by Joanne Rolliver

Created on: November 01, 2009   Last Updated: November 03, 2009

"I don't need paper. I can shake it."

"See?"

The sight of my 4-year-old son's hand jiggling his tiny "body part" is something neither I, nor my 7 year old daughter, will ever forget.

Now he's 10 and she's 13, and the former is embarrassed for the latter to even KNOW that he has a "body part" that she hasn't!

If I ever told him that I and on at least one occasion SHE had needed to wipe the drips off of it before re-inserting it in his pants, he'd leave home.

But when he was 3 and she was 6, we were "allowed" to find it funny. Now, any mention of it results in him turning red and her giggling (and asking whether it had increased in size since she last saw it).

Of course I'm not in the business of embarrassing my son, and I don't encourage my daughter to joke about it when there are any more than the 3 of us present but even their father (my ex) used to ask him questions like "how's it hanging, son?". And he was obviously (even at age 5) happy to be part of male banter that he probably thought C (our daughter) found impenetrable. Little did he know?

But the penis leads a double life like no other part of either gender's body.

Our genitals and urethral outlets change at puberty but they're not visible at any distance; our breasts grow from nothing to weighty pillows over a couple of years; both sexes sprout hair where none existed before. But only the penis changes from malleable worm to toughened sausage, from hilarious "body part" to exciting sexual object, from pee sprayer to fertilizer of life.

And that is presumably, probably subconsciously, why boys are so obsessed with the things. Let's face it, if we as little girls had had such a badly-designed item on show, WE'D have either laughed or cried!

But the subject is BOYS and their body parts so well, we could be talking about feet, hands, ears, eyes, but as WE have those as well, I've talked myself into coming back to their "extra bits" as my daughter, at age 7, called them. "Where is he?" I'd ask as I served dinner, "Playing with his extra bit", she'd say. But before you think I'm getting into the realms of perverted children talking about things they shouldn't be, that was actually her expression for "having a pee".

And humor is part of this subject too. Most of it in our house came from her (innocent) comments:

- "It must be weird having a worm down your trousers", she said one day.

"What do you mean?" he said, "Who's got a worm down their trousers? Oh!"

- "Boys can't do their homework while they pee! That must be why they're less intelligent than us!"

etc. etc.

For me personally, growing up without a brother and not even knowing of their existence until I was 6 (dicks I mean, not brothers!), the funniest thing was boys' automatic acceptance of them.

"What do you mean?" I said to a boy in my class at school (who had willingly shown us his), "you need it to pee? No, you don't!"

"THEY do!" said a girl we all hated because she claimed to know everything, "They weren't born with a peehole, so they need a spout!"

"Oh!"

(Some girls would believe anything.)

"And" she continued "it means they can pee standing up so it was quite a good idea!"

"But why would you want to pee standing up? Ugh!"

I've never understood that. I suppose there's something in a boy's brain that we don't have that tells him he's better off being able to do that.

Now, that would be a "body part" that no-one's explored!

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