You know what it’s like when you’ve been spending the last eight months thinking about cocks, reading about cocks, looking at pictures of cocks in various states of arousal or disease and reading thousands of responses to a long questionnaire that you’ve set up which is all about cocks?

Oh come on, surely everyone knows what that’s like.

The thing is that after all that time (as you know) you start to think that you’re probably not going to learn anything new about cocks. You’ve probably read about or heard about or at least imagined everything there is to know or imagine about them.

Then today something new.

I had ordered a book from Amazon called “Skin Flutes and Velvet Gloves” by Dr Terri Hamilton (there should be a law that people called Terri can’t become doctors. I believe there may be such a law in the UK, but this Terri comes from America). It arrived today. It’s about both the penis and the (let’s face it) much less interesting vagina. I don’t want to look at pictures of vaginas. It’s cocks that I’m interested in. Or is it clocks? I get so confused..

It’s packed with stuff, most of which I already knew at least something about. For example she claims that on in a hundred thousand men is born with two penises, a surprisingly high amount, but I knew that was possible. It’s mentioned in the show.

But the thing that I had never even considered before, mainly because it seems beyond the realms of possibility was this surprising “fact” –

“Approximately 1 in 100 males is capable of self-penetration (inserting his penis in his own rectum).”

Well, bugger me!

Surely not. Surely that isn’t possible, unless your penis is about 25 inches long and curves down and around like a jester’s shoe or has a hinge in the middle. I mean how would it even work if you could get it all the way round and in. Surely you couldn’t thrust backwards like that. Could it be anything approaching fun to do so?

And let’s just suppose there is some freak in the world who can manage that, surely he is alone. Surely this isn’t a “gift” given to one per cent of the male population. Surely one per cent of the male population haven’t even considered it as a possibility and tried it. If only I had asked that on the questionnaire (but I felt like I was pushing back the boundaries of imagination by asking if men had ever tried to suck their own cocks).

I have e mailed Dr Hamilton in the hope that she will divulge her sources!

But later in the day, as tends to happen with these things, my doubts were cast aside. I read about a documented case of what I now learn is called auto-eroticism. You wait eight months for a story of self-buggery and then two come along at once. But the fact there’s two of them doesn’t stop them buggering themselves. Oh no.

I was reading “The Male Member” by Kit Schwarz who related the story of Dr Mikhail Stern, a Russian psychiatrist imprisoned in Kharkov in the late 1960s. One of his fellow prisoners was an auto-sexual – “a man whose penis was both flexible and rigid enough that he could insert it in his own anus, and by contracting his anal sphincter and his groin and buttock muscles could bring himself to orgasm.” Dr Stern commented that the auto-sexual was” virtually autistic; he says very little or nothing at all, and he rarely seeks out the company of his fellow inmates. He lives in absolute solitude but never seems affected by his loneliness.”

Well I guess if you had that as your party trick you wouldn’t have much call for friends. And quite possibly they wouldn’t really want to hang around with you. “Oh yes, that’s my mate. Yes, the bloke sitting on his own penis and rocking back and forth. He’s great.”

I fear what unimagined things I will be forced to confront in the coming months. What Hell I have created for myself.

Get your name in the Christ on a Bike programme and raise money for SCOPE by clicking here

[ Email this edition of Warming Up to a friend ]