Sheikh Nezawi devoted an entire chapter of The Perfumed Garden, which he wrote in the sixteenth century and which Richard Burton translated into English in 1886, to "The Divers Names of the Virile Member." Some are self-explanatory, like Generative Organ, Hairy One, or Bald-Head. At least one, The Pigeon, is interesting as a metaphor because of the way it maternalizes the penis: "It is so called because, after having been swollen and at the moment when it is returning to its state of repose, [this kind of penis] resembles a pigeon settling on its eggs." In most cases, however, Sheikh Nefzawi treats the penis synecdochically, making it clear that in describing certain kinds of penises, he is also describing the men to whom they are attached. Thus we have "The Creeper":
This name has been given to the penis because, when it gets between a woman's thighs and sees a plump vulva, it starts to creep on her legs and pubis, then, approaching the entrance, it continues to creep until it has taken possession. When comfortably installed it penetrates completely and ejaculates.
Or "The Knocker":
It is thus named because, when it arrives at the door of the vulva, it gives a light knock; if the vulva replies and opens the door, it enters; but if it gets no reply, it knocks again until successful. By knocking at the door we refer to the rubbing of the penis on the vulva until it becomes moist. The production of this moisture is what is called opening the door.
That our feelings about sex, about how we make love and about the people we make love with are reflected in and, in part, created by the way we talk about our genitals is a truism that hardly bears repeating. Since my son was born, however, I've been thinking about this truism a great deal, for his presence in our lives confronts my wife and myself on a daily basis with the question of how and why we teach him to talk and feel about his body the way we do. When he was two, for example, he began to have erections when my wife washed his penis in the bath. "I don't like it like this," he would say, starting to cry, "I want it to be soft," and he would try to push his organ back into its foreskin, which only guaranteed of course that the erection would continue.
Usually, either because I was not yet home from work or because I was typing away in my office with the door closed, I didn't hear him crying, and so I learned about these bathtub erections only after the fact. One night, however, when I walked into the bathroom because I needed to tell my wife something, she was crouched at the edge of the tub talking to my son, who was sitting with the water running behind him and breathing the last gasping breaths of what had obviously been a two-year-old's very heavy cry. When she explained that he'd had an erection and was very upset about it, I crouched down next to my wife and leaned over the edge of the tub to get closer to him. "Shahob," I said, "sometimes my dool also gets hard when I don't want it to. I just wait and it gets soft again. You do the same thing. Don't get upset. Just wait and it will go back to the way you want it."
Shahob's eyes widened with a feeling so big it left him speechless. I touched his face, kissed his cheek and walked out. My wife told me later, though, that after I left, Shahob turned to her and said, in Persian, which is her native language and for him the language of intimacy, "Maman, dool eh baba sefteh!" (Mom, Dad's penis gets hard!) We puzzled briefly over what my son had meant, though we couldn't and would never be able to know for sure, and I tried to remember if, when I was a young boy, any of my adult male relatives had talked to me about my body in a similar way, offering themselves as a reflection of my biological maleness and the stance I might take towards it. I don't think anyone ever did, but I did recall a moment when I was no older than five or six in which I caught a glimpse of what I might have learned if someone had: My father and I were in the locker room getting ready to leave the beach. His back was to me and he was talking about something I couldn't listen to because he was naked. My eyes wandered among the whorls of black fur that ran from the nape of his neck, along his shoulders and arms, down his back and into the dark cleft of his buttocks. When he turned around, I could see where the hair of his back met the hair of his front in the bush between his legs. His penis hung like a pendulum, swinging slowly between his thighs when he walked, and I wondered if it got hard like mine did, if he played with it like I'd begun to do. I wanted to run and throw my arms around him, to pass through his skin and know what it would mean to live with such size. I was hungry with the prescience that his body would someday be mine, that my body was his in the making.
Dool is the Persian child-language word for penis. We use it with my son because it's the word my wife uses with him. As opposed to jish, the word she says she would use for vagina if we had a daughter—and which is also the Persian child-language word for urine—dool as far as I know refers to nothing other than penis and functions neither as a metaphor nor any other figure of speech. In this straightforward signification, dool seems to be similar to the word that comes back to me from my own childhood: dingus. Of the two, I prefer dool. Dingus, when I say it now, sounds too much like something you'd call someone when you wanted to put them down, instead of saying idiot or fool.
If English were my wife's native language, and the choice were entirely mine, I think I'd teach my son to call his genitals his penis, plain and simple. He's got plenty of time to learn the other names that organ goes by and to negotiate the layers of meaning with which those names shape the way his body and his sexuality will be seen, both by himself and the society in which he lives. According to the Thesaurus of Slang, published in 1988 by Facts on File, there are one-hundred-forty-three of these alternative names. There seems to be neither rhyme nor reason to the order in which the list is given, but a quick read-through reveals some obvious categories of reference.
- FOOD: meat, banana, cucumber, kosher pickle, baloney, sausage, salami, frankfurter, tootsie roll, peppermint stick, jelly roll.
- TOOLS & MACHINERY: dipstick, divining rod, pike, piston, machine, roto rooter, instrument, fountain pen, hammer, poker, tool, plunger, cherry picker.
- WEAPONS: bazooka, gun, spear, sword, rammer, battering ram, dagger, pistol, peace maker.
- ANIMALS: serpent, snake, one-eyed monster, one-eyed wonder, pecker, pup.
- EMOTION: love muscle, rod of love, heart, joystick, Mr. Happy.
Many of these words—in addition, of course, to the old standbys: cock, dick, prick, schlong—I remember from when I was younger, and I remember how much I didn't like them, not because they were obscene per se, but because they seemed to me so unimaginative. As a teenager, I was an avid reader of Penthouse's "Forum," letters to the magazine that purported to be first person accounts of the sexual adventures enjoyed by the publication's male and female readers. The stories fascinated and excited me, and they became—as they were intended to become—the basis for many of my sexual fantasies at the time, but I often couldn't help laughing out loud at the linguistic contortions the letter-writers would go through to avoid using the word penis. Not only did the constant repetition of expressions like "love-muscle," "rod of love," "tootsie-roll," and "poker" become ridiculous—accompanied as they always were by a number of inches, as in "he (or I) reached into me (or her) with his (or my) nine-inch cherry picker"—but the descriptions the letter writers came up with often de-eroticized the act they were describing. What could be less appetizing, I thought, from either a male or a female perspective, than describing a woman giving oral sex to a man as "swallowing his salami whole?"
One surrogate term for penis did capture my imagination, though I learned it from my friends, not the magazine. Like the description of "The Pigeon" from The Perfumed Garden, "skin flute" seemed to me a metaphor that broke free, at least potentially, of the demeaningly simplistic and single-minded point of view—I would not at the time have known to say male dominant or patriarchal—that gave rise to those other expressions. The only time I ever heard "skin flute" used, however, was in reference to masturbation—"He's playing the skin flute!"—which my friends never said in anything other than a derisive tone of voice I found hard to comprehend. To me the idea of masturbation as a kind of music-making, of the giving of sexual pleasure as a kind of musical composition, was fascinating. I'd just begun in my high school music theory class to learn about tension, release and resolution, and I remember how in a lecture about a specific composer—I think it was Wagner—my teacher had us listen to a symphonic work in which the music seemed like it was going to resolve at any moment, but instead, usually accompanied by a change in harmonies, moved a half-step up, raising the level of tension, changing key and sending the melody off in a new direction to search for the resolution it required. I don't how I decided this, but I knew from then on that I wanted sexual pleasure to be like that, and I practiced as both the instrumentalist and the instrument, discovering not only the hows and wheres of touching myself, but also techniques of breath and of holding and releasing the pleasure until it sometimes seemed I could sustain it indefinitely.
To some it will sound like I am talking about Tantric sex, but I'm not. I didn't know at the time that such a thing as Tantric sex even existed. I thought everyone saw sexual pleasure the same way I did.
I didn't understand how wrong I was till I got to college. Once, during my sophomore year, I was hanging out with a group of friends in the room of the guy who was "the stud" or our dorm. The talk had turned to the part we were going to that night and whether any of would be lucky enough to get laid. The stud laughed, "For me, it's not even a question. I have to get laid; if I don't, I don't feel like a man."
"Why?" I asked the stud. This was a new idea for me. I was not a virgin, but I had never, at least not consciously, equated that I'd had with what it meant for be to be, or to become, a man.
"If I don't fuck a woman at least two or three times a week," the stud answered, "it's like there's this emptiness that starts growing inside me—but wait…" he interrupted himself and looked around at the group. "Why are you asking this? Don't all guys feel the same way?" Now he turned to me, his voice taking on a slightly accusatory tone, "What do you do when you're horny and you can't get laid?"
"I masturbate," I said. "Sometimes I like it better than being with a woman." Which was true. When I was by myself I was in complete control and I could orchestrate my pleasure the way I wanted, something the women I had been with so far seemed not to care very much about.
When I said the word masturbate, a tension entered the room that had not been there before, and my friends were silent for what seemed like minutes, though it was probably fifteen seconds at the most. It was as if they didn't know what the word masturbate meant and were afraid to ask, though I knew of course that couldn't be the case. Then, as if on cue, they all started speaking at once, but the focus of their attention had nothing to do with my original question. Instead, they wanted to know why I didn't have a girlfriend and if I wanted them to help me find one. A few offered to introduce me to girls who "put out." With a girl, they explained to me, and it was clear from their tone that they assumed I was a virgin, "it"—meaning ejaculation—was entirely different from when you were by yourself. The simple fact of the girl's body next to yours guaranteed, and this was the word they used, guaranteed that the sensation would be phenomenal. Even if she didn't know what to do, they said, it didn't matter. The bottom line was skin on skin.
I disagreed. For while oral sex often left me quite literally weak in the knees—and my friends were surprised to learn I was not as inexperienced as they'd assumed I was—my experience of intercourse with the same woman was, as often as not, disappointing by comparison.
My friends insisted that the problem had to be with me. When they had sex, they said, from one encounter to the next, the sensation was always, uniformly, great. Personally, I found it hard to believe that anyone could think this way, but the more sexually active I became, and the more I found myself with women whose entire idea of male sexual pleasure could be summed up by the in and out and up and down of an engine piston, the more I began to realize that my friends' ideas of pleasure were invested not in the "bottom line" of skin on skin, as they had claimed, but in the joy of conquest, of knowing that a woman had made herself into that piston's casing.
The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people—physically occupied inside, internally invaded—be free? I think of my student who writes so eloquently about how sexual penetration is painful for her, a legacy of the sexual abuse she survived as a child, and about how, despite the pain she feels, she fakes orgasm both to protect the ego of the man she's with and to keep the secret of her abuse a secret; and I think of my other student who wonders in the conclusion of a poignant essay about her own abuse if there is a mark on her, visible only to men, inviting them onto and into her body, and I remember the list she makes in that essay of all the men who have put their hands and mouths and more on and in her as if they were responding to such a mark; and I think of the daughter I do not yet and may never have, and of my wife, and of the women who were my lovers before my wife, and I am humbled that they were and are and will be willing to trust me, and I am astonished, because I don't always know if I can trust myself.
Notes:
1Sheikh Nefzawi, The Perfumed Garden, trans. Richard Burton (Rochester: Park Street Press, 1992) 54.
2Ibid.
3Ibid. 59.
