Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Men talk intimately, humorously and with great honesty about their most private part.
May 13, 2003 | We thought it was time for a series on men and their penises. Penises are often overlooked, underdiscussed and taken for granted unless they're in use. Many men are hesitant to speak about their penises except in the crudest, or most perfunctory, ways.
Novelist and screenwriter Terence Clarke has broken through these barriers and is in the process of interviewing more than 200 men -- from a black limo driver to an underemployed Irish poet, and even a man who is becoming a woman.
The pieces running this week are selections from an upcoming book called "Cleopatra's Needle: A Report From the Heart and Soul of Men's Last Taboo." The idea for the project came about when Clarke and editor/publisher Alan Rinzler were talking about Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues" and realized that there was no comparable work on men. Clarke says, "Men keep quiet about their penises but underneath all that silence is an authentic universal preoccupation with precisely what is never mentioned."
All names have been changed to protect the privacy of the penises.
Horacio, my pretty flower
Pedro is an intake clerk for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. He's 31 years old, a small man, very dark-skinned, who wears tinted eyeglasses and a suit and tie every day to work. He does not care for the sloppiness of the contemporary workplace.
No, I don't like the way people seem not to care about themselves anymore. The way they dress at work, they look like bums! My grandfather wouldn't have stood for it, and I feel the same way. So I try to look sharp every day at work. I remember him, although he was very old when I was a kid here in San Jose. My grandmother told me a lot about him. He was from Guadalajara, a furniture salesman. They met in Guadalajara and, you know, in the early 20s he didn't just go out with my grandmother. You didn't do that. He'd ask her to go for a walk on the ramblas on Sunday afternoon, and her mother'd go with them. Or he'd come over for a visit some evening, and they'd sit in the parlor while her mother sat in the living room, which was right next to the parlor, knitting or something but really just watching them. No touch. No making out. None of that.
But, you know, my grandmother, she loved that man! She always told me how beautiful he was, and formal. How he treated her like a lady, a woman! Which meant that he treated her in a manly way, brought her flowers, respected her wishes and always, always greeted her mother and father with real feeling, real respect.
So when I'm at work, I try to be the same way. And I'm that way with my wife, too. She even calls me "Horacio" sometimes, which was my grandfather's name. But, I mean, you know, you asked me about my penis? My wife calls it "mi linda flor," my pretty flower. I like that. But I like it just as much when she calls it "Horacio."
"Please take me to bed"
Clifford is a marketing executive in San Francisco in his late 50s. He was married for 23 years and has one adult son. He is a fallen-away Catholic, an avid reader of South American novels, and loves his social life.
When I was a little boy, my father instructed me to keep my arms and hands outside the covers when I slept. When he tucked me in, he would arrange the blanket and sheet over me, with my Lone Ranger pajama arms resting above the blanket, my hands folded together over my stomach.
"Keep them that way, Cliffie," he would smile, tousling my hair before moving toward the light switch. "And sleep tight!" I didn't succeed. His admonitions reminded me of the similar instructions he gave on those occasions on which I had to wear a coat and tie somewhere -- Christmas mass, Easter service, a funeral -- and I felt similarly restricted, similarly tightened.
For me, one of the lovely pleasures of sleep has always been to become immersed in the sheets and blankets and to allow their dreamy warmth to steal over me like a warm fog, quickly. So as soon as my father left the bedroom, I'd bring my hands beneath the blankets, roll over on my side and go to sleep.
I did not do what he was worried I would do, which was to masturbate. I didn't question why he wished me to be so formal in my sleeping. But the answer became very clear, like lightning, one remarkable night when I was 17 and a freshman at the University of California, alone in bed with a sudden erection. I took it in hand and, well, the rest is history!
For me, onanism came late in life. By 17, most men have become expert in the practice. So I was a late bloomer. But once I did discover it, I recalled my father's loving -- and now suddenly failed -- advice. I had never asked him about it. I never spoke to my father about sex in any way. My mother was the source of all such information as, later, friends were and, much later, some generous, kindhearted and barely contained women. After my discovery in Berkeley, I knew why he had been so careful.
But now, given the pleasure I had found, I wondered why he had cared about it so negatively. Before then, I had thought of my penis as an odd sort of tube to have flopping around before me. What god would have invented that? It was convenient in that toilets were perfectly situated to receive the liquid that periodically ran from it. But what was the point of it otherwise? There were moments, of course, when it got big, and I knew why it got big. (My mother had explained it to me.) But I really didn't understand the consequences of its getting big -- that is, the immediate consequences and the immediate solutions.
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