This post started out as an innocent attempt to answer a startling accusation about the influence of porn on men. The answer is… larger. Unusually, for me anyway, there’s a call to action at the end.
The porn commentator Daze Reader, newly revived after a long hiatus, expresses skepticism about one more outlandish story about the perils of watching porn. The source is an interview with BBC producer Tim Samuels on The World from public radio’s PRI
And even Papua, New Guinea there were doctors who said that they’ve had to deal with cases of young men putting ball bearings down their penises to try and keep up with the impressive nature of the porn stars they’ve been watching in films.
Daze Reader retorts
As for porn-obsessed dudes stuffing ball bearings down their penes, I’ll believe that when I see notarized X-rays. Until then, it’s a great urban legend.
A bit of Googling suggests it actually might be an urban legend. But if it is it’s a very old one! Australian research demographer Terence H Hull, writing for the website Inside Indonesia, says that reports of Indonesians, Melanesians, and Southeast Asians employing esoteric penis piercings and implants go back to Chinese traders in the 1400s and Magellan’s voyagers in the 1500s! The inserted items included “spurs,” bells, implanted balls, and even precious jewels.
(Quick aside: According to Hull the traditional Indonesian word for a device piercing the glans of the penis is “palang.” According to Wikipedia the traditional kinkster word for a glans piercing is “ampallang,” which they say derives from a tradition of the Dayak peope of Borneo. And I know this is all complicated but I’ll just say here that parts of both Borneo and New Guinea islands belong to Indonesia, which is why I’m citing an Indonesian website. Now, where was I?)
For the record the, well, record of Indonesian, New Guinean, Southeast Asian ball-implanting predates the kind of porn folks like Mr. Samuels concern themselves with by at least (um, 1980, the year VHS-based video players became commonly affordable, minus 1433, the year Ma Huan noted ampalling in Thailand equals) five hundred forty-seven years! Give or take.
Case closed on the “porn drives young men to ball-bearing themselves” idea? No, it’s still complicated. Hull says reports of the practice, once believed to be obsolete, is flourishing in laboring-class sailors, loggers, miners, and prisoners. Who evidently share the characteristics of being young, single, unschooled, and very segregated from contact with actual women.
Which lack of contact is… problematic.
Says Hull
From ad hoc interviews I have found that men use the devices before marriage, but remove them when they settle down with one woman. Why, if the purpose is to please a woman? One explained: ‘You can’t really be sure about these things – what if something went wrong? You wouldn’t want to take a risk with your wife.’
So where does the idea that women “love it” come from? Hull says
Informal but persistent attempts to understand the practices of genital cutting and the use of inserts and implants among Indonesian men indicate that what we are seeing today is not the resurgence of tradition. Rather these are largely attempts to come to terms with sexualities based on gender relations emerging from rapid modernisation.
Workers in isolated camps who rely on their peers for information on ‘what women want’ are easily convinced that implants may make them attractive to lovers. Young men who see peers attempting the operations to insert stones or plastic balls, and hear the bragging afterward are easily swayed to try the practice themselves. They do not hear clinical evidence of damage done to sex organs, and they definitely do not hear women’s stories of pain, discomfort or infection. From the viewpoint of men and reproductive health the response to penis implants must be based on education and the demystification of large areas of sexuality.
And how easy would it be to get word out that a) it’s dangerous, b) it’s actually not all that traditional, and c) despite what young men tell each other women actually don’t care for it at all? Turns out it’s hard because
The Indonesian Health Department regards any talk of penis adornments as esoteric, sensitive and obscure. Reproductive health service providers do not recognise the problems associated with genital cutting and the use of sexual accessories because such things are quickly dismissed as immoral. Whatever the moral arguments though, the practice of penis inserts appears to be spreading because men’s sexual education is incomplete and isolated. Lower class men in particular are likely to experiment with implants, not because their sexual needs are any different from other men, but because they are the groups most likely to experience isolation from women in their occupations.
M’kay, so in that environment it’s actually possible to say that porn could somehow be influencing young men raised in that environment to stick ball-bearings (and horsehair threads, bells, and the caps from toothpaste tubes!!!) in their penises. But whereas I don’t have a lot of patience with porn I think its totally missing the point to imply, as the BBC’s Tim Samuels does, that without porn young Indonesians and their regional counterparts wouldn’t “[put] ball bearings down their penises to try and keep up with the impressive nature of the porn stars they’ve been watching in films.”
To the extent porn matters at all for these men it’s just one shovel of dirt in an egregiously stifling, repressive, dehumanizing cemetery of isolation, bad information, institutional denial, misogyny, segregation, chattelization, miscommunication, insecurity, bluster and bravado, loneliness, alienation, ignorance, not even rudimentary education about actual heterosexual sexuality, othering, exploitation, and self-mutilation!
And that’s just for the men! Who nevertheless have an understanding that the mere fact of their gender renders them superior. Or, worse, baseline/constant/normal against which all others are measured and made to fit! And if they’re willing to subject themselves to such torment what are they willing to see befall everyone else inside and outside their societies?
Yeah, porn might be a problem in parts of New Guinea but that’s like PETA saying the problem with Guantanamo Bay is they serve meat to prisoners. A problem, possibly, but so far from the problem it would… I think… you could…
Sorry, lost for words there.
Recommended Action Item: It would be really, really nice if, when he’s done promoting this series the BBC would send Samuels and/or other documentary production teams to shine a little light on what’s happening to the men in the places he casually mentioned. And I’m not saying this in a “whut about Teh Menz” way. I’m saying it because what happens to these guys is bad, yes, and shouldn’t happen to anyone, yes, but also because whatever they learn, whatever happens to them, whatever view of the world they bring home with them rains down on everyone else in their lives from wives to children to brothers and sisters to sex workers to employees and so on.
So, to get back to Daze Reader’s question about whether this is an urban legend. Here’s one last snippet from Hull’s article
For some years I had been hearing of penis inserts in Indonesia, but like most middle class Indonesians I dismissed the stories as being little more than sensationalist rumours or fillers for slow news days in tabloids. Eventually though the growing number of reliable sources suggested that there might be something worthy of further research.
I was serious when I said someone like the BBC should send someone like Samuels shed light on it. The world still needs change and change doesn’t happen in the dark. This would be a good place to start.
