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with tenderness and amusement. The best thing about making love with a new man after all those years of marriage was rediscovering a man’s body. One’s husband’s body was practically like one’s own. Everything about it was known. All the smells and tastes of it, the lines, the hairs, the 27
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    birthmarks. But Adrian was like a new country. My tongue made an unguided tour of it. I started at his mouth and went downward. His broad neck, which was sun-burned. His chest, covered with curly reddish hair. His belly, a bit paunchy –
    unlike Bennett’s brown leanness. His curled pink penis which tasted vaguely of urine and refused to stand up in my mouth.
    His very pink and hairy balls which I took in my mouth one at a time.
    The technique Erica Jong is referring to here is called ‘teabagging’. The partner takes the testicles in his or her mouth – the testicles are first pushed downwards with the index finger and thumb around the top of the scrotum, and then the balls are taken into the mouth and gently stimulated with the tongue. The teeth are covered with the lips throughout, to avoid accidentally inflicting pain. The testicles are kept together; if they are pulled apart, it can be dreadfully painful.
    Dartos
    Back to temperature regulation by the scrotum: the skin of the scrotum is characterized, like that of the eyelids, by the absence of sub cutaneous fat, the presence of many tiny blood vessels, and a layer of muscle directly under the skin. Fat insulates too well, which does not help the ability to react rapidly to cold or heat. The muscular layer beneath the skin is called the tunica dartos . As we grow older the tunica dartos slackens, so that in elderly men the scrotum becomes larger and smoother. Everything starts to hang: it comes to resemble a set of bells. In cold temperatures the scrotum shrinks and when it is hot the muscle layer relaxes and the scrotum expands.
    ‘Croat traps testicles in sun lounger’, read a recent newspaper headline. Trying to stand up and finding to your annoyance that your tes ticles are trapped between the slats of your lounger is no joke. But it happened to Mario Visnjic after he had swum naked around the harbour of Valalta (Western Croatia). Mario had no inkling of danger when he sat down in his chair to get his breath back after his cold dip.
    The cold sea had caused his testicles to shrink, so that they dropped between the wooden slats of the lounger. When a little later the sun did its work and the testicles expanded to their true size again, the damage was done. His rescuer had no alternative but to cut the lounger in half and release the unfortunate victim!
    The blood supply to the scrotum is through the large inguinal artery, the deep pelvic artery and the abdominal wall artery. Lymphatic drainage takes place through the superficial lymph glands in the groin.
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    t h e t e s t i c l e s a n d t h e s c ro t u m It is important for the reader with hypochondriac tendencies to know exactly how lymphatic drainage works: this will help doctors to know exactly where to look for metastases.
    The skin of the scrotum is fairly sensitive. Delicate nerve-endings are designed to maximize pleasure. Swellings on the skin of the scrotum are almost always sebaceous cysts. Treatment is necessary only if there is an infection. Swellings of the content of the scrotum, the testicles and epididymis are much more common. Various sections will be devoted to these in later chapters.
    The blood supply to the testicles is closely related to that to the kidneys because of their common embryological origin. The main artery in the testicle ( arteria testicularis ) branches off the aorta just below the renal artery. The artery runs behind the abdominal cavity through the inguinal canal to the testicle. There are connections to the seminal duct artery. The latter is a branch of the main inguinal artery.
    In the seminal cord there is a tangle of arteries ( plexus pampiniformis ), from