Penises Are Magic! #3
What the hell is a penis anyway?
Penises Are Magic! A Guide to Patriarchy for Everyone Who Didn’t Consent to It is a book-length project that Hanne Blank Boyd is publishing as a subscribers-only serial on Substack. Looking for previous installments? Try the “Penises Are Magic!” heading or the #pam tag.
What The Hell Is A Penis Anyway?
The penis is a tube-shaped organ that protrudes from the center bottom of the pelvis, between the legs, in about half of all human beings. The penis is covered in skin, is not usually hairy, and is located right above the scrotum. It carries a particular subset of bodily fluids from the inside of the body to the outside of the body. Most, but not all, people who have penises are male, and most (but again not all) of them are appropriately referred to as boys or men.
You could think of the penis as being like a gas pump hose, a soda straw, or the sprayer hose on a kitchen sink. They all share the same function: they are a pipe, and fluids flow through them from one end to the other.
One end of the penis, called the root, is embedded in the body itself. The other end, called the body, is external and spends most of its time just hanging out.
The tip of the body of the penis is called the glans. It’s a rounded, bulbous, squishy structure that looks a bit like the cap of a mushroom. If you’ve ever seen Super Mario Brothers, you’ll recognize it.
When they arrive from the factory, every penis is a convertible with a retractable hood. Attached just behind the glans is the foreskin, a sort of turtleneck situation made out of loose skin that can either be rolled forward so that it covers the glans, or rolled back so the glans is out from under it. Around the world and across time, some peoples have chosen to remove the foreskins from penises, while others have let them be. (There’s a whole long, intense anthropology and history there that I’m not going to get into because that would be a different project entirely, but it’s pretty fascinating if you’re interested.)
