Mystery of the Detachable Penis

My collage (and finger puppet) of me, Paul, and Gizmo aboard Triplefin. It's part of an interactive book made for my nephews. Otherwise, this piece is for adults only!

I was planning to at long last share with you a brave and possibly beautiful thing menopausal mermaid did in November and that I feel a bit shy about. But if seven years living in a sailboat floating on the water has taught me only one thing, it’s that sometimes it’s wise to change plans and go with the current sea state. Lately my interior ocean has been feeling choked by an oxygen depleting, algae bloom. Perhaps I can write my way free. But I’m afraid that what I discover may cause my co-captain - my dive buddy - my sea slug junkie - to freak out like a startled puffer fish and perhaps dart away forever. Maybe, though, if I can find the right words for you to understand me then he might as well.

I’ve been living and working my childhood dream with my beloved, cis partner for fifteen years and now it seems I’m stuck . . . in paradise. The surface, evident problem is that he has a penis that (unlike a beastie you’ll soon meet) is definitively not detachable. Believe me, we both wish we could just stow it away safe and snug in the bilge along with the life vests until those times when we both, simultaneously, want it attached.

For me, the last decade of transitioning into menopause has had me wishing I could push a pause button on sex until I figure out what I want and how and when I want it. Our weekly, couple’s commitment to “get naked and see what happens” gradually turned into a guilt-inducing obligation for me, the stunned “cold fish”, and a guilt-inducing frustration for my husband. But just recently I’ve been getting some clarity due in part to three agreements we made. First - to take a break from scheduled sex to wait and see what my body and mind actually want. Second - to be absolutely honest about what we each want in our lives (in and out of bed.) Third - to engage in constructive conflict instead of quietly compromising to keep peace and watering seeds of resentment between us. Before I share my recent “A-Ha!” moment, let’s have some detachable penis fun with a bio-riddle.

What animal has the longest penis, relative to body size?

If you’re thinking “Whale” or “Elephant” or other such beast of enormity, consider just HOW relative to body size I’m talking here. These penises in question, in some species, can be up to eight times the length of the animal’s entire, non-phallic body. Eight freakin’ times, y’all! If a Blue Whale bull was that hung, his junk would dangle down 700 feet (that’s over two football fields) deep. It would act as an anchor and chain with balls for ballast! I’ll give you another hint before you guess again.

This type of creature actually lives their entire lives without moving, yet some cosmopolitan individuals are able to travel across entire oceans!

Now you’re even more befuddled, huh? OK, I’ll give you a third hint. The animal with the longest penis relative to body size is actually not a macho-macho male but a hermaphrodite who spends most of their time as a female. Yeah. The world’s longest dingle dangle belongs to a she-leaning they.

That kind of natural, sexual fluidity gives me comfort as I wait patiently for my own body and mind, for my own sexuality, to settle into some new normal. Even if it turns out to be culturally abnormal. I live on a boat, remember? I’m not expecting conformity and convention here, just something to get me and my life partner out of this sexual double bind we’ve been stuck in. Sort of cemented in place like the occasionally well-endowed creature of your guesswork.

Alrighty, y’all. One more hint before the big, dipstick reveal. Think about what kind of lifestyle would require a beast to have a wild willy that could stretch that darn far away from themselves. Up to eight times the length of their adorable, many and hairy legged, crustacean bodies?

Give up? Drum roll, please . . . . . . . . .

Welcome to a new and multi-faceted appreciation for the ubiquitous Barnacle! One of those critters so common that they’re commonly overlooked. We sailors and likely most whales consider them a nuisance as we’re always trying to scrape them off our hulls and backs, respectively. I bet you yourself have never even considered exactly what kind of animal a barnacle is, have you? They happen to be most similar to shrimp, crabs, and lobsters with a key lifestyle difference. Have you figured out why these diminutive crustaceans require a reproductive appendage up to eight times the length of their own body, as seen here in my illustration of a typical Acorn Barnacle (Balanus glandula)?

Just imagine being a sessile creature who can never leave your cramped, homemade, calcium shell that you glued forever in the place your larval self settled. There you are, living upside-down on your stomach with just your feathery cirri able to reach out through your peaked, articulated roof to snatch food particles drifting by.

When you and the other barnacles in your neighborhood release hormones telling each other that y'all's (yes, that's a word) eggs are almost ripe for fertilization, well then, you find yourself in a predicament. How is your sperm going to reach out and touch as many of those often distant neighbors as possible? With a super stretchy penis, of course! But what if your neighborhood is in rocky, shallow and turbulent waters that could bruise and tear your tender fire hose? It seems you’re smart enough to grow a more stubby chubby that won’t get banged up so much on a sexual foray.

Once you've used the tip of your exenda-penis to smell and taste for neighbors with ripe ovaries and you’ve poked and prodded their giggleboxes all you can for that brief mating season (and hopefully have been plenty poked and prodded yourself) you simply have no space in your house for this now inconvenient body part. So you do the obvious, logical thing. You simply break it off. You'll soon have more literally pressing things to attend to anyway when your clutch of larval Barnacles hatch and you must snuggle and nurture them until they're mature enough to swim away to build homes of their own. Then you’ll have some energy and space to grow another gargantuan tinglestick.

Paul made this short video of thousands of Barnacles with their cirri legs out and waving around as he regretfully scraped them off our hull:

Interestingly, although Barnacles have been long-studied (Charles Darwin wisely used them to support his theory of Natural Selection), the wee beasties still surprise us. Just recently, some Goose-Neck Barnacles (Pollicipes polymerus) were found to cast their sperm into the water for other out-of-penis-reach Barnacles to collect with their cirri and then deposit it into their own oviducts.

And, so, that sense of surprise, at never knowing what’s going to be discovered next - especially when we think we have things all neatly figured out - circles us back to my menopausal mermaid self and sex. What do I want? That’s what my salty sailor and I need to know. It actually feels strange to ask myself that question without trying to twist myself into some answer that I think a male partner expects of me. That our hyper-sexual culture taught us is a requirement for me, as a woman, to be acceptable and loved. That relies on my sexuality to be fixed in place like a Barnacle in their gluey, perma-headstand. Maybe that predictability feels safer to a partner. Sure, I get that. Change is scary but, like the Birds and the Barnacles, it’s a fact of life. So, what do I want?

Sexual fluidity. Sexual freedom. That includes freedom from feeling like I’m supposed to look and act red-stiletto-heels sexy. (Unless that’s what I inherently want. But I’m more of a flip-flop kinda gal.) I want freedom from sexpectations of all types. I spent my whole pre-menopausal sex life trying to be what society expected of me. I rushed into a first marriage because “living together” made my dad worry that extended family and neighbors in the “Where do ya go to church?” Shenandoah Valley were judging me as . . . as what? A whore? Then, in my divorce years, just about every fella I bumped and ground with took the same, oddly sudden, moralizing stance when I would express a desire to just keep it light, fun and non-sexually-committal. So, there I’d find myself again and again, shamed into relationships I didn’t really want or wasn’t yet emotionally ready for.

Remember that disentangling comb we mermaids carry? I also want freedom from (and this is what I fear may most freak out my surprisingly traditional sailor) having sex so tightly entangled with love or at least the construct of romantic love. To be free of it - sex - having to mean so damn much. And thereby having it be an emotional distraction from my life's work and at the sacrifice of authenticity. But I don’t want to make a life big life mistake like I did when I was young. Let me explain . . . .

When I was a teenager and an emerging biologist, I threw the baby out with the holy water. Meaning, when I rejected the Catholic Church in which I was raised and Christianity in general and replaced it with empirical science, I also mistakenly tossed aside the mysterious Divine. A big part of becoming a Menopausal Mermaid is about embracing and exploring my own spiritual life through transcendent, feral encounters with the Wild. In fact, the true-life adventures I share with you describe just those transformative, bestial experiences. What does that have to do with my yearning for sexual freedom?

With menopause, I think I was just about to toss out my entire, remaining sexuality due to feeling like a caught fish slowing suffocating on a bed of ice. But, maybe, just possibly, there’s a middle path. For example, I just met a man - a fellow cruising sailor - who is still happily married to his childhood sweetheart, has two now-adult kids with her, is a retired Naval architect, and who walked over barefoot from his boat to Triplefin in the grungy, boat work yard. Each of his freewheeling tootsies was gorgeously adorned with bright red toenail polish. A mutual friend of ours asked him why he paints his toenails. His response? “I have a question for you. Why don’t you?" That’s the closest I can come right now to explaining the kind of freedom I want from here on. A freedom that comes with not only knowing but fully accepting ones mutable self.

And I want all of this not just for myself but for my partner. What’s it going to look like? I don’t know but I’m eager to find out and I’m inviting you along on the uncharted, ocean crossing. Take my hand now, Sugar, and let’s go outside on the bow. I have something to show you.

Lay down and look up at the Milky Way, towards the center of our unfathomable, shell-spiral galaxy. See that tight, bright cluster of stars you may know as the Pleiades (an ancient name likely sailing/navigation related)? They’re also called the Seven Sisters, although you can likely only see six. When my eyes were younger and our night less polluted with artificial light (Don’t even get me started!) I could sometimes see the seventh. As the old Greek myth goes they were the daughters of strongman Atlas and the sea nymph (Ah! A mermaid!), Pleione. Those seven mer-daughters were being hunted down to be raped by Orion (as if clubbing innocent scorpions wasn’t enough for the mighty hunter). Thus, Zeus flung the sisters to the heavens as stars for their safety. Now, don’t you think it’s time for a new story?

My pic of a joined pair of Acorn Barnacle shells

Try seeing them now as a clump of sibling barnacles who happened to land on a rock next to one another. And that missing seventh one? That one happened to land on the back of a migrating Grey Whale (Eschrichtius robustus) who just zoomed by and who we’ll meet on a later adventure. The Milky Way is now a trail of glowing bioluminescence left by the leviathan’s wake. Now, like the old me I’m trying to detach from - and perhaps like all of us Homo sapiens at times in our lives - that seventh barnacle sibling is sailing all around the sea while ironically stuck in place.

So, if you’ll excuse me, Triplefin is preparing for seasonal migration herself. We’re readying ourselves to sail back across the sea from Baja to Sonora to morph into land beasts during the hot, hot summer. So I’ve got to dive in and scrape the Barnacles off our hulls so we can once again move with fluidity through the water. Along the way, perhaps I’ll find the bravery to share this writing with you and my pensive co-captain.

P.S. - I did and guess what? He gets it and is ready to get unglued with me!

P.P.S - I'm making a writing move over to Substack as The Menopausal Mermaid writing on Sex & the Sea where I'll be sharing similar yet more creative work and where you can subscribe and listen to my tangy-twinged voice read to you instead of having to do it yourself. Please join me there and subscribe. It's free and it will help me as a writer working for the greater good of all life!