Size is important. But who here knows why? I was 19 years old when I was first confronted with the idea that the size of a man's penis might be meaningful in one way or another. Of course I had joked about it for years growing up. Somehow there's a communal instinct among thirteen and fourteen year-old boys to tell each other they've got eight inches of limpness dangling in their pants. It was an entirely absurd line of thought then, and I was astonished to consider, just a few short years later, that someone might actually think my lacking an eight incher, or even a seven incher, could somehow be a real negative. Could the length and girth of my god-given appendage really be a valid reason for a woman not liking me?

 


So much of the male ego is bound up in competition. We play little league, line up according to height, race each other in PE class, wrestle in the school yard just to see who's the most dominant. Men are subconsciously driven by a fear of inadequacy in front of their peers. Someone has probably written a study about this being rooted in evolutionary pressures of competing for a mate and proving one's self to be a stable provider in the rugged Pleistocene wastes.

When it comes to strength or intelligence, there are a huge number of ways a man can go about improving himself. With penis size, the universe has either blessed you in full or damned you to a lifetime of awkward failure and lowered expectations. So it's predictable, I suppose, that penis size comes to be a great shadowy harbinger of psychic dysfunction in a man's life. As I read spjv840's recounting of a recent confessional this deep-seated insecurity struck me in a tragic post. "We don't talk about anything meaningful, I hate your friends, you are not smart, and I can't walk around campus without seeing somebody who's had u too. Basically, you are a slut."

Not being satisfied with the way you communicate and not getting along with your partner's friends are two great reasons to question any relationship. Calling someone a slut because you're uncomfortable with the number of partners she's had is so hopelessly vulnerable it makes me wince. Sex can be a lot of things, and treating it as some proprietary metaphor for a person's moral rectitude is wrong. It's inhuman. Would you hold your lover accountable for all the intimate conversations she's had with someone else, or all the times she's laughed at another man's jokes?

The need to dismiss a woman based on the number of partners she's had is really just about penis inadequacy masquerading as morality. It's a man deathly afraid that one of those lovers that's been so freely accepted and tossed aside will necessarily have a bigger member. Having no grounds on which to compete, at that point, it will have to be the fault of the woman. Only a whore would need so much dong in her life. There are no such things as small penises, only big vaginas.

The maddening thing about this nascent fear of inadequacy is that there's no real way for a typical straight man to set his mind at ease. Statistics tell us the average penis size is six inches long and the average vagina a mere four inches deep. The pornography that I've been watching since I was fifteen tells me something different. After those tense moments in the high school gym showers, straight men don't ever get to see penises outside of pornography. And porn penises are always cut from the Monsters of Cock cloth. As Freud noted, the things that frighten us most are the things that we subconsciously draw closest to. It makes sense that porn penises should all be so big since the majority of viewers are men. We want to torture and nauseate ourselves with our deepest fears.

I used to be sure that I had a small penis, that there was something fundamentally inadequate about it. The shape was all wrong, it was too skinny, it didn't go deep enough. Looking down on my shriveled penis in the shower some mornings I would wonder at how small and acorn-like the thing had become. How could someone with an appendage of such retreating proportions ever hold his head up in public?

Of course the truth is entirely unremarkable. My penis is a six-inch erection, banana-shaped (for extra pleasure), and a bit thicker than my index and middle finger put together. Penis paranoia is bit like worrying about the car you drive. The things in our life don't speak for us anymore than we allow them to. Surely some car enthusiasts might examine a 1968 Camaro Super Sport and get all wet in their metaphysical areas, but for the other 98% of the world getting wet over a car engine is about as intuitive as riding a bicycle underwater. If sex is mechanics in exclusivity, than size and inter-departmental compatibility are paramount.

If sex is a process of sharing your truest self with another, then your whole life can become the hard-on that your lovers slides herself down over. You can always orchestrate a new position, get a dildo, learn a little about oral, but you can't fake the experience of being with someone who you know isn't holding anything back. Being with a woman who hasn't allowed some draconian heritage of penis envy to dictate her search for a love, intimacy, or a '68 Camaro should make a man feel lucky. A woman of experience, who's presumably on a journey to better understand what she does and doesn't want, has chosen to be with you. What a slut, am I right?

 

Previous Posts:

Celebrity Confession: Tom Brady's Love Handles 

Date Night: The Wine Bar as the End of Civilization 

Crying In Public: The Sichuan Night Train

Love machine: How I Date On The Internet

Celebrity Confession: In Which Kevin Spacey Bangs Ass

Sex Machine: Zeitgeisty's Ass Bangin'

Sex Machine: Rate My Blowjobs

Crying in Public: My Cubicle