This missive is about a body part. I’m uncomfortable writing it. I could skip the topic only my brag is Terence’s “Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto – Being human, I think nothing human alien to me.” If a topic makes me fidget, I wonder why. Dig in this dark corner and maybe I’ll extract an instructive shard.

                 Ten to one you know which body part I’m talking about. As the lion is the king of beasts, the penis is of male body parts. Only we’d never have called it that. In my boyhood home we didn’t call it anything unless we had to and then in the squeamish diminutive – “wee” – or if the wee was busy – “tinkle” – like a choir boy with the altar bell. Inability to name a thing enrobes it in awe. The old Hebrews in the Second Temple Period (500 BCE to 70 CE) gave up saying God (Yahweh), substituting Adonai (Lord) or HaShem (the Name) in anxious reverence. So in my experience has the male member been honored with silence, euphemisms, or jokey nicknames, indicative of disquiet.

                  I never saw my father’s, not once, and we cohabited earth for sixteen years. I would have remembered. We were decorous in our household to the verge of prudery. A kiss was a peck. We never touched except to whack. I never saw my three older sisters naked, despite best efforts. Did they resemble the naked Japanese dancers in a kick line in National Geographic? National Geographic was a magazine adults never opened so it smuggled in surprises. Another was a photo of a bear being skinned, frontal view, so you could see his unnameable, so like mine. 

                  This reticence, more like panic, extended to any discussion of sexual reproduction. The books said how it happened – the encyclopedia was another source of titillating tidbits – but it was hard to believe it had happened with our parents – five times, at least. In one of our last conversations, if you can call it that, my father – goaded by my mother, I suspect – asked – blushing, nervous – if there was anything I needed to know about “the birds and the beasts.” “No,” I put him out of his misery.

                  What’s awesome in youth remains awesome in consciousness – perhaps not to a urologist – but to most of us. We’re told that eyes first meet eyes but that’s not true of guys in a locker room. Urinal users don virtual blinders. I used to get so nervous in a men’s room I couldn’t pee, but now I’m 74; things change.

                  It’s curious, this fascination, as with a basilisk’s gaze. Why isn’t this extremity like any other? Why its supremacy?

                  Here’s my hunch. Genitals confront humans with our most complex conundrum. Our equipment – and our respective roles in reproduction – involve us in an inescapable difference. What does it mean to be a man – or woman? Other species accept differences without speculating, but for humans difference leads to comparison, contest, conflict. If you are not like me, one of us must be superior! We cannot just be we must be comparatively, deriving our distinction from difference. Identity, that uniquely human concept, is what makes humans interesting and the human project a mess. We can’t just get along: we must be “somebody” at somebody else’s expense.

                  Such nonsense can’t be helped: it’s how we’re made. My spiritual goal, hindsight suggests, has been to cozy up to my nonentity. As Shakespeare’s Richard II discovers at the last:

Nor I nor any man that but man i

With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eas’d

With being nothing.