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]