One of the weirder, much-less noted phenomena of internet and porn culture is that a lot of people now have a better idea what a penis looks like erect than how they look most of the time. Even if they don’t participate in online dating websites! :-) But seriously, chances are that thanks to the pervasiveness of porn and its collateral practices most people have now seen more naked men with erections than men without.

If you’d been making predictions about the future of the internet back in, say, 1992-1994 I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have made very many people’s lists.

Speaking for myself my days of posting penises, of any sort at all, are pretty much over. But as long as I’m here I might as well add that I am still quietly participating in the Half-Nekkid Thursday photo meme. (No penises but not especially safe for work either.)

Miss Wolfe of Love in the Capitol has a short post about erections

while talking to a friend recently, i learned some very weird information. she told me males can have erections while in the womb. it isn’t only in the womb though, men can have erections at any point in their life and have them quite frequently as an infant. now, i have never been pregnant and my brothers are older or just around my age so i never experienced this. i guess what it comes down to is men just don’t stand a chance. i should have to cut you some slack because its just out of your control. out of curiosity, when is the youngest age you can remember having an erection?

I’ve copied the whole post but I got it from here.

Yes, we can get them at any time. Yes, sometimes infants are born with them and they certainly get them any time thereafter. I guess we probably get them before we’re born too but I’d never thought about it. Oh, and very, very often men allegedly get erections when, or soon after, they die. So yup, any time.

When a small boy says his tee-tee-er hurts it’s a good idea to suggest he reach in and adjust himself. (My mom, at the time socially very conservative but also very up on pediatric medical lore, told me about that.) What hurts is usually that it gets caught on clothing as it gets hard and — since it’s not going to stop — it gets a bend in it and that’s quite painful.

Unverified rumor: the penis gets insufficient oxygen when not erect and so men have erections on and off for up to 60% of the time we’re sleeping. (I’m not positive about that. We certainly have erections most of the night but one of the risks of a “stuck” erection is… more oxygen issues. That could be from the risk of blood pooling and clotting though. I’m not sure.)

Anyway, last thing is that a lot of people, ok, women, seem to have the impression that if we get hard we have to ejaculate, or possibly a cold shower or big scare, before it’ll go away. Nah. They go away by themselves. Another thing, we get our erections way earlier in the arousal cycle than women so they’re more like the equivalent of your first hint of lubrication than “must do something about this now!”

I think it’s a shame they’re so misunderstood. By women, of course, but also by men. Some times they freak us out as much as they freak out anyone else but they’re not that bad. Ok, actually they’re kind of nice even if they don’t get petted.

Now.

As luck would have it, I’m studying boning up for an exam in my combined communications theory / women’s studies / sex education class and a huge component of the test will be male and female sexual anatomy. Including, unfortunately, correct spelling (where does the “y” go in epididymis again?) But including, fortunately, detailed drawings we get to label with those correct spellings.

And that’s cool. Everyone should get a chance to see what grown up men and women are made of. (Must see, incidentally, is this sweet video Lux Alptraum linked to called Cunts for Fags. It’s a hands-on workshop for gay men to get to know about women’s bodies. At least one of the volunteers is a trans man which is kind of cool, and the two main guys they interview for their reactions are just adorably surprised and positive-sounding about it.)

Anyway, while it’s nice to have diagrams I’m always surprised how even external anatomical drawings just don’t look the way we really look. Goodness knows we can find pictures enough of real people, or at least some subset of them, simply by opening a spam email if you’re looking for women’s bits, or posting almost any kind of personal ad at all on Craig’s List if you’re looking for men’s. But even so it would be really nice to have a study partner because real life is just… cooler.

For one thing, unlike 99.9% of the photos we see, real life study partners aren’t always already wet, or hard, or engorged, or tumescent, or… any one thing. Which is, of course, what real people are all about and one of the things that’s really missing from porn! Actually if it wasn’t missing those things I’m not even sure we’d recognize it as “porn.” Though we may never know. :-)

Incidentally I’ve thought about posting a series of strictly instructional photos of me. Because, as I’ve mentioned, one almost never, ever sees them anything but soft, in “erotic” photos, or completely hard in “pornographic” ones. For extra credit I suppose it would be fun to label the parts with a felt-tip pen (maybe a moisture-proof one?) but one complication would be that whether I marked them while I was soft or erect my writing would be difficult to read after the transition to whatever state the other was.

Oh yeah, and while I’m at it, to help get people over the notion that they won’t go away, I still think about photographing the whole erection cycle from very small (I’m a serious “grower”) to full size and then using ice to shrink myself all the way back down again.

The main reason I don’t is I’m not positive the interest level would be particularly, well, positive. Comments always welcome though.

Sigh. Meanwhile, since I have no study-partner volunteers I’ll soldier on with my textbook and notes. Oh, and can’t forget the mirror!