard of "The Hite Report," so, like most girls, I equated sex with love and misty weather.

Some song like "Hot Child in the City" was playing on the radio, and I tried, somehow, to be the hot child my boyfriend, one of the three captains on the football team, seemed to want me to be, and so we kissed each other's faces and ears and lips and necks while we simultaneously moved over the dangerous gearshift into the back seat.

Then there was the prerequisite unbuttoning, my hair in my face and his, the smell of his cologne like butterscotch candy, the car windows steaming up, certain lame statements of his that I refuse to remember verbatim, and, then, in no time at all, it was over.

This, I know, is the common story. But there it is, and still there's no erection for inspection -- just the sense that I'd crossed a bridge that I was bound to cross sooner or later, and the boy's gratitude, which I suppose he expressed by buying me a Coke or a pack of gum, and the feeling that I was all grown up now and ready for prime time, which, girls -- and let me be quite emphatic about this -- I most certainly was not.

An erection can be, honestly enough, more than a little bit distressing. Sometimes it looks like a lost turnip bulb that has been pulled out of the soil for some reason you can't begin to fathom. In the darkness, if the man with the erection is standing in a room looking around for condoms and all you can see of him is his profile, the thing can look like a weapon: all shadowy and gleaming with malicious intent. It is not smooth, like his back, or endearing, like his smile. It does little to increase what you describe to other women as his character and dignity; it is like an internal body organ that has been accidentally moved to the exterior. I would like to know how many teenage girls screamed when they saw their first one.

I imagine girls of many countries faint at the sight of their first erection, or go off and join a convent and marry Jesus precisely because his physical body is no physical body but rather, say, a halfway-hot beam of light. As we all know, halfway-hot beams of light cannot blow up with blood and change shape in three seconds flat. And unless you're the Virgin Mary in a Renaissance painting, beams of light can't get you pregnant, either.

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