Woohoo! Two books about the male body! “The average length of the adult male penis is approximately five times greater than that of an adult gorilla,” says Mels van Driel, a Dutch urologist who, away from the examination room, seems to have spent his life researching the history of the penis.
Why is the human penis so big? Maybe there’s an evolutionary explanation, van Driel says. “A relatively long penis may have been intended to scare off other males.” Or perhaps the reason is that the man with the longest penis has the greatest chance of delivering his sperm safely.
Reviewed here:
Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis, by Mels van Driel; The Naked Man: A Study of the Male Body, by Desmond Morris
Finally, after endless knowing smiles from women and arch looks across the dinner table about The Vagina Monologues, men have a book of their own to display, not that it will have the oomph of The Vagina Monologues. But van Driel’s book at least shows that discussions of the male organ of generation can be jolly and fun, and there’s more to it than just the endless black night of male oppression of which we have heard so much for the past 30 years.
Van Driel wants to do two things: to inform readers about the anatomy and workings of the penis, scrotum and the rest of it, doing so lightheartedly and with humour, as though a slightly boozy uncle were instructing you about how machine guns work; second, to entertain.
Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis, by Mels van Driel, Reaktion, 288 pages, $40.50
This is not a heavy book. Van Driel has read enormously in classical literature and folklore and wears his learning lightly, as we revisit the observation of 1950s U.S. sex researcher Alfred Kinsey that “between 70 and 80 per cent of men hang to the left.” Or learn that the first magnetic resonance imaging study of coitus was achieved in the author’s hometown of Groningen in the Netherlands in the 1990s. The couple had to make love in the narrow tunnel of the MRI scanner. (Many of the men sought out as experimental subjects were unable to perform.)
Why are men unable to perform, if given adequate stimuli? Van Driel says erectile failure stems from dim historic fears of the vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth that may cut the organ off upon entry. “The fear of the vagina dentata and the accompanying premature loss of erection before entering are as old as mankind.” What can we do to keep our erections? “The only thing that works is to talk about it.”
It’s a bit surprising that a book so practical – for those interested in their organs of reproduction – and so lacking in academic-speak would be distributed by a learned outfit such as the University of Chicago Press. Maybe it was the press that insisted on the subtitle, The Rise and Fall of the Penis, as though a book that more resembles a farmer’s almanac required a heavy academic thesis in order to merit publishing.
But readers searching for a sequential account of such a rise and fall – unless the title is an editor’s wry joke – will be disappointed. Van Driel is an entertaining clinician, not a historian.
