Let’s get naked about penises. They’re designed (as it were) to penetrate. For all our peacockery about cocks, a penis is nothing more than a DNA delivery nozzle. Glorifying a man’s pecker is as absurd as glorifying a garden hose when it’s the garden he’s “watering” that should get our respect..
Male design specs encourage “squirt’n go” behavior. Before humans figured out that sperm were microscopic flagellates, they imagined them as tiny humans.
In other words, men (since men got to do all the “imagining”) convinced themselves that when they penetrated a woman with their penises, what they were really doing was implanting the baby that would grow inside them. The man, they believed, delivered the product while the woman served as its incubator and temporary digs.
Our thinking hasn’t changed all that much, has it?
Our culture doesn’t just celebrate the penis, it gives it extraordinary privilege. Where the word “no” should be an absolute, we still see grey area as if an erection suddenly gave men two votes instead of one. Not that it matters. Where sex is concerned, anything shy of a unanimous “yes” (and that “yes” must be allowed to be fluid) becomes an instant “no”; the sex stops right there, right then.
The male orgasm is no more a right than is penetration. The day we make the male orgasm mandatory in male-female sex should come only after we make the female orgasm mandatory.
Fact – female sexuality does not cause pregnancy, male sexuality does. The female orgasm is unconnected to a woman’s fertility. The egg in her fallopian tube can be fertilized regardless of whether or not the sperm swimming toward it had to broach the powerful waves of an orgasm first. Men are 100% responsible for impregnating a woman. Minus sperm – and that sperm’s penile delivery system – no woman would ever get pregnant – even if she actually enjoyed the sex that made her pregnant.
Whether or not a penis gets weaponized is entirely up to the man to whom that penis belongs. And, of course, you don’t have to be a woman to be the victim of a weaponized penis. As I’ve blogged here previously, the man who sexually assaulted me when I was 14 knew exactly what he was doing with his penis.
And he knew that what he was doing with his penis – and with me – was wrong. But a weaponized penis does the thinking for its owner. A weaponized penis wants what IT wants. And a weaponized penis, once unloaded, becomes a whole other kind of weapon – a psychological one.
Though I was assaulted (twice) back when I was 14, those assaults continued to ripple across my life in myriad ways up to and including a depression deep enough to tempt me to suicide myself.
Not every man is beholden to his dick. Of course. That’s where the hope comes from. Fatherhood doesn’t actually require a penis — flowing, as it does, from our brains, not our nutsacks.