THE EXPERIENCE OF MATURATION: ERECTIONS
BY EDWARD BRONGERSMA

“Erections” is the second of the five parts of “The Experience of Maturation”, the third section of “Boys and their Sexuality”, the third chapter of Loving Boys, the encyclopaedic study of Greek love by the eminent Dutch lawyer, Edward Brongersma, of which the first volume (including this) was published by Global Academic Publishers in New York in 1986.

Already at the embryo stage male fetuses have erections, according to Dr. Mary S. Calderone^[1], at roughly 90-minute intervals, and this pattern persists after birth and throughout boyhood.

 

In puberty the growing penis becomes very sensitive and, as a result of the increasing sexualisation of body and mind, the slightest provocation (often of a character that would leave an adult quite unaffected) may produce an erection.

50  “When I was a teenager, I used to have to go through mental gymnastics (like thinking of my mother) to keep from having a hard-on in church or at the beach, etc.”^[2]

To the boy himself these frequent erections may seem to happen spontaneously, without any discernable cause. Sometimes they can be very persistent.

51  A fifteen-year-old boy told me that twice a week he went on a date with his girl-friend. On each date they would walk from her home to the movie house, which took about a half hour, and, after seeing the film, set forth on another walk, this one of an hour, to a railroad switching yard. There, in an empty freight car, they would have sex. From the moment he met her until he reached his climax about four hours later he always sustained a continuous erection.

A Dutch doctor once told a judge during the course of a criminal trial that he had examined 1750 boys between the ages of 12 and 16. Five or six percent erections when they took off their clothes, 0.5% to 1% of the boys became so excited that they had spontaneous ejaculations as well.^[3] These erections during the pubertal years may cause such tension in the penis that it begins to hurt. It is as though nature seizes every opportunity to force the boy to sexual activity.

52 A New Zealand youngster described the situation very well: “You’ve got a cock like a loaded pistol and you need to use it.^[4]

Strong, unresolved tumescence can also cause excruciating pain in the testicles and groin.^[5]

53 The inexperienced fifteen-year-old hero of James Kirkwood’s novel There Must Be a Pony! Describes what happens when an attractive girl starts to kiss him intimately at a birthday party: “It was a whole new world! After a while we were both getting a little shaky and flushed. I was getting this terrific erection and I kept trying to lean back away from her, but the more I leaned back, the more she’d push her body up against me. Finally, there was no keeping the secret any longer, so I just pressed right back and let nature take its course.” This was repeated several times later as the party went on. “Every time we’d get off by ourselves we’d lock in this terrific embrace and stand there for minutes (…) Toward the end of the evening I was getting this fantastic ache around my groin and associated regions. I was really getting worried. I thought I’d popped a gasket or blown a tube or something – I didn’t know what! (…) When Mervin came by for me about twelve-thirty I could hardly make it out to the car. I was hobbling like some old man who’d just gotten off a horse after about eighty consecutive years of riding (…) I was in such pain I could hardly talk.^[6]

This pain is caused by a swelling of the paradidymis is, a structure between the body of the testicle and the top of the epididymis. Under prolonged sexual excitement not relieved by ejaculation, the paradidymis may swell until it achieves the size of the testicle itself. This swelling is caused by the back-up of accumulated spermatic fluid.^[7]

Everywhere, petting with girls may cause in boys unbearable tumescence, only to be relieved by ejaculation. A boy from a tribe in Central India, where girls were not allowed to pass the night with their boy-friends, said, “After the girls go home, we feel forsaken and unsatisfied, and so we seize our cock and milk it like a cow until the seed spurts out. This is our pleasure.^[8] An American boy of 16 told his teacher, who had asked him about dating girls, that he was not very much interested in doing that. “He said that trying to get laid was such a big hassle, that his balls ached so after necking and not getting laid, that he jerked off while driving home in his car.^[9]

“You know very well there is no virginity in childhood: it’s a period of extraordinary voluptuousness,” someone says in a novel by Marie-Claire Blais.^[10] “Children are intensely sexual beings with an erotic life that is expressed in both activity and fantasy.^[11]

The sexual appetite is never so strong as in the years immediately following the attainment of maturity. This is, of course, accompanied by a “vehemence of sexual activity such as will never be repeated later in life.”^[12] How can anyone prepare a young boy or girl for the intense eruptions of emotional and sexual energies in adolescence? Something is going on in their bodies they don’t understand. The overload of sensation in the nerve endings is frightening. Many young people report that their first orgasm made them think they were going to die.^[13] And as Lucrese already stated, when sexual activity appeases the desire in young bodies “the pause is only brief. The rage returns, phrenetic longing invades them anew, and they themselves don’t understand what they want.”^[14] It is derisive of nature when culture attempts to deny or suppress this need. Jacques de Brethmas writes, with justified anger, “One half of all France’s sexual energy resides in the sex organs of boys, and they are officially forbidden to employ it.”^[15]

The Gonado research made it clear that 18- to 19-year-old youths wished, on average, they could have sex twice as frequently as they actually were able to obtain it: 13.1% wanted it more than twice a day, 25.3% wanted it daily, 34.6% wanted it every other day.^[16] For boys, of course, the situation is very much more difficult. The fact that their despair receives no public recognition doesn’t render it any less real. A 14-year-old once declared that he would like to organize a demonstration of thousands of boys publicly masturbating in front of the government building as a plea for law reform and a demonstration of their distress.^[17]

It is to boys of precisely this sexually excitable and active age that the majority of boy- lovers find themselves most strongly attracted. No wonder sexual contacts come about so easily!

Continue to The Experience of Maturation: Ejaculations and Wet Dreams

[1] Calderone, M. S., Fetal Erection and its Message to Us. SIECUS-Report May-July, 1983, [Author’s reference]

[2] Hite, Sh., The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, New York: Ballantine, 1981, 401. [Author’s reference]

[3] Ned. Jurisprudentie 1967, No. 363 [Author’s reference, not further identified]

[4] Tuohy, F. & Murphy, M., Down Under the Plum Trees. Waiura (New Zealand): Alister Taylor, 1976, 134. [Author’s reference]

[5] Hite, Sh., The Hite Report on Male Sexuality. New York: Ballantine, 1981, 510, 594. [Author’s reference]

[6] Kirkwood, J., There Must Be a Pony. 6. New York: Avon, 1960, 153-154. [Author’s reference]

[7] Borneman, E., Lexikon der Liebe, Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1978 p. 1021 [Author’s reference]

[8] Elwin, V., Maison des jeunes chez les Muria. Paris: Gallimard, 1959, 271. [Author’s reference]

[9] McBoyd 1981, 117 [Author’s reference, not identified in his bibliography]

[10] Blais, M.-C., The Wolf. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974, 81. [Author’s reference]

[11] Janus 1981, 234 [Author’s reference, but it is not clear from his bibliography which of two works by Janus published in 1981 is meant]

[12] Stockert, F.-G. von, Die Sexualität des Kindes, Stuttgart: Enke, 1956, 27. [Author’s reference]

[13] Friday, N., Men in Love. New York: Dell, 1981, 503. [Author’s reference]

[14] Burnet, E., Lucrèce notre contemporain. Tunis: Maison Tunisienne de l’Edition, 1984, 135. [Author’s reference]

[15] Brethmas, J. de, Détournement de majeur. Paris: Perchoir, 1980, 13. [Author’s reference]

[16] Pietropinto, A. & Simenauer, J., Gonado (Beyond the Male Myth). Katwijk aan Zee, Servire, 1979, 73-74. [Author’s reference]

[17] Brethmas, J. de, Détournement de majeur. Paris: Perchoir, 1980, 13. [Author’s reference]