- Sir A. Conan Doyle, 1894

Reproductive and Hormonal Functions of the Male

THE MALE SEXUAL ACT

Neuronal Stimulus for Performance of the Male Sexual Act

The most important source of sensory nerve signals for initiating the male sexual act is the glans penis. The glans contains an especially sensitive sensory end-organ system that transmits into the central nervous system that special modality of sensation called sexual sensation. The slippery massaging action of intercourse on the glans stimulates the sensory end-organs, and the sexual signals in turn pass through the pudendal nerve, then through the sacral plexus into the sacral portion of the spinal cord, and finally up the cord to undefined areas of the brain. Impulses may also enter the spinal cord from areas adjacent to the penis to aid in stimulating the sexual act. For instance, stimulation of the anal epithelium, the scrotum, and perineal structures in general can send signals into the cord that add to the sexual sensation.

Sexual sensations can even originate in internal structures, such as in areas of the urethra, bladder, prostate, seminal vesicles, testes, and vas deferens.

The male reproductive structures include the penis, the scrotum, the seminal vesicles and the prostate.

A.D.A.M., Inc. is accredited by URAC, also known as the American Accreditation HealthCare Commission (www.urac.org). URAC's accreditation program is the first of its kind, requiring compliance with 53 standards of quality and accountability, verified by independent audit. A.D.A.M. is among the first to achieve this important distinction for online health information and services. Learn more about A.D.A.M.'s editorial reviewers . A.D.A.M. is also a founding member of Hi-Ethics (www.hiethics.com) and subscribes to the principles of the Health on the Net Foundation (www.hon.ch).

BBC
Last Updated: Thursday, 7 August, 2003, 00:44 GMT 01:44 UK

Penis is a competitive beast

Scientists believe the shape of the penis may have evolved to help men remove the semen of love rivals during sex.

Tests led a team of US researchers, headed by Professor Gordon Gallup, to conclude that the penis acts as a "semen displacement device" and its shape has evolved in part to displace another man's semen.

The team from the State University of New York believe the thrust of the penis during sex may help to clear a woman's reproductive system of a previous lover's semen.

They tested their theory in experiments using latex phalluses, an artificial vagina and a mixture of starch and water.

New Scientist magazine reports they found the coronal ridge of the penis, found where the glans, or head, meets the shaft, could scoop out more than 90% of the cornstarch mixture with just one thrust. A phallus with no coronal ridge only managed to remove 35%. They found the depth of thrusting was also important. A three-quarter thrust was found to clear out less than 40% of the viscous mixture.

...

'Far fetched' theory

Mr Derek Machin, a urologist at University Hospital, Aintree, said the theory seemed "far fetched".

"The research might very well be accurate, but I'm not convinced that just because the penis does something like this it was necessarily designed to have that effect."

...

The research is published in the journal Evolution and Human Behaviour.

ALL SERIAL KILLERS, almost without exception, are severely sexually abused as children. The kind of people who hijack a plane with innocent people and drive it into a building with thousands of other innocent people are related to this phenomenon.

When sociopaths rape and kill, they do not see their victims as human beings, but only as objects. This is because the sociopaths were themselves, at one time, used as objects - as their bodily integrity was repeatedly violated. The rage that results from sexual abuse is one thing, but when combined with living in a dysfunctional culture of sexual repression and misogyny, where love is reduced to violent domination, it is quite another. ...

The sexual privileges that are allowed in Islamic cultures are permitted to men. ... A deep-seated fear of, and hostility to, individuality prevails, and its main expression exists in misogyny.

Socially segregated from women, Arab men succumb to homosexual behavior. ... The male who is penetrated is emasculated. The boy, however, is not, since it is rationalized that he is not yet a man.

...As the scholar Bruce Dunne has demonstrated, sex in Islamic societies is not about mutuality between partners, but about the adult male's achievement of pleasure through violent domination.

There is silence around this issue. It is the silence that legitimizes sexual violence against women, such as honor crimes and female circumcision. It is also the silence that forces victimized Arab boys into invisibility. Even though the society does not see their sexual exploitation as being humiliating, the psychological and emotional scars that result from their subordination, powerlessness and humiliation is a given. Traumatized by the violation of their dignity and manliness, they spend the rest of their lives trying to get it back. ...

[Unmarried males'] sexual outlet mostly includes victimizing younger males - just the way they were victimized. ...

It is ...no surprise that many of these males find their only avenue for gratification in the act of humiliating the foreign "enemy," whose masculinity must be violated at all costs - as theirs once was.

Violating the masculinity of the enemy necessitates the dishing out of severe violence against him. In the recent terrorist strikes, therefore, violence against Americans served as a much-needed release of the terrorists' bottled-up sexual rage. Moreover, it served as a desperate and pathological testament of the re-masculinization of their emasculated selves.

[There is silence in this article around the circumcision of virtually all Arab boys - at an age they can remember it. It is the same silence that legitimises the victimisation of boys by circumcision throughout the world - but especially the US.]

Jamie Glazov holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He is the author of 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist.. ... He writes the Dr. Progressive advice column for angst-ridden leftists at EnterStageRight.com. E-mail him at jglazov@home.com.

The entire article may be seen on a separate page.

Do You Need This Surgery?

Millions of Americans are having operations on their knees, backs and sinuses. Should you?
By Dr. Ranit Mishori, PARADE Magazine
More on this in Health & Fitness
Courtesy of PARADE

More than 70 million Americans face surgical procedures every year. Are they all necessary? Probably not. Even the simplest operation is a serious undertaking. “No surgery is minor,” says Dr. Thomas Russell, executive director of the American College of Surgeons. There is always a possibility that something can go wrong when someone sticks a sharp blade in your body.

Sometimes surgery is the only available treatment. In other cases, however, less-invasive options should be tried first. Whether or not you go under the knife may even depend on where you live. “There’s evidence that in some parts of the country, certain procedures are overdone,” says Dr. Russell. [One procedure is overdone in all parts of the US.] “But other communities take a conservative approach and require you to go through hoops and hurdles before you have surgery.”

... Knee surgery ... Back surgery ... Sinus surgery ...

Ultimately, elective surgery is about making you feel better. And it’s you, the patient, who must decide the right course of action for your needs, carefully choosing the time, the place and the doctor. Educate yourself about any procedure and ask questions. You must be convinced that the benefits of what may be a short-term solution to your problem outweigh the risks.

Questions To Ask About the Surgery

• What are the risks and benefits?
• What are the latest techniques and surgical options?
• Is there evidence that this surgery is effective?
• How many people achieve full recovery?
• How long is the recovery?
• What can go wrong?

Questions To Ask About the Timing

• Do I need the surgery right now?
• Do I have other options?
• What happens if I wait a while?
• Can I wait too long?

BY MARTHA COVENTRY

On New Year's Eve, I sit with an acquaintance and talk. We are nearing the end of a long, pleasant evening. My friend, also a writer, leans towards me into the little circle of privacy we've created "So you mean what happens to African girls?" she asks, after I tell her what I am working on. "No," I say. "I mean what happens to children in the United States."

Or rather, what happens to girls...

As late as 1937, Holt's Diseases of Childhood. a respected medical-school text, stated that the author was "not averse to circumcision in girls..."

This is the only use of the c. word.

Over the past 50 years, medicine has established standards for female and male bodies. ... Girls should have vaginas fit for future intercourse, and boys should have urethral openings at the tip of the penis.

...so the true tip of the penis, the foreskin, is cut off. But this is not what she means, she's referring to operations to "correct" hypospadias, where the urethra does not emerge from the tip of the glans.

Approximately 2,000 children a year have genital surgery in the U.S.

The true figure is approximately 1,200,000 children a year...

Experts say the vast majority are girls who lose parts of their clitorises and, less commonly, little boys who are changed into girls in an attempt to give them what doctors believe will be a better life.

...almost all baby boys

Journalist John Colapinto recently wrote a book called As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. It's about the boy John Money put forth as evidence that we can make a child any sex we want if we get to her or him early enough.

... but no mention that David Reimer's troubles stemmed from a botched, unnecessary circumcision.

After reading of [John Money's PhD thesis arguing against genital reassignment surgery] and knowing what followed - the long-unexamined practice of cutting into children's genitals to make them more acceptable - the practice seems like a sad, avoidable mistake.

... but the sad, avoidable, mistaken practice of cutting into healthy boys' genitals to make them more acceptable remains unexamined a bit longer.

...we're appalled by countries that routinely clitoridectomize their daughters. But we still treat a bigger than average clitoris on a child as fair game.

...or any penis at all.

The Tyranny of the Esthetic Surgery's Most Intimate Violation by Martha Coventry

... Clitoral surgery on children is brutal and illogical, and no matter what name you give it, it is a mutilation. When I use the word mutilation, I can hear doors slamming shut in the minds of doctors all over this country. John Gearhart, a pediatric urologist at Johns Hopkins, has said, "To compare genital mutilation of young girls in Africa to reconstructive surgery of a young baby is a giant, giant leap of misrepresentation." ... Gearhart's mistake is to judge surgery only by the surgeon's intent, and not by the effect on the child....

Of the notable feminist voices raised long and loud in outrage over traditional genital surgeries practiced in parts of Africa, which are now denounced as "female genital mutilation" (FGM), not a single woman has said a word about the equally mutilating practice of surgically destroying the healthy genitals of children in their own country. [And in her treatment of circumcision, Ms Coventry carries on that tradition.] ... Could their silence be because they don't know what is happening in American hospitals? It's possible, but this issue has received media coverage in the past year, and many of them have had the facts explained to them in person or in writing.

I could speculate that these women don't want to take on a foe as formidable and familiar as the medical profession, and that it is simpler to point fingers at more barbaric countries. They may not want to dilute their cause with the sticky subjects of sex and gender that surround the issue of ambiguous genitalia [and "normal" male genitalia]. ...

Each woman has her own reasons for turning away from this issue. But I challenge them to pay attention to the fact that in hospitals just down the street in any big American city, five [no, 3,300] children a day are losing healthy, erotic parts of their bodies to satisfy a social demand for "normalcy." There is no Federal ban to save them. The surgery is left out of the law against FGM because it is deemed "necessary to the health of the child on whom it is performed." [Boys do not even have that much protection. Circumcision may be legally performed for any reason or none.] But as social psychologist Suzanne Kessler at the State University of New York at Purchase points out, "Genital ambiguity is corrected not because it is threatening to the infant's life, but because it is threatening to the infant's culture." [or rather, to the parents' culture]

Doctors and parents believe society will reject a child with atypical genitals, and the child is made to pay with her or his body for this shortcoming of our culture. What is happening in American hospitals to healthy children is just as mutilating to the bodies -- no matter how exquisite the surgical craftsmanship -- and violating to the souls of these children as FGM. And frequently, the surgical craftsmanship falls far short of exquisite.

The strict sexual agenda for bodies in America extends to little boys as well. [Yes! - and then, more silence:] To grow up to be a real man, a boy will have to be able to do two things -- pee standing up and penetrate a vagina with his penis. If a little boy has to sit like a girl to urinate because his urethra exits somewhere along the shaft of his penis rather than the tip (a condition that can occur in as many as 8 out of 1,000), he may be subjected to many disheartening surgeries over the course of his childhood to correct this "defect," and be left with a lifetime of chronic infections and emotional trauma. And if the baby is born with a "too-small" penis that doctors decide will never be big enough to "successfully" penetrate a woman, physicians will probably make him into a "girl" through surgery and hormone treatments, because, in the words of one surgeon, "It's easier to poke a hole than to build a pole." [And if a baby is born with any penis at all, US physicians will probably remove his foreskin.]

In the 40 years since surgical intervention to "correct" genitals that are viewed as abnormal was first prescribed [and in the 120 years since circumcision was first prescribed for "moral hygiene", i.e. to hinder masturbation], treatment protocols have rarely been questioned. After all, it is much more comfortable for doctors to assume all is well than to start digging around to find out if it's really true. Until recently, all discussions of what is done to people's sexual bodies have been hidden safely away in the pages of medical texts, where real lives are only "interesting cases," and pictures of genitals are disembodied curiosities or teaching tools. Many doctors would like to keep things that way. For example. Dr. Kenneth Glassberg, a pediatric urologist associated with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), insists that people who speak up and tell their stories are doing a disservice by "scaring patients away."

... Cosmetic genital surgery on children is out of control. As the practice has careened along unexamined for decades, illustrious careers and reputations have been made, consciences have been swallowed, and terrific damage has been done. For a doctor even to hesitate before operating takes tremendous effort and self-reflection. The need for babies to have genitals that look typical has been perceived as so unquestionable that surgeons travel all over the world to perform surgery on children free of charge as a "humanitarian gesture."

Dr. Justine Schober challenges her fellow surgeons to realize that "when you do [this kind of] surgery on someone, you are responsible for them for the rest of their lives." ... No one is naive enough to say that a life in a body seen as abnormal is a ticket to bliss. But it is not the bodies of these children that are wrong, it is the way people see them. And if these children grow up and want to change their bodies one day, that will be their right. Nobody, but nobody, no matter how loving, no matter how well-intentioned, should have the power to steal precious parts of a body from a child before she or he even gets started in life.

By KATHLEEN LONGCORE
Booth News Service

...
In a book published last year, "As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl," author John Colapinto wrote about his own [no, David Reimer's] failed surgical transformation. Born a boy and re-made into a girl [after a more than usually botched circumcision destroyed his penis], he still felt like a boy despite large doses of female hormones.

The Everything Get Ready for Baby Book
From buying the right gear to preparing a room
by Katina Z Jones

Adams Media Corp.
Holbrook MA
1998 (290pp)

It includes

"This difference between the sexes is reflected in the initiation ceremonies of men and women ... there are more initiations for males than for females ... the Sabiny tribe in eastern Uganda celebrates a girl's passage into womanhood with a brutal ceremony that ends her ability to feel sexual pleasure. A "traditional surgeon" cuts away her clitoris and labia minor with a razor blade as the girl's friends and family watch. She endures the pain in silence, because if she cries out she becomes an embarassment to her family. ...

A boy's entry into the club of men is biologically less dramatic ... Initiations do exist in the modern world, but they get less attention than they did in primitive society. Modern initiations today are pale remnants of old traditions. They exist in ceremonies like joiing a fraternity, entering a new job, taking first communion, or having one's shirt bloodied after a deer hunt."

pp 199-200

Amazon.com: "The author of the provocative bestseller Who Stole Feminism? returns with an equally eye-opening follow-up. 'It's a bad time to be a boy in America,' writes Christina Hoff Sommers. Boys are less likely than girls to go to college or do their homework. They're more likely to cheat on tests, wind up in detention, or drop out of school. This book tells the story of how it has become fashionable to attribute pathology to millions of healthy male children."

Yet The War on Boys nowhere mentions that they're almost infinitely more likely to have part of their genitals cut off. It nowhere tells the story of how it has become fashionable to attribute pathology to millions of healthy male penises.

"In Christina Hoff Sommers's splendid new book . . . she shows the damage that is being done to our sons by adults determined to stop them from being, well, boys."--Danielle Crittenden, New York Post

But not all the damage.

The centralisation of the penis in normative notions of heterosex may be interpreted as an effect of phallocentrism - that is, of the dominance of the phallus in Western cultural symbolism. In Lacanian theory the 'phallus' represents the Transcendental signified in the symbolic order (that is, the order of language and power). Power, authority, and control over desire are predicated on the subject's relation to the phallus. The penis and the phallus are involved in a metonymical [one thing standing for another] relationship, whereby the penis comes to represent the phallus, and thereby is invested with the power attributed to the phallus. By having a penis, men may seem closer to possessing the phallus and the power attributed to it. While much has been written on the metonymical association between the penis and the phallus,2 this chapter focuses instead on the synecdochical [part standing for the whole] relationship between the penis and the man. In particular, this relationship is explored with reference to the inside/outside dichotomy and the 'spatialisation' of sexed bodies.

Spatial tropes are pervasive in Western society. Indeed, Derrida argues that the inside/outside dichotomy is the 'matrix of all possible opposition'. The modern human(ist) subject is constituted in terms of the spatial division, mind/ body; this binary operates by crediting the mind with 'interiority': it resides 'inside', possesses the quality of 'depth', and is intimately aligned with the all-important 'self. In contrast, the body occupies an inferior position on the 'outside' of 'personality', as a superficial, albeit necessary, shell or casing for the interior psyche. Furthermore, the spatialisation of subjectivity is gendered: mind-the 'superior' term in the hierarchical pairing - is associated with man, and body with woman. The differential spatialisation of subjectivity also produces specifically gendered 'experiences' of corporeality, depending on whether one's body is classified as female or male. However, in relation to sexed bodies, the inside/outside dichotomy is deployed in reverse: in this context, men are associated with exteriority (an effect of the visibility of the penis in a culture privileging visual over other sensory modalities) and women with interiority (due to their inner, invisible, reproductive organs).

[There is no mention anywhere in the 204-page book that about half of the men born in New Zealand in the 20th century had their foreskins cut off, making their achetypically phallic, but interior, glandes penis, exterior. ]

Many social scientists incorrectly believe that all long-standing human practices must be evolutionarily adaptive: for how else could they persist? Thus, even the most bizarre and unproductive behaviors­ - female genital excision, blood feuds, infanticide, the torture of animals, scarification, foot binding, cannibalism, ceremonial rape, human sac­rifice, dangerous male initiations, restricting the diet of pregnant and lactating mothers, slavery, potlatch, the killing of the elderly, sati, irra­tional dietary and agricultural taboos attended by chronic hunger and malnourishment, the use of heavy metals to treat illness, etc. - have been rationalized, or even idealized, in the fire-lit scribblings of one or another dazzled ethnographer. But the mere endurance of a belief sys­tem or custom does not suggest that it is adaptive, much less wise. It merely suggests that it hasn't led directly to a society's collapse or killed its practitioners outright.

p20

Thus - instead of simply saying "genital cutting" - Harris apparently skirts around male genital excision because it is not (or so he supposes) "dangerous".

I don't think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the "contextual" legitimacy of the burqa, or female genital mutilation, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that moral relativism does nothing to diminish a person's commitment to making the world a better place.

Enjoy the life of the mind! Watch Sam Harris deliver this sentence without noticing that he has implicitly defended male genital cutting because he does not recognise it as "mutilation" (when severity and gender are not the issues, but violation, lack of consent and irrevocability.)

p27

Moral Blindness in the Name of "Tolerance"

There are very practical concerns that follow from the glib idea that anyone is free to value anything - the most consequential being that it is precisely what allows highly educated, secular, and otherwise well-in­tentioned people to pause thoughtfully, and often interminably, before condemning practices like compulsory veiling, genital excision, bride burning, forced marriage, and the other cheerful products of alterna­tive "morality" found elsewhere in the world.

p42

From the context, Harris clearly means only female genital excision, ignoring a cheerful product of indigenous "morality" found much closer to home.

In his wonderful book The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker includes a quotation from the anthropologist Donald Symons that captures the problem of multiculturalism especially well:

p46

The Road to Wellville

Slapstick comedy movie (1994, screenplay by Alan Parker from the novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle) starring Anthony Hopkins as Dr John Harvey Kellogg and centred on his Battle Creek Sanitarium. Kellogg is portrayed, probably accurately, as a crank obsessed with bowel movements and suppressing sexuality. "Any use of the sexual act other than procreation is a waste of vital energy! Wasted seeds are wasted lives!" "An erection is a flagpole on your grave!" (Much of the comedy involves his clients evading his bans. One woman speaks glowingly of a rival who "wrote an excellent piece on the clitoris.") He performs an operation on "William Lightbody" (Matthew Broderick) to remove a "kink" from his colon, and one sequence involves Kellogg finding out that Lightbody uses an electric belt for genital stimulation, but there is no mention of Kellogg's predeliction for circumcision to treat masturbation.

"The fold of skin which is removed at circumcision is the prepuce and this is anchored underneath the shaft by a narrow band of skin called the fraenum, meaning bridle." (p137)

Not even a comma to slow his hurrying past! Let alone any mention of the functions of the foreskin, which have been well described for centuries (Less well more recently, as this page shows). Earlier, Knight is critical of "the poor draughtsmanship and worse observational powers of the medieval anatomists" yet his own diagram of the end of the penis looks like this:

The prepuce is shown almost invisibly pale. The line from "prepuce" and "corona" ends on the corpora cavernosa, that from "glans" on the meatus, and that from the fr[a]en[ul]um on the shaft/foreskin border. The white ring encircling the penis is mysterious.

Knight's only illustration of the intact anatomy is by Vesalius (1543) of which this is an enlarged detail:

Readers who have never seen an intact penis can be forgiven for imagining they are looking at a circumcised one (with a rather small glans). In fact, Vesalius - who may have never seen a circumcised penis - was portraying a short penis with a large glans covered by a foreskin that extends forward in an acroposthion, and the folds of the preputial sphincter.

Knight also shows two diagrams of flayed penises - which of course lack foreskins - calling them "accurate".

- Penis
forms a shaft topped by the glans penis - the most sensitive part.