To read Part 1, go here.

You have to won­der what kind of research he did and how he did it. Did he inter­view women? Cre­ate a list of all the pos­si­bil­i­ties he could imag­ine and ask them to check off on a list “all descrip­tions that apply?” Did he talk to men, get them to nar­rate their sex­ual philoso­phies and techniques? Did he observe what he wrote about first­hand, some­how get per­mis­sion to stand behind a wall con­structed so that he could spy on the cou­ples who had agreed to be his infor­mants? Or did he just make it all up? It’s impos­si­ble to know, but when Sheikh Nezawi wrote The Per­fumed Gar­den in the six­teenth cen­tury – it was trans­lated into Eng­lish by Richard Bur­ton in 1886 – he devoted an entire chap­ter 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 fem­i­nizes 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” (54). In most cases, how­ever, Sheikh Nezawi treats the male gen­i­tals synech­do­ci­cally, mak­ing it clear that, in describ­ing cer­tain kinds of penises, he is also describ­ing the men to whom they are attached. Here, for exam­ple is 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. (59)

And here is 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. (59)

My son will soon be nine years old. Espe­cially dur­ing the first years of his life, when he began to learn the names for the parts of his body – though I am aware the ques­tion is rel­e­vant even now – I thought a lot about how the way we talk about our gen­i­tals in this cul­ture expresses and, in part, cre­ates the way we feel as a cul­ture not just about the male body, but also about sex and the peo­ple we have sex with. Never before had I been con­fronted on a daily basis with the real­iza­tion that some­one else’s under­stand­ing of who he was, of what it might mean for him to live in his own body, hung quite lit­er­ally on my every word.

When he was two, for exam­ple, my wife would tell me sto­ries about how he occa­sion­ally got erec­tions when she washed his penis in the bath. “I don’t like it like this,” she told he would say, start­ing to cry. “I want it to be soft,” and he would try to push his penis down, which of course did not have the result he desired.

One night, I hap­pened to be home when this hap­pened, and I walked into the bath­room to find my wife crouch­ing at the edge of the tub, talk­ing to our son in a very sooth­ing voice, while he sat with the water run­ning behind him, breath­ing the last gasp­ing breaths of what had obvi­ously been a two-year-old’s very heavy cry. When my wife explained that he was cry­ing because he’d had an erec­tion, I leaned over the edge of the tub, took our son’s face in my hands and said, “Some­times my dool 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 being soft.”

My son’s eyes widened with a feel­ing so big it left him speech­less. I kissed his cheek and walked out, back to what­ever it was that I’d been doing. Later, my wife told me that after I’d left the room, he’d turned to her and said, in Per­sian, which is her native lan­guage and was his dom­i­nant lan­guage at the time, “Maman, dooleh baba sefteh!” (Mom, Dad’s penis gets hard!) We puz­zled briefly over what, specif­i­cally, he might have meant, and I tried to remem­ber if, when I was a boy, any of my adult male rel­a­tives had talked to me about my own 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 six or eight 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 is 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 child-language word for penis. We used it with my son when he was very young because it’s the word my wife used with him. At the time, as far as I knew, the word func­tioned nei­ther as a metaphor nor any other fig­ure of speech and referred only to penis. In this, dool con­trasted starkly with what my wife told me would have been the child-language word she would have used for vagina if we’d had a daugh­ter. Jish–which I have heard both chil­dren and adults use – is also an infor­mal word for urine and is the word peo­ple use when they say the Per­sian equiv­a­lent of I have to pee.

Over the years, how­ever, I have learned that there is at least one fig­ure of speech–doo­dool talah, lit­er­ally “golden penis” – which makes of the word dool some­thing more than a word for chil­dren. I have heard the term most fre­quently from my wife in moments when she feels her­self so full of emo­tion for our son that she lays her hand across his crotch and calls him doo­dool talah, a ges­ture which always reminds me of the pas­sages in Roslind Miles’ Love, Sex, Death and the Mak­ing of the Male where she talks about the ways in which, accord­ing to her, women, or at least mostly women, accul­tur­ate men to iden­tify with their penises. One scene that I remem­ber most vividly – though my copy of the book is in stor­age and so I can­not cite page num­bers right now – was a man’s descrip­tion of how his nanny would tell him it was time to put “lit­tle Johnny” (mean­ing his penis) to bed and how she would stroke him as he fell asleep. (When I lived in Korea, I had a lover who, while she was stroking my per­ineum, told me that was often how moth­ers calmed their sons when it was time to put them sleep.)

I don’t know if I agree with Miles that such con­di­tion­ing – as I think she would put it – lies at the core of phal­lo­cen­trism, not only as a the­o­ret­i­cal con­struct, but as men’s lived expe­ri­ence, but I do often won­der what my son has inter­nal­ized from, what mean­ing he will give to, the fact that his mother has told him over and over again that his penis is golden, that he is her golden penis.

If Eng­lish were my wife’s native lan­guage, and the choice entirely mine, I’d have taught my son to call his penis his penis, noth­ing else. He’s got plenty of time to learn the other names that organ goes by and to nego­ti­ate the lay­ers of mean­ing with which they will shape the way his body and his sex­u­al­ity are 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, a quick read-through of which 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, joy-stick, Mr. Happy.

Many of these words – in addi­tion, of course, to the old stand­bys: cock, dick, prick, sch­long – have been famil­iar to me for a very long time (though I have to admit that divin­ing rod and pup were new to me), and I have always thought them to be under­whelm­ing in their imag­i­na­tive poten­tial, not to men­tion (bazooka, spear, ham­mer, roto rooter) scary. Foun­tain pen–I’m a writer, what can I say – and divin­ing rod seem kind of fun, but the impres­sion I am left with when I read through the full list of which the above is a sub­set is the impres­sion I had, even as a teenager, when I was an avid reader of Pent­house Forum–both the let­ters in the mag­a­zine and the stand­alone pub­li­ca­tion – and I would laugh 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 or rod of love become ridicu­lous – accom­pa­nied as they always were by a num­ber of inches, as in “he (or I) slammed into me (or her) with his (or my) nine-inch kosher pickle” – but the descrip­tions the let­ter writ­ers came up with often de-eroticized, for me any­way, the act they were describ­ing. I remem­ber read­ing one Forum let­ter and think­ing that I could not imag­ine , from either a male or female per­spec­tive, a less appe­tiz­ing metaphor for a woman giv­ing oral sex to a man than “swal­low­ing his salami whole?”

One sur­ro­gate term for penis did cap­ture my imag­i­na­tion, though I learned it from my friends, not any­thing that I read. Like the descrip­tion of The Pigeon in The Per­fumed Gar­den, “skin flute” seemed to me to break free, at least poten­tially, of the demean­ingly sim­plis­tic and single-minded point of view 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 or impro­vi­sa­tion, 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 on 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 moved always a half-step up, rais­ing the level of ten­sion, chang­ing the key and send­ing the melody off in a new direc­tion, though still reach­ing for the res­o­lu­tion it required. I don’t know how I decided this, from I knew from then on that I wanted sex­ual plea­sure, my own and my part­ners – when I had one – to be like that; and I prac­ticed (at that time I prac­ticed alone) as both the instru­men­tal­ist and the instru­ment, dis­cov­er­ing not only the hows and wheres of touch­ing myself, but also meth­ods of breath­ing and of hold­ing and releas­ing the plea­sure until it some­times seemed I could sus­tain it indefinitely.

To some it may 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. Indeed, as won­der­ful and excit­ing as this sex­ual awak­en­ing was for me, I did not think I had dis­cov­ered any­thing other than what those with more sex­ual expe­ri­ence than I had already knew. I thought every­one saw sex­ual plea­sure in more or less the same way that I did. I did not under­stand how wrong I was until I got to college.

///

“For me,” our dorm stud laughed, “it’s not even a ques­tion. If I don’t get laid, I don’t feel like a man.”

We were talk­ing about the par­ties being held that night on cam­pus, and some­one had just turned the con­ver­sa­tion towards whether or not any of us would “get lucky.”

“If I don’t fuck a woman at least two or three times a week,” the stud con­tin­ued, “it’s like there’s this empti­ness that starts grow­ing inside me.”

<
p>“Why?” I wanted to know.

“Because – wait!” He looked around at the rest of the guys in the room. “Don’t you guys all feel the same way?” Some nod­ded their heads, and then one of them turned to me. “What do you do when you’re horny and you can’t get laid?”

“I mas­tur­bate.”

At the word mas­tur­bate, a ten­sion entered the room that had not been there before. Sud­denly, it seemed like my friends, includ­ing the stud – who just moments ago had been wax­ing elo­quent about his need to fuck women – did not know what to say. Then, as if on cue, they all started speak­ing at once, though what they were say­ing had noth­ing to do with my ques­tion. All they wanted to know was why I didn’t have a girl­friend, and they offered to intro­duce me to women who were known to “put out.” With a woman, they explained, 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 her skin, warm and moist and slip­pery, against yours was guar­an­tee – and that was the word they used guar­an­tee–that com­ing inside her was like no other plea­sure you would ever feel. Even if she didn’t know what to do, they said, it didn’t mat­ter. The bot­tom line was her skin against yours.

My own expe­ri­ence was quite dif­fer­ent. Sure, I liked to fuck, and oral sex some­times left me quite lit­er­ally weak in the knees, but it was not uncom­mon for me to feel, after sex, that I could’ve done it bet­ter myself. After all, who knew bet­ter than me where and how I liked to be touched? When I tried to explain this to my friends, how­ever, they insisted that the prob­lem – though they never defined pre­cisely what the prob­lem was – had to be with me. When they had sex, they said, the sen­sa­tion was always, uni­formly great. Per­son­ally, I found this hard to believe, 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 – and the more deeply I came to under­stand that women had learned this idea from men – the more I began to real­ize that my friends’ idea of sex­ual plea­sure was not rooted in the “bot­tom line” of skin on skin, as they had claimed, but on being an engine pis­ton and know­ing they had used a woman as their “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 Cas­san­dra, who wrote so elo­quently about how sex­ual pen­e­tra­tion was painful for her, a legacy of the sex­ual abuse she sur­vived as a child at the hands of a woman, and about how, despite the pain she felt, she would fake orgasm to pro­tect both her secret and the ego of the man she was with; and I think of my other stu­dent, Esther, who won­dered in the con­clu­sion of an essay about her own abuse if there was a mark on her, vis­i­ble only to men, invit­ing them onto and into her body, and I think of the list she made in that essay of all the men who have put their hands and mouths and more on her and in her, as if they were respond­ing to such a mark; and I think of the daugh­ter I do not yet have and may never have, and of my wife, and of the women who were my lovers before my wife, and I am hum­bled that all of these women were and are and will be able and will­ing to trust me, and I am aston­ished, because I don’t always know if I can trust myself.

 Cross-posted on Alas.