Skin Flutes & Velvet Gloves: A Collection of Facts and Fancies, Legends and Oddities About the Body's Private Parts

SKIN FLUTES & VELVET GLOVES

A Collection of

Facts and Fancies,

Legends and Oddities

About the Body’s

Private Parts

SKIN FLUTES & VELVET GLOVES. Copyright © 2002 by Terri Hamilton. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Illustrations by Jamison Gish

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hamilton, Terri.

Skin flutes & velvet gloves : a collection of facts and fancies,

legends and oddities about the body’s private parts/

Terri Hamilton.—1st U.S. ed.

p.   cm.

ISBN 0-312-26951-X

ISBN 978-0-312-26951-7

1. Generative organs—Folklore. 2. Penis—Folklore.

3. Vagina—Folklore. I. Title.

GR489.5 .H35 2001

398’.353—dc21             2001019170

First Edition: April 2002

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

CONTENTS

Thanks

Introduction

In the Beginning . . .

A Hose by Any Other Name . . .

A Penis by Any Other Name . . .

A Vagina by Any Other Name . . .

Penis 101

The Penis Files

Bigger Than a Breadbox

Les Petites

A Hard Man Is Good to Find

Vagina

He Thought Her Name was . . . MULVA

The Vagina Files

Like a Virgin

The Black Rose

The Tender Button

Misbehaving Vaginas

What About the Birds and the Bees?

Sacred Parts

Circumcision

Foreskin . . . or Against It?

F.G.M.: They Call It Circumcision

Shave and a Haircut

Sometimes a Cigar . . .

Yikes! You Want to Do What to It?

I’m Not Making This Up!

Dictionary

Sources

THANKS

As she has been throughout my life, my sister Neva Cheatwood was beside me through every phase of this project—so much so that I almost feel guilty claiming sole authorship. From planting the original seed, to getting on the wrong train with me to deliver the final manuscript, it is not melodramatic to say that without her, this book would not be. In spite of a slight three-thousand-mile geographical inconvenience, she selflessly donned the hats of an entire office staff, variously assuming the roles of agent-finder, publicist, word processing expert, format designer, copyeditor, and wordsmith (thanks for all the worms, Roxanne), not to mention cheerleader, financial backer, and late-night woe listener. There are no words to adequately express the depth of my love and gratitude to and for my sister. I am blessed . . . and I know it.

The extraordinary illustrations are the work of Jamison Gish, a wonderfully gifted artist destined to become a household name. I am deeply grateful to this remarkable young man, who generously—and unflinchingly—etched these drawings while completing his senior year of high school.

A serendipitous encounter brought the multi-talented Nasreen McMullen into my life, and with her the cover I had dreamed of (along with a wonderful photo, dazzling business cards, and a fabulous Web site!). A simple thank-you is woefully inadequate, but rest assured I will be singing her praises for years to come.

The gods were smiling on me when Blanche Schlessinger became my agent. She walked me from doubtful uncertainty to enthusiastic optimism, and was unwavering in her belief that this project would find the right home and the right clothes. Thank you, Blanche, for your wise counsel, professional diligence, above and beyond endeavors, and wonderful friendship.

My thanks to Charles Spicer, my editor at St. Martin’s Press, for enthusiastically getting it and believing in the possibilities. An additional heartfelt thanks Charlie, for your patience, flexibility, and good cheer. My thanks and appreciation to associate editor Dorsey Mills for her spirited interest in the material and her remarkable tolerance for obsessiveness. And to assistant editor extraordinaire Anderson Bailey, who rode in with the calvary (oh wait . . . he was the calvary), my deepest thanks for engineering such a smooth and gratifying completion. It was a joy to work with you. And thankful kudos to publicist Jennifer Reeve for her assiduous who, what, when, where savvy and buoyant optimism.

I’m grateful to the following health professionals for their time, knowledge, and wisdom in compiling various sections: Dr. Lonnie Barbach, Dr. Helen Fisher, Dr. Gary Rheinschild, Dr. Roger Seibert, Dr. Lauren Streicher, Dr. Baolin Wu, and Dr. Bernie Zilbergeld.

I’m grateful also to the thousands of human sexuality students who contributed to both the spirit and substance of this book. Teaching was one of the great joys of my life, and I thank you all for allowing me to be a part of your educational journey.

A special thank-you to my parents, Ernie and Mary DiMatteo, my loving rocks in a sea of hard places. I’m blessed and somewhat humbled by their enthusiastic support for my various life adventures, this book being the latest on a long and eclectic list (any day now I’m going to tell them what I wrote about). Thanks also to my sister Sue Snell for her endless encouragement . . . and for keeping the name Snell.

And finally, my thanks, my gratitude, and my forever love to the man who gives meaning, joy and passion to my life, my husband Bill. In an uncertain world where absolutes are scarce, I know this for sure: I am loved and treasured as I love and treasure. I’m one of the lucky ones who chanced upon my soul’s companion and heart’s desire in this lifetime, and for this I am grateful every day. I was supported in this undertaking as I am in everything I do . . . with love, with encouragement, with enthusiasm, with understanding, with thoughtful input, with comic relief, and always, with much needed neck rubs and tasty breakfasts. I am a woman to be envied.

INTRODUCTION

Throughout history, male and female genitalia have been shrouded in mysticism, celebrated in ritual, enjoyed in intimacy, contemplated in poetry, worshipped, mutilated, scorned, feared, and adored. Indeed, even as we stand at the dawn of a new millennium, our fascination with private parts has not abated. We name them. We talk to them. We write about them. We are ruined by them. Sometimes, we even die for them. The level of attention bestowed upon—and obsession with—the penis and vagina challenges even the most progressive thinker. It also makes for really good book fodder. And that, honestly, is all this book intends to be. Good fodder. Not a deep, probing gender treatise. Not an analytical dissection of pudendal parts. Not a foray into sociological underpinnings. Just . . . an entertaining read. One that I hope will alternately amuse, educate, soothe, challenge, inspire, and, occasionally, wow.

I chose to write about genitalia because I could. I didn’t wake up one morning filled with an urgency to pen prophetic words about the penis. I didn’t hear hallowed voices compelling me to extol the virtues of the vagina. Truthfully, I didn’t even know the subject would be all that interesting until well after I had committed myself to the task—a feat which took more than a few contemplative moments, I might add. But in the end, penises and vaginas were a natural choice for my initial foray into the author abyss.

The seed for this work was actually planted many years ago, in a university classroom filled with nervously tittering students embarking upon an academic journey into the nebulous world of human sexuality with me as their guide. Before they could arrive at the imagined nirvana, however, they first had to overcome daunting obstacles, such as speaking aloud taboo words like penis and vagina. To further this endeavor, the budding scholars participated in an exercise designed to lessen their anxiety, expand their social comfort zone, and desensitize them to the sexual vernacular. This activity involved clustering students together in groups of six to eight, and telling them they had five minutes to come up with as many synonyms for penis as they possibly could.

After a few timid utterances, the room was soon awash in the camaraderie of chuckles and chortles as a wondrous vocabulary began to unfold. At time’s end, each group’s anointed scribe would stand and read their selections aloud. Round two followed the same procedure with vagina. By the time the groups dispersed, the word barrier was broken, unspeakables had been spoken . . . and a curious collection was spawned.

Many years, and well over seven thousand sexuality students later, the collection was . . . big (much of which can be viewed in chapter two). And while I never thought of it as anything more than just an interesting lecture moment, my savvy sister, Neva—an idea guru of unparalleled proportions—thought otherwise. One day, when our conversation drifted (as it often did) to the as yet unnamed, unexplored, unselected book I was perpetually going to write, she (as she often did) said, Here’s an idea: why don’t you write something about your giant collection of penis and vagina words? Well, we laughed and laughed . . . and then she said, No, really. I’m serious. And so, instead of dismissing the notion as insufficient, inconsequential, even a tad insipid, I mulled it over. And in doing so, I realized that as a sexuality educator for twenty-something years with a penchant for overdoing the anatomy front (doggedly trying to undo the nasty, shameful, and disgusting mindset so many kids grow up with) I had collected more than just penis and vagina words. I had a lot of stuff about genitalia. Facts. Fallacies. Folklore. Useful tidbits. Odd things. And darned if it wasn’t all pretty interesting, too.

Thus the book began to unfold. From glib genital words (and why we feel compelled to have glib words for the genitals) to ghoulish genital activities, to more than anyone could possibly want to know about pubic hair. What began as a whimsical portrait of private part trivia evolved into an eclectic excursion into the genital cosmos—a world filled with sacred rituals and traditions, mythological gods and goddesses, countless symbols, confused anatomists, obsessed worshippers, fascinating folklore, bizarre behaviors, gifted celebrities, and a goodly sum of genital gobbledy gook.

One last thing. When I first conceived Skin Flutes and Velvet Gloves, penises and vaginas had yet to achieve their reluctant status as media darlings. It was only a few short years ago that all things genital were relegated to the dark corners of the forbidden zone, banned from the likes of social gatherings, mainstream magazines, and daytime television. We heard of them only vaguely, through abstract euphemisms usually delivered with a bashful blush and a knowing wink. But that was then. A flurry of activities in the late 90s, most notably the appearance of Viagra, the presidential Zippergate fiasco, and the poignant theatrical play The Vagina Monologues have since catapulted the genitals from down there obscurity into the national conversation.

Now, even polite folks talk about genitalia. A lot. But I’m thinking they still don’t really know very much (despite all my years in the sex ed trenches, even I didn’t know half this stuff). So while I have no illusions that this book will profoundly change anyone’s life, by golly, I’m confident that people who read it will definitely know more. And, given what they’ll know, I’m also thinking—and hoping—they just might be smiling more, too.

SKIN FLUTES & VELVET GLOVES

IN THE

BEGINNING . . .

"Let’s face it, the sex organs

ain’t got no personality"

–MAE WEST

In the beginning . . . there were no penises. There were no vaginas. There were only (brace yourself) cloacae—sort of multipurpose cavities that handled both the animal’s bathroom and sexual responsibilities. Private parts as we now know them took another hundred million years to evolve. (Imagine this conversation between Eve and Adam—Eve: Adam, is that a cloaca in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? Adam: What’s for dinner?) Nature saw fit to attach the first actual genitals to a group of primitive reptiles known as saurians. Members of this honored group include lizards, tortoises, and crocodiles.

SPEAKING OF PRIMITIVE

In the beginning . . . Man knew nothing of the Saurians, nor did he care to. However, according to primitive folklore, he was curious about the penis and vagina, and thus devised a variety of colorful explanations regarding their origins. One of the more charming of these—which appears in the book Femina Libido Sexualis—is the legend of the Bakongo tribe located on the Loango Coast (in southwestern Zaire). It seems the Creator, Nzambias, purposefully left a kola nut laying about, apparently as a test for the first man and woman. However, when the first woman found the nut, she resisted the temptation, and wisely warned her partner not to eat it, as well. As the story goes:

DID YOU KNOW?

It’s impossible to tell the sex of a fetus simply by looking at its external genitals during the first two months of development. At that stage, all fetuses look alike, possessing nothing more than a single mass of protruding tissue nondescriptly called a genital tubercle (destined to become either a clitoris or a penis head), along with a pair of folds (which will become either labia or penile shaft and scrotum). It isn’t until the third and fourth month of fetal development that this mass of tissue will become genitalia visually identifiable as hers or his.

Nzambias praised the woman’s steadfastness but he did not wish her to be stronger than the man, that did not please him. So he cut her open and took out some of her bones, making her smaller and softer to touch. Then he sewed her together again, but with too short a thread, so a piece remains open to this day.

The Boys’ Club

Anatomy is destiny

—SIGMUND FREUD

Aristotle Discovers What Women Are

In the fourth century B.C., the influential Greek philosopher and bastion of original thought Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) had an epiphany: the female . . . was an imperfect male! This conclusion was based on his theory that women’s sexual organs were similar to men’s well-developed appendages, but hers were stuck inside the body, having failed to develop sufficiently to emerge into the daylight. And so was born a deformed child, as it were. Or so said Aristotle:

Just as it sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents, and sometimes not, so the offspring produced by a female are sometimes female, sometimes not, but male. The reason is that the female is as it were a deformed male . . . we should look upon the female state as being . . . a deformity.

With those words, Aristotle spawned a male-oriented way of thinking that flourished for well over two thousand years. Following in his wake came Soranus, the second century physician whose book, Gynecology, was one of the most widely cited texts until the late seventeenth century. Soranus agreed that women had interior male organs, and reasoned that since the woman’s penis was hidden inside of her body, the vagina was therefore its foreskin, which grew around the neck of the womb like the prepuce in males around the glans. In other words, Soranus imagined the vagina as a giant foreskin draped over the head of her penis (now known, of course, as her cervix).

Galen Discovers Why Women

Are the Way They Are

By far the most powerful and enduring model of male and female reproductive organs was developed by the Greek physician Galen (130–200 A.D.), considered the most influential anatomist of early antiquity. Elaborating on previous notions, the estimable Galen agreed with his predecessors that the female genitals were a less perfect, inverted and mutilated version of the male’s, with a slight twist. Galen also described the female genitals as a penis turned inside out, but viewed the labia as foreskin, the uterus as scrotum, and the ovaries as testicles. Turn outward the woman’s, turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man’s genital organs and you will find the same in both in every respect, he insisted. The good doctor argued relentlessly that women have exactly the same organs in exactly the wrong place. (Of course, it never occurred to any of these folks that men might be the one’s misplacing their parts, much in the same way they’re forever losing their keys.)

The mindful Galen also developed a theory as to the reason for male genital superiority: heat. Now just as mankind is the most perfect of all animals, so within mankind the man is more perfect than the woman, and the reason for his perfection is his excess of heat, he said to polite applause. Galen attributed great importance to the role of heat, considering it to be Nature’s primary instrument. Women, he concluded, were much colder, and so it is no wonder that the female is less perfect than the male. When those in power speak, people listen, and these spoken words stuck around for a good fifteen hundred years before folks finally said, Say what?

SON OF SEMEN

bull The role of reproductive fluids was also potent gender fodder for the ancient thinkers. Aristotle believed that man contributed the active substance, semen, while women offered menstrual blood as passive material for the semen to work on (although he was clear that man alone controlled the magical force of conception, and was the true parent of the child). Galen, on the other hand, thought both sexes produced semen, but believed man’s seed was hotter and thicker, and women’s, naturally, was inferior. Not surprisingly, Galen also believed that male semen was the sole force responsible for producing life . . . and so did everyone else for almost two thousand years.

bull Some physicians later theorized that the milky fluid contained homunculi, fully formed offspring that were simply deposited, through intercourse, inside the female incubator, where they were nourished. Daughters, it was decided, were the result of a mother’s errant behavior during pregnancy, i.e., eating the wrong foods, thinking the wrong thoughts, or as Galen posited, having a chilled body. One thing was obvious: girls were unequivocally a mistake of Nature’s intentions.

bull Tertullian (155-225 A.D.), considered one of the greatest Western theologians and writers of Christian antiquity, believed that the formation of a person happened at the moment of ejaculation. Consequently, the practice of fellatio—which culminated in swallowing the semen—was an act of cannibalism.

THE BIG OH

It was not until 1877, when a Swiss biologist by the name of Herman Fol observed the entry of sperm into an ovum (of a starfish), did the scientific world utter a collective Oh . . . regarding the process of reproduction.

BOY OR GIRL? GENETIC SEX 101

Once science determined that both eggs and sperm were necessary for reproduction, their curious minds turned to the question of sex: how and when do we get a boy or girl? The question is a complex one with few solid answers. However, we can safely say this: the genetic sex of a child is determined at the moment of fertilization and depends upon chromosomes carried inside the egg by the one winning sperm in the biological game of life. (A contest, by the way, that begins with about five hundred million sperm desperately vying for the honor.) If the lucky tadpole carries a Y chromosome, the child will be a genetic male (XY); if it carries an X chromosome, the result is a genetic female (XX).

Why Men Are Loathe

to Admit They’re Lost

The Y chromosome has a special gene that carries penis directions, meaning, a few weeks into fetal life it tells the previously mentioned nondescript genital mass it’s time to make male hormones and turn into a penis. But, (and this is a significant but), if the directions somehow get lost or damaged, female genital development will take place instead, in spite of the Y chromosome. It seems Nature engineered all fetuses to become female in the absence of special instructions indicating otherwise. In other words, contrary to centuries of phallic thinking that ungraciously labeled women as defective males with inverted mutilated genitalia, the basic blueprint for all embryos . . . is FEMALE. So there.

YOURS, MINE, AND OURS

Male and female genitals emerge from the same embryonic tissues so it should come as no surprise to learn that they have corresponding parts:

Undifferentiated before 6th week of development

Does That Feel Good?

Ever wonder what your opposite sex partner really feels when you touch certain intimate places of his/her body? The best way to glean some understanding is to simply notice the sensations you experience when he or she touches the corresponding body part on you!

His . . . or Hers?

Private parts may come from the same origins, but does the finished product of one sex have any advantage over the other? This provocative question has long been the subject of heated debate. According to Greek mythology, the great gods Zeus and Hera actually came close to battle while trying to determine who feels the greater pleasure from coitus, man or woman? Zeus argued that the female enjoyed sex more than the male; Hera was convinced the opposite was true. To settle the argument, the two gods consulted the seer Teiresias—who had been both man and woman, and was, therefore, a logical choice. His answer?

"If the sum of love’s pleasure adds up to ten,

nine parts go to women, only one to men"

(Hera later had Teiresias blinded for being disagreeable.)

HIS FEMININE SIDE

All males possess a remnant of the "vagina that might have