A thought that occurred to me in a locker room: Do rural men have bigger penises than urban men?
A thought that occurred to me in a locker room: Do rural men have bigger penises than urban men? Jim Bowie/shutterstock.com

Speaking of locker rooms, I spent a good deal of time in them when I was a rugby player at Oriel Boys High School. (This Harare, Zimbabwe school, and particularly its rugby field, actually plays a big role in an anti-Apartheid movie, Dry White Season, that stars Donald Sutherland and Marlon Brando—during the shoot, which exposed me to the grinding magic and misery of film production, I got to meet Sutherland on the set and even dined with him at a Chinese restaurant with windows like a UFO.) After a game, usually on a Saturday afternoon, the team would take a shower, change clothes, and talk shop and shit in the locker room. I do not recall anyone bragging about sexually assaulting women, but I do remember a man, Wentworth Chisadza, bragging about the size of his dick, which he showed to us. And it was indeed very long and thick.

Chisadza had at that time recently moved to the city from the rural areas, and I recall wondering if this had something to do with the bigness of his stuff—that there was a connection between the root-thickness of his dick and the sticks. Other rural guys also had big penises. But once in the city, once one was surrounded by the beauty of buildings and the conveniences of civilization, the penis lost its rudeness and retreated. The only problem with this theory is that all of us in the locker room were very new to the city. My parents, for example, were born and raised in the rural areas. How could cocks get small for us city Africans in such a short amount of time? Evolution acts on a population, not an individual—this is what we were taught by our science teacher. We were also taught Francis Crick's "central dogma of molecular biology." Epigenetics, which might have provided an answer to my young mind, was not in our textbooks. Why did the rural chaps have such big cocks?

I also recall a boy, with the help of another boy, demonstrating to us how he'd do it with a woman (we were between the ages of 14 and 16 at the time). But the most memorable sexual thing that happened in the locker room (and keep in mind, it was more common for us to talk about the game we had either just won or lost than about anything else), was when Takawira Tawengwa, the son of a man who made millions from a fleet of buses, advised us to avoid sex with women because their orgasms were physically dangerous.

Tawengwa: "You have to have the strength to deal with such pressure. A woman is just too powerful for you, my man. Just look at your back. Her legs will break it like a toothpick." The idea of being paralyzed permanently by the leg-pressure of a woman's orgasm really bummed us out. Maybe you could leap from her when she came, like a mouse leaping from a trap after getting the bit of cheese? Maybe that could work? Tawengwa: "Not a chance, my man. The only thing that will work is a back like mine." His was a back thick with muscles that protected the spine, a back that could withstand a woman's superhuman leg-lock. That was a very sad day in the locker room of Oriel Boys High School.