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Perhaps you've had occasion to contemplate at close range the curiously mushroomy glans, the term for the head of the penis. Perhaps your fondness for relieving other men of their semen has motivated your attention. If so, then you and dick-heads could have something in common. According to researchers at the State University of New York, the glans of the human penis is drawn to other men's come like bees to honeysuckles. Why is the glans so flared, so grooved, so deliciously curvaceous? The better, the New York scientists claim, to sweep away the semen of rival suitors from recently penetrated vaginal tracts-- for sake of insuring the freshest reception of the most recent man's spermatic deposit.

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Or at least that's the conclusion Gordon Gallup and co-authors draw from their disarmingly simple experiment reported recently in Evolution and Human Behavior (vol. 24) and conducted-- this is a public university in America, after all-- with latex penis surrogates, a simulated vagina, and cornstarch solution. While the rubber dicks with a bulbous but unflanged "glans" scooped away, in a single thrust, less than 40 percent of the mock semen, the phalluses with a glans flared-- as with actual mankind-- evacuated more than 90 percent. That difference isn't accidental, Gallup contends.

Of course, when it comes to sex, academics have long read too much into too little. As Sigmund Freud (perhaps a guilty party in that regard) himself remarked, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Could the shape of the glans be accidental? A function of other anatomical requirements or legacies? Could the mushroomy cockhead be just a result of eons of feminine judgements about what's sexy in guys?

But on the other hand, among all sexually reproducing creatures, competition goes on, not just among species and individuals, but among their constituent parts-- such as sex cells and genes. Sperm themselves are chemically armed to disable the spunk of rivals (see "Grappling Jism," The Guide, March 2000). And so the idea of penises being selected not just to inject their owners' semen but also to displace their competitors' isn't farfetched.

To bolster their claim that the glans's semen-displacing abilities aren't accidental, Gallup cites sex surveys that show that men thrust faster and deeper when they suspect their female partners of sleeping around-- deep thrusts aiding the penis's ability to clear away lingering vaginal-tract semen.

Gallup's findings may cast light on a fact almost as curious as the shape of the glans-- the fondness of many human cultures in permanently exposing it, via circumcision. Some contend-- though data are hard to come by-- that glanses of circumcised penises, unconstrained by foreskin, flare more than their uncut brethren. Is the maybe extra-bulbous glans of a cut cock the equivalent in its domain of an aggressive, muscled he-man-- a suitor who will brook no rivals? Food for thought the next time a cock is waved in your face demanding attention like a baby crying for milk.