I'm just an ordinary girl living in extraordinary circumstances.

February 03, 2006

Greater Than Less Than

Admittedly we are not normal, average TV watchers. While I do like my fill of Desperate Housewives and Lost, I also like old 80's English shows like House of Elliot, in which I can pretend I could have had a chance as a proper lady in 1920's London (when the truth is, I think in a past life I was a gin whore who sold her body for bathtub gin and the precursor to the modern fish stick. This would explain why I don't like gin straight up and fish sticks anymore. Karma, people. Karma.)

But we are also of the documentary world in this house, too. While it's always important to know how the Marshall Plan actually works, we also learn such nuggets as how maple syrup is made (to which I think-seriously, do I care how it's made? Doesn't it just come in a bottle from the Canadian wilderness? If that's enough for Aunt Jemima, shouldn't it be enough for us?) And at any given hour, I swear to God, there's a program about WWII on, no matter what time of day it is. I think that WWII is just as important as the next person, but come on, England. It might be time to begin to move on now.

Monday night I tread into the living room and settle in next to Angus, who is watching the TV with a look of horror on his face, the kind of fascinated horror that you only see when someone watches midget porn/sees someone wearing parachute pants in public/sees a drunken reveller eat a kebab/observes a live vivisection while eating chili cheese nachos. I look up at the TV and see, in giant plasma 32 inch glory, a penis staring me right back in the face.

Ah, good old channel 4. There to help me get over the fact that boobs aren't even allowed to be shown on American TV before 10, you come racing in with dicks the size of dinner plates on the TV show The Perfect Penis.

And, much like watching elf porn, I sit down with Angus and stare in slack-jawed horror.

The show is scientific, a study on penis size and on the male attitude towards the penis. That said, I think I was flashed by about a hundred penises, all of them different sizes and all but one of them circumcised (yes, this show was filmed in the States). In one scene there was a Russian doctor doing surgery on a hermaphrodite. He said to the camera that the man had type "XX" and was therefore a male (to which I shouted at the TV: Um, no! XX is female, XY is male! but to no avail-he went ahead with the surgery anyway. No one listens anymore.) So he chopped off his patient's little nubbin (it looked surprisingly easy to do) and sewed it to the patient's wrist (yes, you read that correctly) for a blood supply while he worked on making the little nubbin a little something.

The ick factor was huge. My clitoris climbed up into my body and whimpered pitifully, begging me to tell it when this scene was over.

Another story was of a gay man in San Francisco whose dream it was to have the world's greatest circumference in testicle size. Seriously. He was so keen on it that he had many, many injections of silicone into his sac to make them huge. They showed the man walking down a long corridor and it looked like he was packing something other than heat in the crotch of his trousers (I sat there thinking that I know a good therapist that guy should talk to). They asked him if he'd show the camera his private version of happy and his face lit up like it was Christmas and he was being visited by Silicone Claus-he dropped trou and exposed a mass of flesh the size and shape of a bowling ball. He gleefully explained that the penis and testicles were no longer sexually functioning and he had to squat over toilets as they dragged into the water, but it was all worth it just to be able to say his sac was larger than anyone else's in the world's, including Merrick's.

To me (and, I think, 90% of the ladies out there), if he's huge it's a bit of a put-off. Our cervixes are not there to be drilled, the man need not look for the new Alaskan pipeline. There is the man saying that "More than a handful is a waste", well, the same can be applied to both sexes. I remember unleashing the trouser snake of a guy I was dating in university. When that thing popped out of his tighty-whities I looked at it in horror. I had been planning on providing him with a little oral pleasure, only I was pretty sure that the last strep throat culture I had was negative, I didn't need a repeat of it. I looked up at the guy. "I'm not going anywhere near that thing," I croaked. He begged me. I gave in and gave it the old college try and wound up accidentally leaving wagon trail grooves on the side of his dick with my back molars.

A painful lesson to both parties, really, though I suspect the pain was slightly greater on his end.

In general, women are not interested in having men be the stand-in for King Kong. If the guy is the size of Bic pen cap when fully erect, perhaps there is a need for being careful and diplomatic. Then, maybe, we'll have to provide a bit of encouragement. There is a world of truth in the adage "it's how you use it", as well as how men cultivate their, um, other talents. If, for example, a guy can use his tongue to lick out the inside of a carton of Yoplait then party's on, babe.

These men having the surgery done, what are they hoping to hear? Bet your girlfriend likes that you've gone bigger, huh? Is that what they hope to hear? Because when I had my breasts reduced many years ago do you know how many times I heard from a man: Oh my God! You didn't! What did you boyfriend say? Did he let you do that?

If he's not carrying my rack around on his pecs, then I don't think his opinion was needed. And as for if he let me? If he let me? Imagine my reaction, and here's a hint-I was more outraged than when they changed the recipe for Trix cereal.

While overall women don't have any interest in men having the girth of a Coke Can (not all of us like the feeling of having sex with a Bratwurst. I'm just saying. Plus it makes it hell to put tampons in if we're all stretched out), I don't imagine men really want us running around looking like Jordan or Pamela Anderson either. Just because many men like looking in wonder at silicone 36-EEE boobs, I would bet that if men lived with them every night in the bed next to them, they'd get a little tired of it. Eventually we all will need to put these myths to rest, the perfect Hollywood stereotype that we have of the perfect person isn't what we want in our real lives

An example of this is the admin for our project ran into Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie a week ago in a museum in London. In her early 20's "Ohmigod!" squealy voice, she said she was star-struck and tongue-tied and couldn't believe she was standing next to them. Then her brow furrowed and she said she was actually disappointed-Angelina was wearing a shapeless pregnancy-hiding shift but that she was "very scrawny". And she also said that Brad Pitt was maybe 5 foot 8, and that was with "tall shoes". So our Hollywood heroes? A measure of publicity goes a long way.

Long schlongs are supposed to be a sign of virility but as a chick going through fertility treatment, from my perspective the only thing that will prove virility is a white-coated man in a lab looking into a love cup and counting up the swimmers. That, or if (like a guy I work with) you have 6 kids. 6 kids. Yeah. He's virile (or else his mailman is, as his wife finds out once he leaves for work in the morning). A jungle vine busting the fly does not mean that you have the propensity to re-stock the human race. It's also not necessarily a sign that you are the Big Man on the Block, even if you're the Big Man in the Balls. Testosterone, for example, is higher in men that are bald. So if women are allegedly worshipping the men who drip testosterone from their pores, we'd be more likely to go for a guy with a sunroof as opposed to the Adonis with curls into his late 40's (beside, curls are so Magnum PI. Gauche).

If the guy's average, chances are that suits 90% of women. If men like average boobs, chances are we women suit 90% of them. So how about the men dial down the dick extensions and we women'll put the silicone blobs down, yes?

-H.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 08:52 AM | Comments (17) | Add Comment
Post contains 1564 words, total size 8 kb.

1 Yes!

Posted by: Di at February 03, 2006 11:35 AM (KJE2B)

2 Well said Helen, well said.

Posted by: Teresa at February 03, 2006 01:55 PM (zf0DB)

3 Now if we could just get this message out to more people... I swear, this hits the nail right on the head. Well said as usual, Helen, well said...

Posted by: sue at February 03, 2006 02:22 PM (WbfZD)

4 Amen!

Posted by: That Girl at February 03, 2006 02:35 PM (QzfsY)

5 Yes please. Tough my wifes "milkbar" looks better everyday ;-)...

Posted by: Miguel at February 03, 2006 02:50 PM (1VWjY)

6 YES! YES! YES! "The ick factor was huge. My clitoris climbed up into my body and whimpered pitifully, begging me to tell it when this scene was over" Boy, did I ever laugh at that line!!

Posted by: kenju at February 03, 2006 03:03 PM (2+7OT)

7 You hit the nail right on the head, girl! I haven't laughed like this in quite some time...

Posted by: Lisa at February 03, 2006 03:54 PM (4segi)

8 Okay, intervention time. Angus isn't allowed to choose the channel on the TV anymore.

Posted by: Lindsay at February 03, 2006 04:14 PM (pYXRq)

9 LMAO! You said it, and succinctly.

Posted by: caltechgirl at February 03, 2006 06:52 PM (uI/79)

10 Well said!

Posted by: tommy at February 03, 2006 07:46 PM (EhwJT)

11 Precisely! Could never have said it better myself.

Posted by: Lisa at February 03, 2006 09:08 PM (5vmEt)

12 Wow. Just a couple of hours ago Dan sent me the URL that goes to a page of pictures where guys do that to their naughty bits. It's, it's...I don't know the word for what it is. Oh wait, here it is: CRAZY!

Posted by: Amber at February 03, 2006 09:31 PM (zQE5D)

13 Aha! I KNEW most chicks would rather not deal with anacondas! I've had this same discussion with many guys, some of them incredibly stupid. I've thought what it'd be like to be monstrously large and decided it isn't worth it. Too many women running away screaming, can't get full penetration (unless she's got a box the size of a beer mug), and I prefer things that tuck away nice and neatly when not in use. Plus they make too large and tempting a target if you royally piss off a woman and she decides to rack you. Oops, maybe that was a little TMI. I'll just say that my wife has no complaints.

Posted by: diamond dave at February 03, 2006 09:54 PM (0gB9X)

14 Oh my god, I too, totally got sucked (maybe the wrong term here) into watching the penis - documentary? - the other night. My boyfriend walked in at the silicon lump uber package scene and almost lost his dinner. I believe his exact words were, "My eyes, my eyes!!! Oh the humanity!!". Um yeah and the next night on Channel 4 was "Extraordinary Breastfeeding". A little somethin' for the fellas so they don't feel left out? lol. Is it sweeps week or something?

Posted by: Lee at February 04, 2006 04:00 PM (fu97t)

15 I met a girl in college who was slouching a bit, so I told her she should stand up straight, it might help her back. She replied that she was working on it, but she'd had breast-reduction surgery just a few months prior and hadn't quite gotten used to the new balance. (She was still moderately large.) When she got married a few years later her posture was great. And she was so pretty! And now, for some reason, I'm remembering the sex ed teacher in my (Catholic!) high school, who simply said "Sex is not soccer. You are allowed to use your hands."