I’ve been privileged to work, as a teacher and a headteacher, in several Middle Eastern nations and this was one of them. The troupe of black-clad dementors had come to us from the Ministry of Education. My boss, Linda (name changed), told me the reason for their visit, before I went in. “They’re looking for willies,” she said.
The ladies had come to inspect our humanities books. With some help, I bore the heavy pile into the room and set them down upon the long table. Magnetised by the promise of rich pickings, the visitors leaned forward in hungry anticipation, each reaching greedily to grasp a volume in her hennaed talons, then leafing voraciously through its pages.
“Ha!” exclaimed the quickest, triumphantly stabbing downward with her foreclaw. The image was from the Louvre, or the British Museum, or somewhere. An Adonic male statue in grey marble stood proudly, arms aloft, not a stone stitch of carved clothing to obscure God’s fine handiwork. The head scrutineer had found her willy. I am sure it was not her first.
“You will remove this. It is inappropriate,” intoned the dementor-in-chief.
Then they left. With scissors, we cut the page from every copy of the children’s encyclopaedia it had been part of.
So, what had we collectively achieved, we teachers, and the august body of officials who guide us? We had disfigured a beautiful book. We had denied young readers a remote doorway to a room filled with classical sculpture. And we had indulged a coven of inward-looking, poison-minded naysayers in their assigned pastime, one they doubtless consider a holy quest.
‘Inappropriate’ was the word the lead inquisitor used. In what sense was the picture of the statue inappropriate? Did it contain an error? The ancient sculptor’s representation of the human form is anatomically correct, and it had been accurately depicted in the encyclopaedia through the photographer’s fine work. As I’m sure you have already concluded, the ministry lady objected to the image being seen by children. This is despite the demonstrable fact that fifty percent of children were born with a penis and therefore have, we can safely assume, already seen one. Of the other fifty percent, over four fifths have at least one sibling, and half of those siblings can be expected to be biologically male, so a good number of children who don’t have a penis will most likely have seen a penis at some time during their childhood, be it at bath time or whenever.
And what of the minority for whom the statue would be their first glimpse of the unclad male form? Ought we therefore to protect them from this particular aspect of reality? I mean, it’s not necessarily all that big an aspect, is it? Are we not overblowing its importance, amid all the wonders of the world?
Islam is a conservative, unblemished religion, we are continually assured. Women cover their torsos, arms, legs, hair and faces. Men wear long pants, or thobes, eschewing short-sleeved shirts. No unworthy thought would ever cross the mind of a good Muslim, good Muslims and their apologists tell us. We can surely conclude that no good Muslim would seek to spend her time gawping at willies.
Yet, those morally exemplar, holier-than-us women were singularly lured to our school and others by the beacon of the male penis, carved in stonework, inexorably drawing them on, but an evil menace to the innocence of everyone who sees it. Are the dementors themselves at risk of harm from exposure to such an image? Of course not, because they are imbued with the power to eliminate vices and promote virtues, or at least that’s what it says in their preferred holy text.
Perhaps something else motivates the posse, and those who issue their orders. Could the inspectors’ outward, vehemently broadcast conservatism be no more than a movie set facade, masking powerful inner urges that have kept humanity and its ancestors in continuous reproductive existence throughout our history? I assert that the dementors and their handlers find the unclothed human form no less attractive than do you or I, and that they have been conditioned from early childhood, via religious indoctrination, to consider their natural human impulses unwholesome, even wicked. Able neither to talk about their shameful obsession nor to purge themselves of it, they seek to externalise their self-loathing and demonstrate to God, the world and themselves that they are doing all any mortal can to rid the world of that which they find at once so base and so compelling. Here are two examples, both depicting prurience thinly disguised as puritanism.
Doctor Samuel Johnson, it is said, upon completion of the first dictionary of English, received a visit from a delegation of elderly ladies who wished to congratulate him on having excluded all obscene words from his grand work of reference. In response, the author noted he was intrigued to learn that the unimpeachably principled gentlewomen had been looking those words up.
In Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear berates a policeman whom he has caught in the act of whipping a prostitute. Undoubtedly missing a good number of his marbles, the troubled monarch nevertheless marshals sufficient presence of mind to point out the hypocrisy of the beadle, beating the hapless woman for doing exactly what others - including the policeman himself - want her to do.
Pious, self-flagellating religion is born of a trinity - namely consciousness, death and sex. Living organisms that reproduce sexually have a huge advantage over those that don’t, insofar as they can shuffle the genetic cards and change the password every generation. Parasites and pathogens thus have a much harder time scoring points against their targets. Evolvability may be accelerated or slowed by sex, in response to selection conditions. The vast number of plants and animals that reproduce sexually testifies to sex’s efficacy. The world is full of organisms that have what it takes to be in the world.
In order to get established, sex has to be popular. Sexually reproducing organisms that don’t practise sex will die out. Therefore, sex has to include both motivation and reward. Put simply, sexually reproducing organisms must seek sex whenever and wherever they can get it, and they must find it to be worth their while when they engage in it.
Animal brains can process information sufficiently fast to be ‘in the moment’, which gives sex an ideal opportunity to make that moment one of pleasure. Once a brain adds the ability to contemplate and to analyse, it will develop its own views on sex, a subject that occupies many of its waking hours. None of us likes being told what to do. When we have identified sex as a controlling influence, we may come to resent it, while at the same time enjoying it. Dwell on that long enough, with shrieking vocal reinforcement from Lear’s policeman atop his minaret, and before long you’re a full letterbox-format dementor, travelling around, doing God’s good work. I offer my sincerest wish that you find happiness.
