‘I’ve been wanting to write about ‘the penis’ for a long time now but I had no reason to. Nothing happened to trigger the writing, there’s no amusing anecdote to kick it off. I can’t even offer you any contextual framing. Nothing. But I’ve decided to write it anyway. It is pure indulgence. I just want to. Feel free to pull out at any time (sorry, there’s a bunch of them).

So here goes nothing. This is what you would call a prickly topic. Very prickly.

“A penis walks into a bar.” Bartender looks up and asks “Who are you?”

“Richard” replies the penis, “Dick for short.”

Why is it that the penis is the butt (sorry) of so many jokes. And it’s not as though this is a modern era development. Turns out that penis jokes have been around for thousands of years and across cultural divide. What do Shakespeare, ancient Rome and Pompeii have in common? That’s right. And with some exceptions of course but for the most part it is men carrying the water on these jokes. It’s a rare occasion when men get together, you know ‘just the guys’ where a penis joke isn’t told and met with howls of laughter. Get a group of men in on a Polar Bear Dip on New Years Day and I’ll wager big money that a ‘shrinkage’ joke will come up, met of course with howls of laughter. I’m not thinking that when women get together they bust out a whole lot of dick jokes. Perhaps laughing at them but not with them. That may be because for women a penis can be serious business, demanding attention as often as not at the most inconvenient of times. And for that matter I don’t think women bust out many ‘vagina’ jokes when they get together. No, this is a particularly male thing.

There was a young man from Kent

Whose tool was extraordinarily bent.

One day while in trouble, he put it in double

And instead of coming, he went.

From the moment a young boy becomes aware that he has a penis, it becomes the centre of his attention. Every mother can remember that time she was changing her little boys diaper and up it popped. Then when you looked up at his sweet little face he had the weirdest little smile. Of course he did, it feels good and it fascinates him. And that never stops. At no point in a males’ life cycle does he abandon this attachment to his member. Now one supposes that is in part because he is attached to his attachment and it is unavoidable to the naked eye.

It’s all too patriarchal for words of course. For most of time men have been the architects of cultural norms and humour and no doubt more familiar with their own junk than the hidden secrets of women. And there is no doubt that penisjokes have been a convenient way to project heterosexual norms, an easy way to claim membership in the world of ‘real’ men. Shallow? Of course, this is men we’re talking about. Who else could have created the Great Conversational Trilogy ‘Hockey, Sex and Beer’?

Do you know what this is?

“Whoa, check her out. I’d tap that. The Canucks have gotta dump salary dude. They need cap space. I don’t drink that pussy shit! Gimme a Winter Harvest Stout.”

That is a perfectly constructed, heteronormative, content rich contribution to any conversation between men, beginning and ending with cultural declarations of virility. It’s like a constant reaffirmation between ourselves that we have a penis, that we all belong to an exclusive club: The Penis Club. You have to have one to join. And we have found a way to announce our membership (sorry, again) to the whole world. We do it with penis jokes.

Although to be clear and you don’t need membership to know this, penises are funny. Funny in a slow motion video of your dogs tongue flipping and flopping everywhere when he’s running kind of way. Funny when they pop up at the wrong time kind of way. Funny when they don’t work when they’re supposed to. Funny when they shrivel up in the cold kind of way (except in Manitoba where I’m told centuries of gene splitting has left modern Manitoban males impervious to the cold, made necessary no doubt by their eight month winters). Funny to look at. Just funny.

So many penis jokes through the centuries were built around the ever present male anxiety about the comparative size of one’s member.

Two guys standing on a pier, peeing.

“Man that water is cold.” said one of them.

“Sure is. Deep too.” replied the other.

When I was eleven (You know as an aside, if you can indulge me a moment, it’s becoming clear to me that as it relates to all things penis, my eleventh year was perhaps the most formative for me.) Anyway, where was I? Yes, when I was eleven I was in ‘Cinderella’, a Christmas pantomime. My mother (and she also keeps on popping up in my stories. Hmmm?) was the director and I played the role of Buttons, a court aide to Cinderella. That role was played by Cherry Shotton, a young English girl on whom I had a huge crush. Trouble was she was thirteen. How was I to know that no self respecting thirteen year old girl is going to be at all interested in an eleven year old pre pubescent boy. Not then. Not ever. And to make matters worse Cherry had a mad crush on the boy playing the role of Prince Charming, a handsome young seventeen year old. His name? Richard Long.

“Hi my name is Tony.”

“How you doin’ Tony. I’m Richard. But you can call me Dick. Dick Long.”

Dick Long my ass. Crushingly humiliating upon reflection. Thank goodness I was too young to get it. Either Mr. & Mrs. Long had a great sense of humour or they thought their son would be a porn star. What a dick, for short!

And they take up space. They’re like the thing that dangles from your carry on luggage. Always hanging down, the first thing your eye goes to, resisting every effort to stay inside the ‘luggage’. I mean when you think about it, they are a dual function utensil, designed efficiently enough and on a good day functioning without issue. It’s as though the world’s greatest mechanical, electrical and civil engineers had been asked to come up with a waste management system equally capable of procreation. Clever stuff really when you think about it.

And they’re Self Starters, at least in our early years they are. Although not so good on timing. I remember vividly when I was a young boy driving home with my mother after going to Hall’s Grocery Store in Kelowna, out in the Mission where we lived. I was eleven at the time (you see what I mean, there’s that eleven/mother nexus again). The five minute drive down a bumpy dirt road had its effect on me and the ‘tent’ in my brand new khakis, recently purchased from Fumerton’s Men’s Clothing, apparently caught my mother’s eye.

“What is THAT Tony”

Now let me tell you from years of experience, there is nothing more intimidating than an English mother asking a direct question, made ever the more so when the object of the question is my erection! It was of course a rhetorical question, one of those wherein the answer is embedded. But I was eleven and what was I to know about rhetorical questions. Had I been up to such a rhetorical joust I might have answered,

“This is THAT mummy”

But even at that I was quite certain she couldn’t handle the truth. And quite frankly it was all new to me as well. It just happened. My Self Starter had no sense of timing.

“Oh, it’s nothing” I replied meekly, rather too close to the truth as I recall.

Somewhere along the way though men wandered off course, grateful as we were for the urinary function so easily accessed, we bored of the single use ‘procreation’ function of our penis. And perhaps that was inevitable as every teenage boy discovers in the privacy of his own bedroom.

“I’m not sure how I feel about masturbation but on the other hand, it feels pretty good.“

And that’s when it starts to get a little bit crazy. We’re told as boys that ‘urination’ and ‘penis’ are synonymous. What they don’t tell us is that ‘penis’ and ‘pleasure’ are very close to each other in the dicktionary (sorry, again), closer as it turns out than ‘penis’ and ‘procreation’.

And demanding. Holy crap! Unlike any other part of your body. You haven’t experienced ‘insist’ as in ‘I insist’ until your penis has gotten itself all fired up and wanting to party. And that little Insister is at the epicentre of many great stories through the middle part of our lives. Good Lord, those were fun times. And funny.

And then middle age comes along. It’s just like your mother (uh-huh!) said.

“All good things must come to an end.”

How did she possibly know that this would happen, to MY penis!

If it does happen to you by the way, talk about about it openly. It’s not that hard.

Nowadays our lovers are typically sympathetic, aware that there’s no penis joke that will work in that moment.

“It happens to everyone honey.”

“Well yes, it does as a matter of fact but I didn’t think that ‘everyone’ included me. Not now at least.”

And so our relationship with our penis begins a new chapter. Still full of shared adventure but lacking that unbreakable trust with which it was once bound. Of course, medical science has been able to push back time and return us to that delicious certainty that is the glory of a firm erection, albeit bringing with it some fresh and unexpected challenges, not the least of which is timing. Or should I say bad timing.

“Now. Right now? Why just because Mr. Mushroom Head says so. I don’t think so!”

And then you learn a whole new meaning of ‘I insist’. Mr. Mushroom Head will not be denied. It can be a solitary experience.

“Hear about the theft at the Viagra factory. Police are looking for some hardened criminals.”

My doctor is wonderful. She keeps a close eye on me and manages my health issues which as I get older are following a predictable trajectory. I’m diabetic so she has me on Metformin which she allots carefully, no more than two refills at a time.

“I’ll give you one refill on the Metformin and then I’ll want to see you again. Anything else Tony?” as we approached the end of our pandemic related Zoom meeting.

“Ah yes doc, I’m out of Viagra. Could you give me a refill and perhaps some Cialis as well?”

“No problem. I’ll send that over to the pharmacy.”

24.

Twenty-four refills of Viagra, each refill with twenty-four little blue pills.

12

Twelve refills of Cialis, each refill with twenty-four little yellow pills. It was an Erectile Pharmacopia, enough to satisfy the needs of a young man in his prime for his lifetime!

I’m 72. You do the calculation. Let’s just say that it will see me out. I laughed. It was as though she was exasperated with yet another old male patient trying to hang on to his virility. And of course I am but what do you expect. I’ve been closely attached to my attachment since I became aware of it. My penis has served me well and faithfully, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better and for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.

Well you get the point. Now is not the time to be disloyal, to abandon my penis. Not now, not ever not after what we’ve been through together. And now that it is clearly a single task utility, my relationship with it most obvious at 1am, 3:25am, 4am and 6:30am nightly, now I can finally relax and just sit back and bask in the all the good times we spent together.

There was a young man named McNamiter

With a tool of prodigious diameter

But it wasn’t the size

Gave the girls a surprise

But his rythm, iambic pentameter

And so there it is. Finally. Thank you to those of you who have stayed the course on this one. Sometimes when I read my stuff I wince as I remember that my children will be reading my idle musings. I’m not sure my two boys, successful adults though they may be, need to read about my eleven year old erection and I know my two successful adult daughters can do without my pharmaceutical erectile dysfunction history. It’s definitely a prickly topic. Whatever. It’s just a penis. And they are funny.

Next week: A Vagina Walks into A Bar

Just kidding. I don’t know a thing about vaginas and they are not funny.