cock

Balancing C-Words Against Dysfunctional Alternatives

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2008-02-16 17:50

Following on the heels of Jane Fonda’s appearance on The Today Show Holly Combe of The F-Word Blog documents her recent encounter with the word “cunt” on Yahoo!‘s “Yahoo Answers” service:

The latest jawdropper, while browsing the site this week, was my discovery that, when it comes to comparing the word cunt to the far more restrictive description of “cum dumpster,” the majority of answerers actually found plain old “cunt” more offensive. Seriously. A term that quite literally reduces the vulva to a passive site for “cum” to be dumped like waste is considered more acceptable than a simple word for it! In fact, at the point when I began to type my own earnest justification of why “cum dumpster” is obviously derogatory in a very literal way, the other answers had all singled out cunt as worse.
...
How can one word be so powerful? Why is it that the words “prick,” “cock” and “dick” don’t cause nearly as much offence, even when they’re used as insults? I appreciate that some people just hate the way the word “cunt” is used but does that really mean the word itself is bad? And, if so, doesn’t that impact on attitudes towards women’s bodies?

Read the text in context here.

Actually just as I seem to have dated myself with my post about cocksuckers I may be about to date myself again but at least when I was growing up “cock” was almost as nasty a word as “cunt.” My take growing up was that, like cock, cunt was just too overtly, ungenteely, even assertively sexual. And while I still don’t think I’ve ever said either word out loud for any purpose (isn’t that unusual to have read more words than one has pronounced is it?) I’ve advocated appropriating tinfoil-hatted concerns about sex as men are indoctrinated to express it in language, if it was me I’d agitate for reappropriating cunt as that third positive, non-cutesy/non-medical-sounding thing women can do with their genitals besides gratifying men (a.k.a. “cum dumpsters?” really?) and canal-ing birth. Because goodness knows it wouldn’t hurt men to have a rich, realistic, and not-at-all-prim vocabulary for their partner’s enjoyment any more than it would hurt us to imagine our cocks as good for more than peeing and “pounding” with.

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Cockeyed Reconsideration of the Phallus

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2008-02-13 03:32

In comments on yesterday’s post about “shrinkage” Tantekoo said

What this post brought up is the main dilemma between women and men, or at least men’s perception of what they fear from women: that we will laugh at them. A very primal fear, and one that, not surprisingly, is seated in the all the angst and anxieties about the penis.

Funny to think that, gee, maybe denormalizing patriarchy might decrease men’s anxiety… that by giving up our stupid, politically abstract “phalluses” we might worry less about our poor, fallible fleshy penises… and increase appreciation of our sharable, cuddly, eager to please and be pleased… and sometimes perfectly, harmlessly goofy-looking cocks.

Seem like a no-brainer tradeoff, that.

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Showers Rhymes With Growers Not Hours

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2008-02-11 21:44

So one consequence of spending all day skiing, coming back to a chilly bathroom, and waiting for the water to heat up so you can jump in the shower is, for some men anyway, the phenomenon of “shrinkage.”

Shrinkage is another word for when someone’s penis and testicles look really, really small because his body has pulled everything tight against him to conserve heat. And while it’s hard to imagine humans have spent enough time in cold climates for selective pressure to have anything to do with it, shrinkage probably helps minimize the risk of frostbite. (I don’t have time to talk much about the incredible functionality of the never-will-be-a-word-of-the-day scrotum but for all that the name is graceless and the organ itself is funny-looking they have a surprisingly complex set of small muscles that function to keep the testicles functioning at the odd but evidently necessary temperature of 95 degrees. But I digress.)

Anyway, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear a lot of men are nervous about being seen with “shrinkage.” (There was even a Seinfeld episode about it, or at least a thread in an episode.)

The problem, I think, is that we’ve so indoctrinated ourselves to be Teh Manly-Stud sex class, solely responsible for initiating sex, solely responsible for generating sexual interest, and steeled at every instant to be brought down to earth by our heterosexually would-be partners who, we tell ourselves, will always find a good reason to be distracted (sometimes, literally, by having cold feet) that we just… just…

Well, we’re dead sure you’ll think… what? That you couldn’t possibly be interested if you don’t think we’re interested? That if you ever see us looking small you’ll never be interested in us again? That just because we’re not really that curious about cocks that you aren’t curious either? That you’re so innocent of male anatomy… so set on remaining innocent of it… that if we look anything but immediately ready for sex you’ll just see it as one more thing to hang a cross-stitched potholder on?

Because back here on planet Earth scientists tell us there are these things called “human beings,” both genders of which are equally curious, and capable, and intelligent and everything and they both, um, like sex.

So…

Whereas there might be one set of scripts whereby women point at shrinkage and titter “eww,” or, perhaps, “gee, that looks just like a penis only smaller.” Sure. Ya betcha. Another entirely possible (though not comprehensible to those still invested in the “no-sex” class paradigm) might involve other, more universal scripts like “what would happen if I helped warm it up?” Or “I could cup him completely in the palm of my hand and feel my partner grow, thaw, emerge, respond, come to life, unfold, awaken, rise up, greet me, become my valentine.” All words men are never taught to use when thinking about women and therefore…

unable to imagine it…

we hide from all possibility.

[Caveat: The photo behind the “continue reading” link is topic-appropriate but consequently less work-safe than usual. —fl]

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Request For Information: Comparative Male Anatomy

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2008-01-29 07:00

So I’ve got a question about cocks and sexual sensitivity.

One of the limitations of heterosexuality or, of course, homosexuality, is that however experienced one might be with the responsiveness of different individuals of one’s preferred gender one is necessarily going to have more limited experience with whichever gender isn’t the one you prefer. That means an opposite-side data point of one if you’re straight, or none if not.

In my case I’ve got pretty much a data point of me and for the question I’ve got that’s not enough so I’m going to ask those of you with more sexual experience with cocks other than mine.

So!

Pretty much every sex education book introduces the penis as functionally blah-blah this, and la-la that (usually without mentioning that whatever else it’s good for one of its functions is caressing one’s partner.) After the functional formalities there’s mention that the “head, or ‘glans’” has the most nerve endings and is most sensitive to touch.

So…

I gotta admit that the head, “or glans,” of my cock has the most nerve endings and is most sensitive to the touch. I also, however, gotta admit that all those sensitive nerve endings aren’t really very erotically sensitive. They’re extraordinarily good at, say, helping me locate just the right part of a partners vulva without me having to look, of being able to tell… quite a lot really… about how she’s feeling about penetration: how wet she is, how warm she is, how engorged and open her lips are, where the verge of her vagina is, and whether I should try to enter her at all or if I should first dip shallowly and slowly for lubrication or whether she’d be into me deepening my strokes. It’s even good (and, it seems to me, almost exactly the right shape) for telling when it’s touching her cervix so that, if I know she’s enjoying it (which some partners do) I can continue or if she doesn’t care for it at all (which some partners really don’t) then I can steer clear.

What all those sensitive nerve endings are not good for, however, is…

...pretty much anything to do with arousal or orgasm!

Anybody else have experience with that, either as a cock owner or as partners with cock owners?

Now that doesn’t mean my glans never feels erotic sensation, but if it does at all it only does so way, way, way far into extended arousal and even then it feels good only with the lightest sensations and tons of lubrication.

Instead what’s most sensitive to erotic touch for me is the skin an inch or two below the glans, the wrinkly, oak-y, tattered remnants of my foreskin, especially along the sides and underside (underside when if I’m standing up, anyway.) The surface there is instantly and erogenously sensitive to warmth, moisture, and touch. The lightest contact from tongue, or labia, or a slickened finger feels marvelous there, and somewhere below the surface, close to the slippery-hard core, especially near the spongy ridge along the bottom, there are deeper nerve endings that respond very nicely to firmer pressure from tongue or the roof of the mouth, from thumb or fingers, and from the slippery/hard corrugations right over the G-spot just inside and under the pubic bone.

Oh, where was I?

Oh yeah, textbooks and sex manuals. They tend to go on about nerve endings in the glans (as they do about the glans of the clitoris, by the way) as if raw numbers told the whole story. At least if you asked me but I could be mistaken so I’m instead asking you.

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Purloined Letters and Penis Purposes

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2008-01-21 21:09

Did you ever get something like the following in one of your sex ed classes?

Although the clitoris is structurally analogous to the penis (it is formed from the same embryological tissue), its sole function is sexual arousal. (The penis serves the additional functions of urination and semen ejaculation.)

Particular source: Human Sexuality: Diversity in Contemporary America, Chapter Three, but plus or minus a few words you’ll find the same thing in most texts.

A bit later the text adds that

The vagina … encompasses the penis during coitus … so that sperm will be deposited near the entrance of the uterus…”

In the next chapter, on male sexual anatomy, we learn, in a variety of ways, that the penis is mostly useful for urination and delivering semen although they sort of omit that the penis serves a function of sexual arousal, if in a somewhat less specialized way than the clitoris. We also get some handwaving about depositing sperm near the uterus but no real mention of where the uterus might be.

So I want to be a little fussy about the dimorphism of the standard descriptions of… well… dimorphism. Yes, the “sole function” of the clitoris is arousal, yes, the vagina functions to encompass[**] a penis, but c’mon, if the penis is going to deposit semen near the entrance to the uterus it’s going to do so during intercourse…

and if there’s going to be intercourse then the penis and vagina are going to be conjoined…

Which suggests a third common function of the penis might be intromission into the vagina.

Conjoined, intromission. Enjoying these terms? Me too, actually, since they, like “encompass,” can indicate function while remaining descriptively neutral.

Now!

If you thought I was a typical axe-grinding gender crank you’d probably expect me to start bawling about the short shrift given to men and men’s role in reproduction. (And I actually do have a mild beef with the way the ideology of masculinity minimizes men’s contributions.) Instead of complaining about being left out I’m going to assert instead that we tend to be so phallocentric we merely forget to mention the obvious.

Thus we can describe the clitoris as functioning only for arousal — it doesn’t have anything to do with his dick so let’s mention what its doing there. And we can describe what the vagina does to the penis because, dudes!, that’s the point. And we can talk about the less comes-to-mind uses for penises — urination and ejaculation — but …

Anybody remember reading Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter? It’s the one about a very clever blackmailer who thwarts the Parisian police, known experts at finding evidence no matter how cleverly hidden, by “hiding” a letter that would compromise the Queen in plain sight. Well, what I’m afraid of is that, rather than being some sort of slight, the idea that you’d have to explain what the penis does or where it goes is so obvious people forget to mention it.

Bit of a shame, though. I had my tongue in cheek the first time I ever mentioned it, but I really do think that in a slightly less phallocentric/androcentric universe where the penis wasn’t so hidden in plain sight, textbooks and sex manuals might not that in men the embryological clitoris develops into the only organ who’s function is to caress a partner.

And, that in turn, is a bit of a shame because lacking such clarification we imagine other purposes for it, some of which are tragic, some of which are brutal, and others (such as estimating some kind of pecking order at urinals) are outright silly.

[** Kudos to the authors, by the way, for finding an active, non-passive word for what one’s vagina does during intercourse — the paradigm of active male penetration leaves very few suitable English words. I was pretty sure I’d posted about the language problem before but couldn’t think of any unique keywords to Google with. —fl]

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