Free God's Doodle by Tom Hickman

unnecessary tissue ‘was instead devoted to extra cerebral cortex, that brainy redesigned man would gain a big advantage’. The truth of that is theoretically undeniable – but one can guess that the men who would be prepared to make the swap would be few and far between. Indeed, as Phillip Hodson pondered in
Men: An Investigation Into the Emotional Male
, if the majority of penis-possessors had the option, they would only be satisfied ‘with Beardsleyesque phalluses of such dimensions they need to be carried in both hands’.

You will always say of his membrum virile that it is huge, wonderful, larger than any other; larger than your father’s when he used to get naked to take his bath. And you will add, ‘Come and fill me, O my wonder.’
    Eighth-century Japanese pillow book

FROM BIT PLAYER TO LEAD
    TOWARDS THE END of the sixteenth century, a fifteen-year-old French peasant girl named Marie was minding the family pigs when they escaped into a wheat field. Chasing them, Marie leapt over a ditch whereupon, according to the celebrated French surgeon Ambroise Paré, ‘the genitals and male rod came to be developed’. In consternation Marie rushed to the physician and the bishop, neither of whom could offer help. Resigned, Marie renamed herself Germain and went to serve in the king’s retinue. Years later the French essayist Michel Montaigne, on his way to Italy, stopped off to see the prodigy, who wasn’t at home. He had not married, Montaigne was told, but he had ‘a big, very thick beard’.
    If Renaissance woman suffered anxiety that strenuous activity might make her prey to gender transformation (‘there is still a song commonly in girls’ mouths,’ Montaigne noted, ‘in which they warn one another not to stretch their legs too wide for fear of becoming males’), Renaissance man was made indignant, at the very least, by the tale of Marie/Germain and others like it. His conviction was that he was born to rule over woman and the Bible provided the evidence. ‘The whole world was made for man,’ opined the doctor and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne in
Religio Medici
(The Religion of a Physician) published in 1642. ‘Man is the whole word, and the breath of God; woman the rib and crooked piece of man.’ So did biology. In the first instance, as God had made man in his own image it followed, ipso facto, that God was a fellow penis-possessor, and woman, as a non-penis-possessor, was by definition lesser; in the second, medical authority held, as it had for more than a thousand years, that all foetuses were male: infants that emerged as female had simply failed to achieve masculine perfection. The reproductive organs of the female were male but in a defective state: the uterus was the scrotum, the ovaries the testicles, the vagina the penis and the labia the foreskin. These, save the last, had remained inside the female’s body because she had generated insufficient heat to thrust them outside – a process seemingly not unlike turning a washing-up glove inside out.
    To Renaissance man, the penis was God’s ultimate gift; and that a woman might suddenly acquire one was not only an affront to God and to the natural order but to rightful penis-possessors. To Leonardo da Vinci the human body – the male, penis-possessing body – was even an analogy for the very workings of the universe, as depicted in his famous drawing of Vitruvian Man.
    You can blame the Ancient Greek physician Galen for woman’s inferior status in Western thought. It was he who erroneously theorised that there was a single model of human physiology, though he’d never seen inside the human body (he’d only dissected dogs and pigs). ‘Turn outward the woman’s [sexual organs], turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man’s, and you find them the same in both in every respect,’ he wrote. And until the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries showed he was talking, well, cock (or balls, if you prefer), there