In Praise Of The Penis
Salon has an entertaining article listing 10 fun facts about penises. Please click over to their website for the full list, but here are my favorite items:
Fetuses can get erections
That’s right, and ultrasound scans prove it. “So many newborn males greet the world with an erection that the sexologist William Masters in his earlier obstetric days set himself the challenge of trying to cut the umbilical cord before it happened,” writes Hickman.
Before there was Viagra, there were monkey balls
They didn’t have Cialis at the turn of the century, but they did have monkey-ball transplants.
In order to cure impotence, doctors began experimenting with xenotransplantation: surgically transplanting testicles from goats, chimpanzees and baboons into male humans. “Thousands of men around the world in the 1920s went under the knife for the supposed benefits of what were known as ‘monkey glands,” he says.
By the way, it didn’t work.
The big-balled cheater
“Testicular research of a more sociological kind has deduced that men with large testicles are likely to be more unfaithful, the converse being true of men with small testicles,” says Hickman.
Thus, he advises, with tongue firmly planted in cheek: “A woman” — or man, I would add — “seeking a reliable long-term partner might be advised to invest in an orchidometer,” a medical instrument designed for measuring balls.
Penises can actually break
“Every year at least two hundred Americans, and thirty to forty Britons break their erect penis,” writes Hickman. Most do so during “violent intercourse.”
But there are also cases where men snap their member — indeed, Hickman notes that such incidents are accompanied by an audible crack — by falling out of bed with an erection.
The cure for a broken penis? Six weeks of bed rest with a penis splint!
Masturbation panic popularized circumcision
King Louis XVI of France was circumcised because of a too-tight foreskin, which caused the procedure to become “fashionable among the aristocracy,” says Hickman.
But ”what made circumcision common among the proliferating nineteenth-century middle classes on both sides of the Atlantic was the hysteria about masturbation; removing the foreskin helped its prevention, doctors declared, and also cured bed-wetting and other conditions.”
The world’s largest penis
The largest penis ever to be medically verified was 13.5 inches long and 6.25 inches in circumference.
Just to put that in perspective, the average vagina is three to four inches deep.
And a few of my own contributions:
The old myth about “growers” vs “showers” is actually true
Some men’s penises get much bigger during erections, while others’ flaccid penises are almost the same size as their erect penises.
The average man gets about a dozen erections during the course of a day
Most of those take place in his sleep.
Smoking can shorten the length of your penis
Makes you think twice about lighting up, doesn’t it?
Two is better than one?
It’s extremely rare, but there are records of men being born with two penises.