Cockamamie

Slightly more sexually mature than some of my peers, by the time I got to health class, I knew that the cock-and-bull story that all penises were about the same size was a big ol’ rod o’ salami. I’m not saying I made the rounds of the track and field team, but I had a large enough sample size to know that every transmission is as unique as its owner’s manual. Even if I just watched porn I might have had a distorted concept of size, but I would have seen that penises have all different shapes, and some even turn off sideways.

I was so pissed in health class when our male gym teacher would talk about the variations in female anatomy, then, in a very earnest voice, declaim that all penises are about six inches long. I actually laughed out loud when he said that. I swear. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that myth, it wouldn’t be the last, but it was the first time I knew from hands-on experience that the teacher was lying about penises. I laughed so hard that I had to put my hands over my face. The entire class stopped and stared at me—all those teenage boys with looks of horror on their faces that maybe their penises were the wrong size.

I got myself together and wiped the laugh-tears from my eyes and sat up straight. “You were saying?”

What I couldn’t believe was that women were each unique, delicate flowers, but, goddammit, maleness was uniform! “Do not look upon your penis harshly, good sons, for—fear not—your compatriot at the next urinal is exactly the same!”

Women are implicitly inferior because our genetic variations are visibly obvious. Men, however, deserve by national decree from scholastic publishing headquarters to be told that, it’s OK, no penis is inferior if all men are the same. The superior form of male development being standardized meant that women’s deregulated bodily free-for-all was clearly less evolved.

Nerts to that. Even at fifteen I knew that no hegemonical force of maleness would keep me from believing that every body was unique, whether it be a delicate blossom or a towering beast. They may have looked at me with terror in health class, but I hope I made all those boys and that gym teacher reassess the ruler by which they measured maleness.