Bonk (32 page)

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Lue was the 1988 recipient of the Gold Cystoscope Award, which Dr. Hsu remembered as the “Golden Bladder Award.” The ensuing trip to Google for verification revealed a veritable medical supply catalogue of gold-plated statuary: there is the Golden Speculum Award and the Golden Forceps Award. The American Rhinologic Society bestows a Golden Head Mirror Award. There are at least three different Golden Stethoscope Awards. The American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons, not getting into the spirit of it
at all
, bestows an annual Mentor’s Award.

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Because the man had been dead only a few hours and his face was covered by a surgical cloth, the video was no more gruesome than your average Dr. Hsu production. Also, someone had added a soothing soundtrack, the sort of innocuous instrumental one hears in shopping mall atriums.

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The U.S. Postal Service was aware of this practice, and even endorses it. USPS spokesman Mark Saunders points out that it was a nice, if modest, source of additional revenue for the beleaguered Postal Service. “Because I bet these people didn’t use the stamps after that, for mail.” Saunders urges care in choosing the stamps. “For instance, we recently introduced a Distinguished Marines stamp and a Muppets stamp,” both of which would seem, well, just plain wrong. Saunders also felt that some stamps, like the Greta Garbo, might be considered cheating. I asked Saunders if the Postal Service even sells perforated stamps anymore. “Yeah,” he deadpanned. “We’ve got a new dog stamp. It licks itself.”

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The semen-as-life-force concept dates all the way back to Pharaonic Egypt. When the creator, Atum, needed to create a pair of helper gods, he masturbated. His seed spawned Shu, the god of air and—surely something of a letdown—Tefnut, the goddess of humidity. This and other tales are detailed in a group of illustrated erotic papyruses, which I read about in a paper by urologist A. A. Shokeir (“Sexual Life in Pharaonic Egypt: Towards a Urological View”). Shokeir’s paper includes a drawing of Atum masturbating, which he did by mouth and, as always back then, in profile.
The best-known erotic papyrus is the Turin Erotic Papyrus, housed just down the road from the Shroud of Turin. To avoid confusion, the papyrus is the one that shows people having sex in a chariot and, also, in “the Geb and Nut Position.” Shokeir includes the latter in his paper, noting in his caption that “the man carries a sack over his shoulder and takes her from behind.”

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More often, the Patent Office opted for euphemism in the category headings for antimasturbation contraptions. “Surgical Appliance” was by far the most common. Also “Sanitary Appliance,” as though a sneeze guard or a mop could somehow keep wanton sexual impulses in check.

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The scrotum enjoys a natural expandability that makes it a good candidate for use in skin grafts. Researchers at the Shriners Burn Institute in Galveston, Texas, have gone so far as to call the hairy sac “lifesaving.”
There are images on the Internet of men with scrotums the size of those inflatable hop-along balls of my youth, but this strays well beyond normal expandability. These men have elephantiasis, and if you know what’s good for you, you will not do a Google search of “scrotum” and “elephantiasis.”

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They can also, if they’re the sort who likes to invite comment, order a Neuticles baseball cap or bathrobe, the latter suggesting a disconcerting scenario wherein the proud Neuticle owner suddenly throws open his robe for inspection.
The latest addition to the Neuticles promotional merchandise line is a Neuticles BBQ apron. It has been a sluggish seller.

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Rhino poachers of yore were more resourceful than their modern-day counterparts, if no less evil. Li describes them “rigging up a rotten wood fence which the animals like to lean against.” When the animals fall over “they cannot rise quickly and are easily killed.” For sheer originality, though, nothing tops the tactics of hunters of the Moupin langur, an animal that grins “when it sees people” and “when it grins it draws its upper lip up over its eyes.” Whereupon the hunter runs over and nails its lip to its forehead and smothers the creature. Don’t worry, though; it’s probably not true. Li also writes that the animal is ten feet tall and its feet are backward. The more you read Li, the more you wonder about his trustworthiness as a naturalist. One of his longest entries is Clear Liquid Feces of a Man, prepared by burying it in a jar underground to ferment. “The longer the time it is in the ground the better.” Like, say, forever?

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But not if you step on one: A sea cucumber under assault expels the organs of its digestive tract through its anus (and then grows another set). Given that the sea cucumber’s greatest threat is Asian cuisine, this “autoevisceration”—essentially gutting yourself and saving the chef the bother—probably needs to be rethought as a self-defense.

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A fact that has spread well beyond the confines of panda reserves. The Urban Dictionary includes an entry for “panda penis” (meaning a small one) submitted by a contributor named Lew. Lew’s usage example reads: “That girl said Matthew Reed had a panda penis.” It is Urban Dictionary policy to reject definitions that include the full names of non-celebrities, leading one to assume that the panda slur was directed at some sports or entertainment figure named Matthew Reed, and not Matthew Reed the wedding photographer, or Matthew Reed the assistant professor with the research interest in the interaction of quinoid compounds with cellular macromolecules, or any of the thousands of other “Matthew Reeds” on Google.

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I always assumed that Priapus was a god of something manly—war or shouting or chariot customizing—but in fact he was a god of fertility and gardens. One mythology Web site calls him the “the protector of all garden produce.” Clearly troubled by the girly job title, he took to wearing robes slit high enough to display his enormous cucumber. Those caught robbing his garden were promptly sodomized. “If I do seize you…,” reads an epigram in Smithers and Burton’s
Priapeia
, “you shall be so stretched that you will think your anus never had any wrinkles.” Encyclopedia Mythica reports that outside of Rome, Priapus was “never very popular.”

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Kegeling has since been taken a step further, in the form of vaginal weightlifting. The idea being: You don’t just flex your muscles if you want to build them up; you train with weights. I once tried the Feminine Personal Trainer for a story. It came with a slip of paper telling me not to be overwhelmed by its weight. I wasn’t. I was overwhelmed by its size. Suffice to say, this is the only workout on Earth that calls for vaginal lubricant. The directions tell you to insert and contract, causing the FPT to rise up inside you until all that can be seen protruding is a doorknob-shaped piece of steel, as though you are giving birth to a hardware store. I use mine as a paperweight.

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To those who would say this is unnatural, I direct you to consider the male shark, whose sexual apparati are also erected with saltwater. Shark “claspers” fill with seawater before the predator mates.

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In 1989, a team of psychiatrists at SUNY Downstate Medical Center interviewed twenty-one men who did so regularly. Some had always been able, and some had come upon the ability later in life. The latter group combined those who had taught themselves, using a variety of techniques generously covered on the Internet, and those who stumbled upon it accidently, such as the fifty-nine-year-old skeet shooter who had continued thrusting on behalf of his wife and surprised himself with a second orgasm. Whereupon he exclaimed, “Doublee!”—described by the paper’s authors as a term for shooting two clay pigeons with a double-barreled gun, an event even rarer than male multiple orgasm.

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Medical dilators have been around since the early 1800s, mostly under the name
bougie
. There is a bougie for widening most every tube in the body. There are cervical bougies, urethral bougies, esophageal bougies, vaginal bougies. There is even, yes, a sinus bougie. Not only is there an anal bougie, there is a neoanus bougie, used for dilating a new asshole. Hegar refers to the man who invented this particular dilator. More specifically it refers to Ernst Ludwig Alfred Hegar, and if ever a name called out for anal dilation, it’s that one.

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A word of apology to the male reader. There is no way for me to adequately appreciate how uncomfortable this may be making you. As a consolation, I promise never to witness and describe the insertion of a Disposable Internally Applied Penile Erector. (Yet one more way to stiffen an unstiff penis.) U.S. Patent 4,869,241 describes a stiff, hollow (so semen can come out) plastic tube designed to be “slidably placed” in the urethra. By the urethra’s owner. Writes patent holder John Friedmann—clearly of tougher stuff than my husband, Ed, who actually crossed his legs as I read this to him—“One merely slides the support tubing down the urethra.”

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Close to but not quite the world’s most embarrassing underthing. First prize must go to the Deodorizing and Sound-Muffling Anal Pad. The patent’s background material details the sad decline of the human anal sphincter muscle, whose gripping capacity fades as we age. The absorbing layer is said to “trap the sound of a flatus,” as though one might later drive it to a less populated area and release it.
The Anal Pad should not be confused with a prior invention called the Anal Napkin, which, in turn, should not be confused with the dinner napkin.

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Not entirely an exaggeration. The collagen fibers surrounding the corpus cavernosum of an erect penis are as stiff, by weight, as steel. I learned this in 1999, while interviewing Diane Kelly, then at Cornell University, the planet’s lone expert on the biomechanics of the mammalian penis. The fibers are arranged in two layers, one perpendicular to the other, which keeps erections from bending or ballooning out of shape when they’re squeezed. If you use enough force, however, a penis will buckle. “Penile fracture” is the preferred term. It refers to a ruptured corpus cavernosum rather than a broken bone. Humans don’t have penis bones. Dogs do, and chipmunks and muskrats and various other mammals, all of them represented in the fabulous Smithsonian Institution penis bone collection that languishes, tragically, in an off-site storage facility. The largest penis bone is that of the walrus. The Inuit call it an oosik and used it as a war club.

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Not her real name.

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And from HAFD, hyperactive acronym formation disorder. The condition has reached epidemic proportions in the sex research community. Cindy Meston staged a quiet parody in her days as a postdoc at the University of Washington. She had the task of composing a questionnaire to screen patients to see if they were promising candidates for surgical correction of a crooked penis (due to Peyronie’s disease). The surgery repairs the crook but takes as much as an inch off the length. Meston called the questionnaire the Washington Examination of Expected Negative Identity Post-Peyronie’s: the WEENI PP.

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Other things enter MRI tubes less slowly. Anything magnetic is subject to the projectile effect and, if brought too close, will abruptly lift off the ground and hurtle through the air toward the giant magnet at up to 40 mph. This has, in the past, included ladders, floor buffers, laundry carts, IV poles, and, in July 2001, an oxygen canister that fatally beaned a six-year-old boy as he lay in the tube.

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Let’s get used to this word, because there are few likable substitutes. In a study of male and female genital slang carried out at five British universities, respondents came up with 351 ways to say penis (e.g., veiny bang stick, custard chucker, one-eyed milkman, bishop) and only three for clitoris: bean, button, and the little man in the boat. The authors felt this reflected society’s disregard of female pleasure, which is probably true, but I simply bemoan the lack of useful synonyms. The third one is well-nigh unusable, as anyone from this side of the Atlantic would assume the reference was to the Ty-D-Bol Man.

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A clitoris does not, of course, ejaculate semen. But some women—40 percent according to a 1990 survey of 1,292 women—do, like men, expel a substance from their urethra during orgasm, especially orgasms from stimulating the G-spot region. The nature of this “ejaculate” has been the source of extended debate—
urine or not urine?
—and diverse scientific inquiry. One woman devised a home experiment in which she swallowed a tablet that dyes urine bright blue. She then “inspected her wet spots,” which she reports were either colorless or faint blue. One research team collected specimens of “the expulsion” and asked outsiders to characterize it. It is a testimony to the generosity of the human spirit that these volunteers both smelled and tasted the specimens. (Several specified that it “had no urine taste” without further specifying how they would recognize this taste. One likened it to watered-down fat-free milk.)
Chemical analyses of female “ejaculate” have differed. Two labs concluded the samples were the same as urine; four found significant differences. At least one reported the presence of PAP, an enzyme found in the prostatic component of semen. It
is
true that women have a vestigial prostate, a scattering of ducts and glandular material surrounding the urethra, in the G-spot vicinity on the vagina’s front wall. It’s possible some women expel urine, others a prostatic fluid, and some a mixture. The debate drags on.

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Women get them too. It took science a while to figure this out. You couldn’t simply hire a grad student to sit and watch all night, as was done in 1944, when science first confirmed that men were dependably getting erect as they slept (three to five times per night). And the average clitoris was too small for early-model strain gauges. What you needed were some congenitally enlarged clitorises, a fancy strain gauge, and a powerful need to know. In 1970, a trio of University of Florida researchers pulled together all these things and assembled them in a sleep lab. The women in the study were found to have a similar number of erections as did a control group of men, and, as with the men, they usually happened during REM sleep.