Interview with the Editor: Journal of Penile Anatomy

This is dedicated to Nicole, whose hard work and shared fantasies have given me great pleasure. - Finder

The following is excerpted from an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Penile Anatomy, Sara Eldrich:

Two of our better researchers were let go because of the incident. Perhaps that’s inaccurate; we could say they resigned, but they never officially submitted papers.

Somehow the government of a repressive South American country – I will let you guess which one it was – found a way to reach them, probably from reading some of their publication in journals – The Journal of Penile Anatomy, quite possibly. The corrupt officials – all women, by the way – in charge of the rebel retention center were conducting a campaign of terror, trying to strike fear into the hearts of the rebels. They threatened what, in that culture, is a man’s proudest possession. Any rebel who was captured could expect that, if he lived, it would be without a penis; the only question was the manner in which it would be destroyed, or removed. The reports were gruesome.

The prison doctor was able to obtain injectible papavarene, used clinically for creating erections in men with various types of erectile dysfunction. She would inject massive doses into their penises, to ensure a rapid and long-lasting erection, no matter what was done to his penis. Sometimes a captured rebel was tied up, penis projecting in full erection, and infantry women would use it for target practice. A direct hit to the base of his penis with an AK-47 round would tear it right off. In another incident, they modified one of those “penis pumps” with some extra plumbing. The pumped air out of the chamber, generating a rigid erection, as you would expect. Then, through a new tube into the chamber, they filled it with liquid nitrogen, kept it full as it boiled off. As you can imagine, his penis was frozen solid in seconds. At this point they pulled off the pump – his penis would be a ghastly shade of white, and harder than any natural erection could possibly be. Sometimes they would just grab it (with gloves, of course) and push it to one side or the other, and it would just snap off, like it was glass. One of their favorite things was to roll up a granite-topped table right under it, then hit it with a little ball-peen hammer. It would just shatter, jagged little pieces of frozen penis going in all directions. Or, target practice again – the impact of a bullet would just vaporize it.

The officials appealed to the researcher’s professional ambitions – offering them a chance to do certain research on penile anatomy and physiology that you couldn’t possibly do here in the States. Unfettered search on living subjects, no messy red tape, no silly consent forms required.

One of the more elusive goals of our research has been to attempt to study the anatomy of the penis, in the erect state, at a microscopic level. This is hard to do because you can’t easily view the internals of a penis at that level of detail while it’s erect – as soon as you penetrate the tunica surrounding the corpora cavernosa, you release the pressure – and a lot of blood! – that’s maintaining the erection, and you’ve lost it. Even if you introduce some kind of imaging device into an erect organ, it’s filled with blood, which is essentially opaque. You can’t see anything through it.

They came up with an ingenious solution, but one that could only have been done in a culture that had complete disregard for the suffering of the unfortunate subject. The brought the man to a full erection, manually – no papaverene, to ensure this was a completely natural erection. Then they introduced two needles into his corpora cavernosa – one through the glans, near the tip, the other far back in the perineum, into the hidden root of his penis. From the needle in front, they drained blood; into the needle in the perineum, they introduced a low-viscosity chemical compound made from a polymer resin and a catalyst – like epoxy – that would cure to a hard clear solid in less than 60 seconds. They kept him manually stimulated the entire time, and the rates of draining and filling were the same, so his erection was maintained. As soon as the draining tube showed no more blood leaving, indicating it had been fully replaced with the clear polymer, they stopped filling, and pulled out the tubes. A powerful UV light was then focused on his penis from all angles, promoting rapid curing of the compound. In another minute the full internal length of his corpora cavernosa was essentially a clear solid, interspersed with the connective tissue and blood vessels they so much wanted to study.

They did some tests on him to demonstrate that all sensation was still intact. They actually brought him to ejaculation, although the unnatural rigidity of his penis made it impossible to project his semen with the force of a normal ejaculation. But, it demonstrated there was no damage to his nervous system.

All this was bad enough. Then came the part that seems unnecessarily cruel. They wanted very thin cross sections of his penis, to be viewed and photographed under a microscope. There are two ways they could have done it. In the first – and we’re sure it’s the easier way – they could have simply severed his penis at the base, and then brought it to the lab and sectioned it there. But they didn’t choose to do that. Instead, they brought him to the lab, bound him in a standing position so he was quite immobilized, with his erection projecting horizontally at table height. Then they rolled up the microtome stand, and proceeded to thin-section his penis in situ – fully attached – starting at the very tip.

Now you have to understand something about the operation of a laboratory microtome. It uses a scalpel-sharp, rotating blade not unlike the meat slicer at your grocer’s. It’s just a lot smaller, and a lot more precise. His penis was immobilized in a little trough, lashed down so it could not move, and then they started making thin sections, starting right at the tip. You can only imagine what this man must have felt. Each section was a complete cross section of his penis, with all his nerves intact and functioning while the cutting went on, and on, and on.

We figure he had about an eight-inch penis, fully erect – longer than average. That’s 200 millimeters. They set the microtome to take half-millimeter sections – so – from the tip all the way to the base, they made almost 400 sections. Imagine feeling your penis getting cut off by this device, a rotating blade slowly slicing all the way through. Now imagine feeling your penis get cut off, 400 times, at every millimeter of its entire length.

The microtome is typically advanced quite slowly through a large sample like a penis, to get clean edges without tearing – maybe a minute to travel through a penile shaft, 40mm thick, in his case. That’s 400 minutes of cutting – almost 7 hours!

Needless to say, they did their work well – the sections were wonderful – we saw features we had never seen before, in sections from cadavers. There had never been anything like it in our lab. Our course, when we found out the circumstances in which these sections were created, we had an ethical dilemma. Should we use them, if they gave us real information we could have never obtained otherwise? It’s like the dilemma of researchers when presented with results from Nazi concentration camps research. In the end, we decided this nameless man should not have sacrificed it all in vain, and we do continue to study his cross-sections and learn from them.

Naturally, we intended to reprimand our two researchers when they returned. However, they seem to have struck some sort of unholy alliance with the government that hired them, and they have stayed in South America. Of course they are persona non grata here in the states, and we’ve made it clear we will not accept any more results of their “research”. But we can’t be sure they’ve received that message, since we lost track of them.

I suspect they have worked out a deal that gives them unrestricted access to male subjects for all the genital research they can think of. I don’t know for sure what motivates them; it seems to go beyond professional ambition, because no technical journal in good standing will knowingly accept contributions from these renegade researchers now.

I suspect there’s some deep and perverted sexual impulse behind it; it’s not unheard of for some women to get aroused at the prospect - and the reality – of doing violent and abusive things to a man’s penis. In return for this access, I’m sure they are advising the corrupt regime on new and ingenious methods of abusing men’s genitals.

We’re very disappointed in these women. Now that the news has circulated, we began hearing about episodes in their pre-med history here that should have given us concern – some men have come forward with their own stories, having met these two in a more social setting. But, that’s another story, for another time.