Penises Are Magic! #5

Don’t Quit Your Day Job

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.

Biologically speaking, any given human penis has two jobs.  One job is essential to the organism, but not the species.  One job is helpful to the species, but not essential to the organism.  

Urination, or peeing, is essential to the organism.  Urine is one of the body’s waste products, composed of water and the salts and other metabolic wastes that your body either doesn’t need or that are toxic and will do harm if they build up in your body.  

The kidneys make urine by filtering blood, sending the components that the body can use back into the bloodstream and getting rid of the rest.  From the kidneys, the urine travels through the ureters into the bladder, which is a round bag made out of smooth muscle tissue.  It’s the holding tank for pee. At the bottom of the bladder, a single tube called the urethra provides an exit so that the pee can drain out.  

In people with penises, the urethra is relatively long, between 15 and 23 cm (roughly 7-8 inches), so it can extend all the way from the bladder down the entire length of the penis.  In case you were wondering, researchers have found no relationship between the length of the urethra and a person’s height, weight, or age. As far as I know no one checked whether it has anything to do with shoe size, but since research shows that penis length itself doesn’t correlate to shoe size, probably not that either.

In people without penises, there’s no need for a long-distance pee tube, so the urethra is much shorter, just 3 to 4 cm (about 1.5 inches).  At the top of the urethra are the urinary sphincters, tight little bands of muscle that normally seal off the urethra from the bladder so that pee stays inside.  Note that this is important enough that we don’t just have one sphincter:  evolution let us double down and grow two.  

Before you assume that this must mean you should hold it twice as long: no.  Not peeing is dangerous, and can cause major damage to the body.  This can range from things like urinary tract infection that are fairly easy to treat and recover from to things that can actually kill you, like kidney failure.  Prolonged lack of peeing can also stretch the bladder, urethra, and ureters to the point of permanent damage, which in turn creates other problems.  One of those potential problems is that you can blow out your urethral sphincters, and become unable to hold your pee at all.  Whoops.  

Like my mom’s dad, a WWII fighter pilot, used to say, Here’s what I learned in the service: never miss a chance to eat, sleep, or pee.  You never know when you’re gonna get your next chance and you might really regret it if you don’t do it while you can.

All this is by way of saying that the one genuinely crucial thing that a penis does for any given person is carry pee out of the body.  

It is also by way of saying that a penis is not the only workable way to accomplish this, as should be obvious given that about half of the human population doesn’t use a penis to do it. 

There is only one known advantage to using a penis to drain pee out of the body, which is that a longer urethra is protective against urinary tract infection.  Because the distance between the urethral opening and the bladder is so much further, and the distance between the urethral opening and the anus is also a lot further, bad bacteria are much less likely to get up in there where they can cause trouble.  People with penises get far fewer (up to 30 times fewer) UTIs than people without penises.  

While this is definitely a perk, penis-havers shouldn’t get too, er, cocky about it.  After all, roughly 2,000 people with penises show up in U.S. emergency wards every year because they’ve managed to zip their dicks into their pants, something that people who don’t have penises literally never, ever do.   Given that your average penis-having person is NOT going to go to the emergency room when this happens, that 2,000-weiners-a-year statistic has got to be a gigantic undercount. There’s an invisible epidemic of dickzip out there, y’all, and if the Journal of the American Medical Association is anything to go by, it has been going on for almost a century now. 

This type of injury, which the medical literature somewhat hilariously calls a ZIRPI or “zipper-related penile injury,” was first reported in JAMA all the way back in 1936.  Yet metal zippers are somehow still the industry standard for pants of all kinds, worn within fractions of an inch of millions of penises daily. Think about it: it only took one guy with plastic explosive in his Hush Puppies and we’re still all having to take off our damn shoes when we fly.  On the other hand, it’s really hard to murder dozens of schoolkids without an automatic firearm and the United States doesn’t seem to be in any rush to take those off the shelves either, so maybe the whole zippers-in-pants things makes sense after all. 

(Sorry about the mass murder, kids.  Watch out for those zippers.)

But I digress, and anyway, I know what you’re thinking: but ejaculation, ejaculation is crucial!

To which I am forced by actual science to say: nah, not as much as you think.