Article on the Iceland penis museum

[SplitDik (imported)]

A new article on the penis museum. Note it mentions how several men have now willed their penises to the museum.

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/living ... lly_health

In Iceland, a museum of phallologyBy Faye Flam

Inquirer Staff Writer

HUSAVIK, Iceland - Most animals don't have to worry about erectile dysfunction. Seals, walruses, mice, bats, monkeys, chimpanzees and polar bears have a penis supported by a bone. Bulls and goats gain stiffness from fibrous tissues.

That there's more than one way to get an erection was one of several take-home messages for visitors at Iceland's Institute of Phallology - the only known penis museum in the world.

I had planned to visit this infamous place while in Reykjavik last month, but discovered it moved two years ago from the cosmopolitan capital to Husavik, a fishing village of 2,500 inhabitants located on a northern peninsula jutting within a few miles of the Arctic Circle.

When I asked curator Sigurdur Hjartarson how to find him once I got to town, he said, "Just ask anyone."

It's one thing to navigate 300 miles of semipaved roads that hairpin-turn through Iceland's tortured landscape, another to ask complete strangers how to find a penis museum.

Luckily, the "Institute" was marked by a giant carved phallus.

Though the name suggests corridors of scientists dissecting penises and students finishing phallology degrees, it's really just Hjartarson's private collection of more than 240 specimens.

There are stuffed whale penises the size of fencing foils, pickled penises floating in jars, dried fibrous penises, and penis bones. No animals were killed for his exhibit, he said.

The biggest was a 5-foot-2-inch organ once belonging to a sperm whale and now preserved in a cylinder of formaldehyde. It was twice as long when it was still attached to the whale, Hjartarson said.

The 64-year-old father of four and retired history teacher started collecting penises the same way others collect frogs or rubber ducks. Back in the 1970s, he said, a colleague who worked a summer at a nearby whaling station brought him a whale penis as a curiosity. Then others gave him more penises.

Now he has representatives from around the world, including every mammal in Iceland except for the human being (and that may change soon as several men, including one 91-year-old Icelander, have willed their members to the museum).

"Phallology" is more likely to be practiced as part of other disciplines, such as biology, but penis studies have an illustrious history stretching back to Leonardo da Vinci. According to David Friedman's A Mind of Its Own, Leonardo was fascinated with the mystery of erection, and examined executed criminals to discover that it came from engorgement with blood, not "air" or "spirit," as his contemporaries believed.

Today, scientists classify mammalian penises into two major types, says Peter Nassar, a vertebrate morphologist at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine. Bulls, sheep, goats and horses have a fibroelastic penis, which stays semi-stiff all the time and is controlled by muscles.

Other mammals, humans included, Nassar says, have a "muscular cavernous" penis, which relies on the inflation of spongy erectile tissue. This type often comes equipped with a retractable penis bone.

It's not clear why humans didn't get one.

There is, however, a major downside. You can break your penis, as evidenced by an American possum's broken and fused bone in Hjartarson's collection. It's all an evolutionary trade-off.

Zoologist and marine mammal expert Steven Ferguson of the University of Manitoba suggests in a recent scientific paper that the Arctic environment may encourage evolution of long penis bones.

"Animals that live in high latitudes sometimes have trouble getting together," he said. They're more likely to adopt a "multi-mating" system, copulating with whoever comes their way.

In animals with such promiscuous ways, a male who can deposit sperm deeper into the female than his competitors is more likely to pass on his genes. So in evolutionary terms, he who has the longest penis bone wins.