Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

When Miss Poubelle was a young thing perusing her father's hidden stacks of Playboy and Penthouse magazines, she soon discovered that the little advertisements on the last pages were the best places to see pictures of naked men. The publishers of gay porn were smart enough to know that men who go in to buy Playboy might very well be interested in buying Playguy as well.

But buried among these ads were also an amazing number of ads for erection creams, "erection-sustaining rings," and penile extensions.

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Miss Poubelle was being introduced to the very real world of male anxieties about erections. The problem with the penis is that it is not under voluntary control. You can't raise and lower your dick the same way that you raise and lower your hand. If we are lucky the penis does what it is supposed to do, but far too often it seems that we have erections when they are not wanted and fail to get them when they are sought.

"Wood problems" are in fact the chief occupational hazard for male porno actors. The recent film Shooting Porn tells us about this in some detail, and explains the role of "fluffing" during film-making as well. (Fluffing, for the uninitiated, is when another person helps an actor get a hard-on, usually with a blow job or hand job.)

English slang is in a resolute state of denial about this basic fact of male anatomy. We call an erect penis a woody, a boner, or a rod, but wood, bones, and rods don't go soft at unexpected times.

It comes of something of a surprise to learn that most male animals never have to worry about having a soft penis because they have a bone in the penis. Several years ago, Miss Poubelle made her first visit to the La Brea tar pits. In the museum next door, they have patiently reassembled and exhibited the bones of the mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and wolves that fell into the tar. To her surprise, the wolf skeleton quite clearly had a penis bone jutting out from between its legs.

The technical zoological term for the penis bone is baculum. One zoological dictionary defines it this way: "A baculum is a heterotopic bone, which is the skeleton of the penis, found in all insectivores, bats, rodents, and carnivores, and in all primates except man." And the term baculum is Latin for "little rod."

Assuming that the dictionary is correct, it seems strange that in the course of evolution, humans have lost the penis bone while closely related species have kept it. If one were a creationist, one could almost believe that God was out to keep a lid on human pride by making us vulnerable in this most sensitive area. When porno stars say their prayers at night, do they ask God for a return of the penis bone? Or do they content themselves with their own erectile good fortunes, and knock on wood?