Penis History

There is an irreverent child’s story about the creation of man and woman which goes like this…

In the beginning, God created man and woman but in a hurry to complete before the weekend, He didn’t quite finish the job and instead left the two new members of the human race with thread, needles and instructions to sew themselves up.

The woman after the nature of her kind sewed carefully crafting beautifully stitched knots in her body. But as a result she ran out of thread before the job could be completed leaving a gap. The man, on the other hand, sewed carelessly with a few large stitches leaving plenty of thread left over. The woman therefore asked the man to lend her some thread and his refusal was the start of the battle of the sexes which has been about the ownership of the spare thread ever since.

Whatever your opinion on the story, the history of the human penis is indeed a curious member of the body. Its sheer size alone makes it stand out in the animal kingdom.

Indeed, if your ego takes a battering over the size of your penis, feel sorry for your primate cousins. The chimpanzee, the gorilla, the orang-utan and the gibbon all have smaller penises than man. Peter Jackson may have it when it comes to animatronics and CGI animation but as far as the greater apes are concerned, man is King Dong.

This curious fact is a by-product of research into the engine of (all our troubles?) the genitalia, the testicles. In this aspect, humans are average. Testicle size is determined by the level of promiscuity (and therefore sexual competition) in species sexual relations. Chimpanzees are the most promiscuous and therefore have the largest gonads. Gibbons are monogamous to a fault and have the smallest. Men stand somewhere in between suggesting that they are either mostly monogamous or slightly polygamous (I ‘m not going there!). Man’s pride is in fact so big it’s scarcely functional for the job at hand. Indeed, some penis augmentation techniques render it useless for reproduction because it can no longer fit the vagina.

But the male penis is also curious because of its softness and smoothness. It does not have a penile bone in it, nor is its skin horny or bulbous, something which is common in apes and monkeys and presumably enhances sexual pleasure for females. Certainly, there are numerous examples of humans artificially enhancing their penile attributes to just this effect. Finally, the human foreskin is like a undeveloped version of the penile sac. It has been suggested that the human custom of circumcision began with observing sacred baboons in ancient Egypt who had no foreskin but a fully developed protective sac (with obvious advantages if they ever took up soccer).
Evolution is meant to determine how species develop, but if they are honest evolutionists will admit that they don’t always have an explanation. And the penis is a big question mark in human development. One theory suggests, quite simply, that women selected men with big dicks to mate with. However, there is actually very little evidence that women, despite the continual torrent of spam, find big penises any more satisfactory that small ones. If anything the evidence is that artificial enhancements, such as piercings, are more effective – provided they are accompanied by a good sense of humor and excellent career prospects.

A more intriguing theory is that women chose men for their cooperativeness, loyalty and gentleness – useful attributes in child rearing. The result was that human beings became more infantile in appearance (as the above qualities as well as curiosity and playfulness are the results of greater childlikeness). This phenomenon, known as neotany, is also seen in dogs who are bred for their cooperative nature and so become more puppylike both inside and outside.

Of course, there is nothing here to stop a Creator enhancing human genital attributes for reasons of His own. After all what do you do when you have a bit of spare plasticine left over? Think about what shape you roll it into.