The fact that in the distant past there were so many different ways of delivering sperm cells — with some male animals surpassing others by developing methods of getting as close as possible to the ovum — led to the evolution of the penis. It was to play a crucial role in reproduction.
There are many different kinds of penis: the aedeagus of flies, mites and butterflies, the protuberances that some frogs have near their anus, the tiny organ with which the drone of the common-or-garden bee copulates (it breaks off and costs the drone its life, but does prevent others from mating with the queen), the embolus of the golden spider, the anal fin of fishes, the double penises of snakes, the proboscis of the dragonfly. Ostriches are particularly well equipped, and at the turn of the twentieth century walking sticks were made from their penises. Male organs vary from little protuberances to whale penises, which, though they are usually hidden in the body, can reach a length of almost 2 metres. In the fearsome cold encountered on an expedition to find the North-East Passage led by Willem Barentsz in 1596, the ship’s doctor tanned the only part of a whale’s skin that is fit for tanning and made it into a waistcoat. Calvinist that he was, he had his Bible bound in the same material — penis leather. The phallus, death and religion are, after all, closely connected.
Leather can also be obtained from the human penis. Sceptics should visit Wieuwerd in Friesland. This village, built on a large mound, has a mysterious crypt (discovered by accident in 1765) in a small church dating from 1200. The corpses interred there centuries ago have never decomposed. One of the mummified bodies on display — that of the goldsmith Stellingwerf — has a virtually intact but completely leathery penis!
The penises of the dead can sometimes literally lead a life of their own. There are many stories in circulation about that of the deceased French emperor Napoleon — many and varied stories, comparable to the Arthurian legends. It is a historical fact that a post-mortem was carried out on the late emperor in 1821. It emerged that he had died of stomach cancer, quite a common occurrence in his family. The doctor conducting the post-mortem stated that the imperial reproductive organs were small and insignificant and clearly shrivelled and desiccated. ‘It should be pointed out, for the sake of historical truth, that the deceased must have been completely impotent before his death.’
In his book P. Roobjee mentions that a priest who had been present at the post-mortem somehow acquired Napoleon’s penis and describes what happened thereafter:
It suddenly turned up again in the 1950s, after a mysterious odyssey of almost a hundred and fifty years, at Christie’s Fine Art Auctioneers in London. The imperial member, one inch (2.54 cm) long, bore, according to a member of the staff who assisted at the sale, a strong resemblance to a very small seahorse.
The auctioneer actually spoke of an insignificant, dried-up object. There turned out to be no interest in the penis, on offer for £13,300. Shortly afterwards the member was offered for sale in the catalogue of a mail-order company, but again there were no takers. In 1961 Napoleon’s penis finally acquired a worthy permanent owner, an American urologist, who paid out approximately $3,800,000 for the tiny object. Unfortunately the owner of the jewel was not able to enjoy the sight of the Corsican-bred tufted-gilled seahorse for very long, succumbing shortly afterwards to thrombosis and embolism of the lung. Since then the member has begun a second secret odyssey and to this day Napoleon’s body lies — minus a penis — in the crypt beneath the Dome des Invalides.
The average length of the erect male penis is approximately five times greater than that of an adult gorilla. Man’s proportionately huge penis gives an indirect indication of the sex lives of our forefathers. If we bring evolution into the picture, a relatively long penis may have been intended to scare off other males. While this is true of a few species of monkeys, it probably doesn’t work like that in man. Or is a long penis intended to lure women? To heighten sexual pleasure? Neither of those possibilities seems probable.
Evolutionary biologists argue that in the case of females who mate with several males, the male with the longest penis delivers his sperm cells most safely, and in other words has the best chance of fathering progeny. Therefore the so-called sperm competition theory offers the most elegant explanation of the dimensions of the penis. The vagina is, believe it or not, a dreadful place for the sperm cell, an acidic torture chamber, which is why a penis that can reach the back of the vagina has an advantage over one that delivers its content less close to the ovum. Male seminal fluid is fortunately sufficiently alkaline to neutralize the acid. Because it is an advantage if a large quantity of sperm cells can be delivered close to the ova, in terms of evolutionary biology a condition has been created to make the penis grow in length. But a penis that reaches further than the mouth of the uterus no longer offers any extra advantage.