An interesting piece in the New York Times [$] this morning about being groped on the subway.

Here’s what I liked: women in New York have helped police catch flashers by snapping pictures of them with their cell phones. Ha HA! So, you wanna be an exhibitionist, eh?

Yes, when we say “no touching,” that means not only others, but yourselves, too, lads! At least in public. It’s hard, I know, because there seems to be something in man’s very nature that compels him to stick his hands down his pants. Mark Twain once remarked: “To a man all things are possible but one—he cannot have a hole in his breeches and keep his fingers out of it. A man does seem to feel more distress and more persistent and distracting solicitude about such a thing than he could about a sick child that was threatening to grow worse every time he took his attention away from it.”

Of course, mankind has a long history of touching himself, and modern technology, far from otherwise occupying idle hands has only provided myriad new and improved opportunities for bigger and better feats of onanism. The internet is a storehouse of phalluses in action. Is there any teenage boy alive today who has not waved his for the webcam? Craig’s List alone boasts a daily collection to rival Darwin’s barnacles. If there was any question that many more men than ever suspected were merely waiting for a chance to show their stuff in public without adverse personal consequences, the internet has answered it resoundingly.

It’s too easy, is the thing. Diogenes, the one who thought of himself as “a crazy Socrates,” would masturbate in public, saying, “I wish I could satisfy my hunger as easily.”

While Diogenes was making a philosophical point with his, Leonardo da Vinci liked the look of it, pure and simple. Leonardo was fascinated by the membrum-virile cupidum, even more so than the ordinary man is, as evidenced in his obsessive sketches of it. He wrote (as quoted by art scholar Kenneth Keele): “A man who is ashamed to show or name the penis is wrong. [Instead] of being anxious to hide it, man ought to display it with honor.”

Showing it off has taken various forms down through time. I’ve mentioned the phallocarp, favored by warriors in Papua, New Guinea, before. In the 15th and 16th centuries, as François Rabelais delighted in pointing out, the codpiece, molded in the shape of a permanent erection, was all the rage. Some have speculated that the power tie is the modern man’s phallocarp.

Of course, a phallus is not a penis, and the advantage of phallocarps, codpieces, and fat ties, is precisely that the thing itself remains mercifully hidden from sight. This is usually advantageous to all parties, by the way (though not always—I imagine that Mapplethorpe’s Man in a Polyester Suit would garner appreciative oohs and ahs, and even an approving head-nod or two were he to board a train as pictured in the famous photograph, so long as he minded his own business). Point is: most of us are perfectly satisfied in all but a very few cases, to speculate rather than be provided, at least proactively, with proof. In fact, in nine out of ten cases, as most adults these days know, actually seeing the thing in all its usually underwhelming glory may satisfy a native curiosity, but little else.

Some believe they can tell what it’s like without actually seeing it, thereby negating the need for proof—there’s the old fallacy that large noses are accurate predictors of a member’s mass. Not so! And I’m not just saying that as someone with a mid-size schnoz, either. “In dissecting cadavers,” one venerated anatomist once famously noted, “anatomists frequently observe the opposite.” Still, small noses on grown men are repugnant in their own right (Michael Jackson, anyone?), without any reference to this other body part.

But I digress. The pertinent question here is, are we seeing a resurgence of a primitive compulsion, obviously felt as an obligation by some males, to display their goods, variously, to the females of the species?

Meredith Small, in her fascinating study Female choices: Sexual behavior of female primates, provides what may be a clue to uncouth male behavior on the T: “Male chimps use their penis for display toward estrous females. Because a longer penis would give a female pleasure (note that the human male has the longest and thickest penis of any primate), female choice might have been a factor driving penis length to extremes among primates.”

Furthermore, as Helen Fisher reports in Anatomy of Love: The Mysteries of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray, while “[w]e do not know why men have conspicuous genitals,… a male chimp solicits a female by opening his legs, displaying an erect penis and flicking his phallus with a finger as he gazes at a potential partner. A prominant, distinctive penis helps broadcast one’s individuality and sexual vigor, which may lure female friends. In many species of insects and primates, males have exceptionally elaborate penises, and scientists think these evolved specifically because females chose those males with elaborate, sexally stimulating genitals. So perhaps as Lucy’s ancestors became bipedal some four million years ago, males began to parade their genitals in order to make special friends with favored females–selecting for those with large organs.”

Lucy’s ancestors are beyond bipedal. Today they take the T. But they are obviously still very keen to make special friends with favored females. Some of them, misled by ads on Craig’s List and the ubiquity of internet porn, perhaps, seem not to know that we have evolved a bit since the days when displaying an erect penis and flicking it with a finger are criteria for friendship–even special friendship.

Do men deserve pity or scorn? As David Friedman says in A Mind of It’s Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, “a man’s relationship with his penis…is the most enduring mystery in every man’s life.” Sad, but true.

The Times article concludes:

Many women said they were not so much frightened by the subway encounters as they were appalled that men would do something so pathetic.

Like Ms. Fairley, the actress. “All of a sudden,” she said, “this man moved into my frame of reference, and I was staring at a penis. I couldn’t believe it.”

Ms. Fairley said she was embarrassed, but felt even worse, in a way, for the man. “They need help, bless their hearts,” she said.

All I can say in the end is: ladies, I salute you (and not with my erect penis, either). What you have to put up with on a daily basis boggles the mind.