Sometimes I hold

my warm seed

up to my mouth

and kiss it.

-Essex Hemphill

Taking dick seriously requires that we think about how we take it, about the tools, implements, and orifices engaged in taking it - about friction and frottage, wetness and dryness, saliva and KY. Taking dick seriously requires that we consider how condoms feel, how we experience docking, how masturbation feels. 

Taking dick seriously requires that we question the pabulum that men always enjoy sex, that we distinguish between the easy relief of ejaculation and the intricate pleasures of nerve tissue specifically designed to experience pleasure. 

Taking dick seriously requires that we talk about bodies and pleasures, that we multiply how we experience pleasure, that we experiment with modes of producing pleasure, that we be and become playful and patient, discriminating and promiscuous.

Thus far, the debate on male circumcision in Kenya has revolved around three main foci: the politics of ethno-masculinity in relation to national masculinity, medical research into HIV/AIDS, and the bodily politics of autochthony. Briefly, the first debate questions what bodily form national masculinity should take and, thus far, those who are cut have insisted they cannot be ruled by the uncut.¹ The second, current, debate argues that cut men have a lower risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. And the third debate argues for an ethno-morphology in which ethnic identity is inextricably bound to bodily morphology.²

These are complex debates and my brief summary here does them little justice. It is my hope that others will flesh them out. 

Absent from these debates is an engagement with the erotics of circumcision. As we abstract male bodies into their ethnic, national, political, scientific, and cultural dimensions, we diminish the importance of the felt, the lived, the experienced body.

We have believed that the quick relief of ejaculation exhausts the possibilities of how we might experience sexual and bodily pleasure. Denying ourselves the pleasures of play and experimentation, we have accepted that the shapes and textures of penile tissue are irrelevant to the 45 seconds we allot ourselves. In the process, we have refused to consider how 45 seconds might be stretched indefinitely, with delicious results.

We need to talk about what feels good.

We must ask what it means to risk our bodies and our pleasures.

II

place your ring

on my cock

where it belongs.

-Essex Hemphill

Pleasure matters.

Taking dick seriously demands that we ask why and how discussions of pleasure in Kenya have been foreclosed, rendered unthinkable, silenced by the paradoxical blends of tradition and modernity, science and religion.

Progressive theorists of Afro-modernity have not been as helpful as they might be. Africanist and postcolonial scholars who argue that racist and colonial discourses portrayed Africans as hypersexual implicitly de-sexualize our ancestors by depicting their sexual lives as lacking in irrational and excessive desire, theorizing sex as functional, or, avoiding the subject of sex altogether. 

We have lost and are losing sexual histories we have never known.

We have been told the "west" and "east" are "too permissive" as our own sexual histories are rendered mute and erased. We have allowed that the "east" may have an ars erotica but that our own sexual knowledges have little merit. And we have believed for too long that sexual innovation is derivative, borrowed, and imposed.

Don't believe me? Take, for instance, this study among the Kuria: 

According to grandmothers . . . penetration is the principal interest of men. Whether with their wives or lovers, women say that men see themselves as sexually accomplished in being able to ejaculate quickly.

Men from other ethnic groups . . . say that Kuria women are not very accomplished lovers. . . . When asked about their reputed lack of imagination and initiative in sexual relations, women say that is only the way they are with their husbands. If they became active in any way, they fear their husbands would question them jealously, demanding to know where they had learned the behavior and with whom they practice.³

We have refused to imagine, refused to experiment with our bodies and our pleasures, believing, wrongly, that we have done all that can be done, and to extend beyond our limited frames of pleasure is to court perversity and foreignness.

Taking dick seriously requires that we engage and multiply our discourses and practices of pleasure. The dick debate is about learning to inhabit our bodies consciously, cultivating and nurturing the sensation of embodiment. We must take dick seriously and playfully, understand how to intensify sensation, how to feel not just good but frantic, anxious, ecstatic, jubilant, frustrated, teetering, sore, unwittingly aroused, celebratory, angry, ashamed, alarmed, jittery, tense, tender.

We who inhabit our bodies must question discourses and practices that seek to dis-embody us in the names of health, masculinity, politics, and culture. We must ask what it means to pledge our bodies to each other, be it for 45 minutes or a lifetime, what it means to develop and cultivate and experiment with bodily intimacy.

III

[We can] counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges in their multiplicity and their possibilities of resistance.

-Michel Foucault

I have framed the circumcision debate around bodily pleasure because I fear that we are forgetting the body even as we manipulate, change, and shape it in all kinds of ways.

Forgetting is not the right word.

We are abdicating responsibility, conceding that how we experience our bodies need not be articulated when we speak to scientists and politicians. Presented with facts and figures and evidence and promises, we believe that the claims of our bodies are insufficient, lacking, negligible.

To begin here and now is to acknowledge that how our bodies feel and how we feel about them is central to how we negotiate the social, the cultural, the political, and the economic. To begin here and now is to acknowledge what we are and what we own, to ask that others can and should be accountable to us. To begin here and now is to counter the abstractions and mystifications that capture our bodies while making us forget our embodiment. To begin here and now is to stake an embodied claim, to insist that bodies matter, our bodies matter.

_____________________________________________

Notes

1. For a historical perspective on the politics of Kenyan ethno-masculinity, see E.S Atieno Odhiambo. (2004). "Hegemonic Enterprises & Instrumentalities of Survival: Ethnicity and Democracy in Kenya," in Bruce J. Berman, Dickson Eyoh, and Will Kymlicka (eds.) Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004.

2. Thus, while some Luo political leaders tout the ostensible health advantages of circumcision, the Luo Council of Elders has denounced circumcision as mutilation, implicitly arguing that authentic Luo masculinity is wedded to having a foreskin. This narrative is even more complex, because some of these latter leaders have invoked the Bible as one of their authorities.

3. Miroslava Prazak, Talking About Sex: Contemporary Constructions of Sexuality in Rural Kenya, Africa Today: 47.3/4 (Summer/Autumn 2000): 86.