ABSTRACT
‘You know when your dick goes all long, thin and stiff’, said Sharpy, my new friend in my new school for Big Boys (you never called each other by the first name, and I never even learned his), ‘it’s called “horn”’. I had indeed experienced the phenomenon, and rather enjoyed the accompanying sensations, but didn’t know that there actually was a name for it, which thereby hinted at some remote level of acceptance, if not respectability. I did, however, know, or, rather, guess, that it was extremely impolite to draw attention to it, or even to discuss it openly in the presence of adults. Sharpy looked as if he could confidentially offer me some much-needed background knowledge, although I was not to know at the time that he could also be a fount of unreliable and at times downright misleading information. At 12, he was a year older than me, far more street- and worldly-wise. He went on to say that the phenomenon was associated with procreation – not, of course, in exactly those terms, with which he would have been quite unfamiliar. Thus, when a woman wanted to have a baby, he said, a man had to piss inside her, and you needed horn to achieve this. We both agreed that it seemed an extraordinarily insanitary and rather unappealing thing to want to do, although in a rare moment of insight he hypothesised that that might be why ‘horn’ felt really rather nice. Indeed, when some time later we encountered, in the school’s well-equipped library, very explicit photographs in the latest issue of the National Geographic of newly encountered New Guinea warriors, penis sheathed in a tight-fitting tube and held aloft with a cord at the ‘present arms’ posture, the significance of cultural differences in perceptions of propriety was brought home to us.
