Read Stand by Your Manhood Online
Authors: Peter Lloyd
Tags: #Reference, #Personal & Practical Guides, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Men's Studies
Stand by Your Manhood (4 page)
I was once at a friend’s twenty-first birthday party, which was festooned with pictures of him at various stages in his life, including some as a child in the bath. Even here, whilst celebrating his passage into adulthood, there were women whom I overheard say: ‘Hmm, he hasn’t changed much … if you know what I mean.’ Another time, during a man’s speech about prostate cancer at a major health seminar in London, two women in the row ahead of me leaned in to each other and made an inch gesture between their thumb and forefinger. Both times, my heart sank. Not for me or my body – I’m happy – but for the death of basic manners.
Anyone would think the sole purpose of a penis was to pleasure women. Get in line, girls – they have a whole gamut of functions for their owner before anybody else even enters the room.
More importantly, the entire size debate is … well,
bollocks. Biology proves it. If male size did matter, it would affect our ability to urinate, father children and get an erection from the moment we reached puberty. Which it doesn’t. Even the
Kama Sutra
explains that there are three sizes of penis and three sizes of vagina, the perfect combination of which depends on personal preference.
Instead, small is a shame we’re taught about, then taunted with. Advertisers use it as a foundation on which to sell their ‘remedy’ products, whilst women broker it as an insecurity they alone have the power to relieve us of. Influential German psychoanalyst Karl Abraham suggested this was a vindictive form of penis envy – and, who knows, he might be right. After all, why else would people – well, let’s be honest here: women – be so vile about something so amazing? If he’s wrong, and he might be, then it’s just simple sexism, which is worse.
Either way, it doesn’t tickle. So trust me when I say that making a mental leap into healthy thinking is the cheapest, safest and most satisfying solution there is.
I once knew a guy at university who thought buying herbal growth pills from Japan would cause him to wake up with a penis like porn actor Jeff Stryker, solving all his problems. It didn’t. It just cost him £45 plus import fees, one awkward trip to the Post Office and, later, embarrassing diarrhoea. He’d spend hours devising ways to pimp his penis (because of an ex’s throwaway comment when
he was fifteen), which essentially meant trawling websites to buy a whole manner of gadgets.
The rule of thumb was: don’t ever open his post.
Thankfully, he eventually met somebody on a night out and, from that moment on, changed. Turns out the sex was mutually their best ever and, naturally, his penis was an integral part of that. Now, they’re married with kids – and he’s never doubted his dick since. Even though it’s exactly the same as it was before.
He got off lightly, though. In recent years I’ve spoken with countless urologists who’ve seen horrifying home enlargement jobs that would cause even the toughest man to faint. There was one who used chip fat in an old glue gun to give himself bigger girth (it didn’t work), another who tried to release his own suspensory ligament with a pair of kitchen scissors (don’t even think about it – it didn’t work) and the man who, quite literally, used Polyfilla to fill out his phallus (seriously, don’t do it – it didn’t work and I think he died).
Instead, we should learn from these men. They weren’t home alone looking for something to do because the football season hadn’t started; they were searching for solutions to their anxieties, which had completely spun out of control. OK, the above cases are extreme ones, but men everywhere are wasting hours, days, weeks and months worrying about something they can’t do much
about anyway. Forget worrying if your penis is short; LIFE is short.
Author and comedian Richard Herring wrote 2003’s
Talking Cock
– the male equivalent to
The Vagina Monologues.
In it he noted that men’s paranoia about their size is so deeply ingrained (and encouraged) by society that we don’t even question it:
Few of us are going to be prepared to rock the boat and look at the positive things that men do – to focus on all the men who are being good fathers, good lovers, good friends … for fear of appearing un-manly … Rather than making the obvious mental leap and concluding that the male stereotype was wrong, I had decided there was something wrong with me.
One easy, immediate and fun way to do this is by viewing porn with reality glasses. Not literally, of course, but by simply understanding that the actors in them are no more atypical than the pneumatic blondes they’re with.
‘I was always careful to point out the actual rarity of penises over 8 inches,’ says publishing editor Dian Hanson, referring to her work on Taschen’s
The Big Penis Book.
‘Seriously, I can’t tell you how many thousands of photographs I had to examine to find ones of that size.’
Interestingly, proportionate to body scale, man already
has the biggest penis of all the primates – but does bigger always mean better? I enter the online world of Craigslist to find out. In the personals section I find a man who’s advertising his 11-inch penis to women with pride, which thus begins a very unusual email exchange. When he eventually agrees to speak with me, he admits that he frequently fails to get it completely up because a bigger dick requires so much more blood flow than normal. Even then, its heaviness means it often fails to stand at the optimum erect angle. Still envious? Thought not.
In 2012, a man called Patrick Moote learned self-acceptance the hard way. He got down on one knee and proposed to his then girlfriend at a UCLA basketball game in Los Angeles. Crushingly, before an audience of thousands, she said no – later telling Moote that it was because his penis wasn’t big enough. Gutted, he became an overnight phenomenon when the clip of her rejection went viral, being watched more than 10 million times in four days.
Already on the world stage, penis in hand, he pragmatically decided to answer the size question in a documentary – or is it cockumentary? – called
UnHung Hero.
According to the film, which was endorsed by
Fahrenheit 9/11
director Michael Moore, the US penis size industry is worth a whopping $5 billion. Gentlemen, that’s $5 BILLION WORTH OF SELF-LOATHING
AND SHAME which could be spent on so many better things. Specifically, things that work. DO NOT GIVE IT ANY MORE.
‘The fear comes from the fact that we’ve all been lead to believe what’s “average” is huge, when, in reality, most of us are walking around within an inch of one another. Yet, whenever it’s talked about it’s always in extremes – “so small” or “so big!” – when, even across cultures, the difference in size is not as drastic as most people think,’ he tells me.
Besides, being insecure about having a small penis is way worse then actually having a small penis. The average female vagina is only 3.5 inches deep, and the clitoris is right up front, so it doesn’t matter anyway. The best thing guys can do is become informed. The film taught me that confidence is the cure for just about anything. If you are owning it then no one else will even care.
One man who knows this all too well was British filmmaker Lawrence Barraclough. Armed with a penis that’s 3.5 inches erect, he spent years agonising over his size until he finally faced his issues in a BBC Three documentary called
My Penis and I.
Groundbreaking for British television, it rugby-tackled women’s fascism with size and translated it into something positive for the guys.
Once again, Barraclough’s issues weren’t innate or justified – they were simply acquired from a toxic narrative in the wider world. ‘My penis insecurities stemmed from being laughed at by everybody who came into contact with my dick,’ he told me. ‘Right from my first sexual experience.’
In a bid to be accepted, he considered everything from completely avoiding sexual relationships to surgery, which either sees fat transferred from love handles and pumped into the shaft, or erection ligaments slashed so it hangs lower when flaccid (although only when flaccid – in fact, this tactic can give men ‘dive-bomber dicks’ that hang down, even when erect).
‘It stopped being an option for me when I was told how little I’d gain and how potentially dangerous it could be,’ he added.
I tried a penis pump a few times but I just found the whole thing a little too dispiriting. Ultimately, what set me free from my size concerns was being open and talking about them. When the film aired I thought people would see my penis and laugh at me all over again, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Since making
My Penis and I,
not one person has said anything derogatory about my cock. Instead, they congratulate me on sharing such a personal story so publicly. I’m also
a father now, which my penis had a small part in, so I couldn’t possibly be anything other than happy with it. My penis made that happen. It’s pretty amazing.
Abso-fucking-lutely. So can we definitively say, once and for all, that size doesn’t matter?
‘Yes, definitely,’ says leading psychosexual therapist Phillip Hodson.
We live in a bigness culture where most women know that many male insecurities are penis-focused, so belittling their endowment is a power-play. Fortunately, there’s no penis that is too small to give some pleasure – even if it’s just a ‘bud’ then it’s still as hot as the external part of a woman’s clitoris.
Besides, when it comes to experience, does not possessing a 10-inch penis really stop you having the fuck of your life? Answers on a postcard, please…
Author Susie Orbach once said that fat was a feminist issue. If that’s true, then penis size is an issue of the same scale for men. Now, thanks to the likes of Lawrence Barraclough, Larry David and Patrick Moote, millions of men might just stand an inch or two taller because they appreciate the politics of the penis.
So, the next time you’re about to sleep with somebody
who looks at your dick and asks ‘Who’s that going to please?’ the only answer should be: ‘Me.’ Not only does this ensure you’re the custodian of your own dick dignity, but it proves you’ve got the balls to tackle size sexism head on.
Now that’s big.
WHEN POMPEII WAS EXCAVATED BY
the Victorians in the 1860s, they found a stash of porn belonging to the Romans – which, to ‘protect’ society, they swiftly hid in a mausoleum of smut we now know as the Secret Museum in Naples.
Jump forward 150 years and history is repeating itself with the same moral panic. Except, rather than
an archaeological dig, male sexuality is now suffering a snide dig at the hands of self-appointed censors with
Downton Abbey
ideals.
So, when
Nuts
folded in April 2014, it wasn’t just the end of a magazine – it was also the demise of another everyday freedom: the ability to legally enjoy human sexuality without shame. You know, the stuff we take for granted in a post-sexual revolution society.
And, according to experts, it’s only going to get worse.
During its decade-long run, the glossy title may not have been the epitome of good taste, but it certainly had a place in the market, with no shortage of fans. So why did it close? Well, all it started when far-left groups demanded censorship rather than centrefolds, and in latter years, the campaigners at Lose the Lads’ Mags associated it with domestic violence and misogynistic men. Although unfounded, these claims weren’t good PR, and – combined with an industry-wide drop in print sales – the beginning of the end was swift in coming.
In a bid to have it banned from supermarket shelves, along with
FHM
and
Zoo,
the hard-line campaigners at the helm, UK Feminista and OBJECT, used equality legislation to scare retailers into submission, threatening legal action if they continued as stockists. The crucial point, they said – at a stretch – was that expecting staff
members to sell such material was tantamount to sexual harassment and could result in expensive pay-offs.
The magazine’s publisher, IPC Inspire, eloquently hit back, describing the attack as ‘an unreasonable attempt to prevent shoppers from freely browsing a magazine that’s already displayed according to Home Office guidelines’. Managing Director Paul Williams added:
The objection that niche lobby groups have against certain sectors of the media should not mean that the right to purchase a perfectly legal product is restricted for the over half a million readers. This is no longer a question of whether you like men’s magazines, it’s a question of how far you can restrict the public’s ability to consume free and legal media before it becomes censorship.
It was a very modern battle of the sexes, if not a bun fight.
Opponents presented cleverly spun statistics from self-esteem studies, but there was no robust, reliable proof of direct, scientific cause and effect. Not even close. In fact, according to the British Crime Survey, the opposite is true: when lads’ mags first debuted in the mid-1990s, shifting millions of copies each month, incidents of domestic violence actually fell by 64 per cent between 1997 and 2009, whilst the number of sexual assault victims also
decreased between 2004 and 2008: a statistic that directly correlates with sales.
Similar accusations that they caused children to become ‘sexualised’ also fell flat. Reg Bailey, chief executive of the Mothers’ Union, led an independent review into this alleged side effect, hoping to find some justification for all the bluster, but awkwardly noted on page 80 of his report that, actually, ‘there is no clear evidence of a causal link’ between sexualised images on lads’ mags and ‘harm to young people’.
It was an embarrassment. It was also solid proof that societies can recede as well as progress. Just look at 1930s Berlin – indulgent partying one minute, intolerance the next. Yet, somehow, all the hysteria stuck. One high-street retailer demanded
Nuts
begin using shame-inducing ‘modesty bags’ – typically seen with XXX hardcore porn rags – or face being dumped altogether. The editors boldly refused – and ultimately went, er, bust.
Yet, undeterred, the genre lives on.
Loaded
magazine, the original men’s monthly, famous for its bold journalism and subsequent ladette movement, is now enjoying a major revival, whilst the remaining lads’ mags are busy evolving, increasingly shape-shifting into digital formats, where demand remains consistently high.
Then again, we shouldn’t be surprised by this: the
desire for erotica has always existed. Statues of a topless Venus, the goddess of love, pre-date civilisation and are considered the earliest examples of figuritive art, whilst one world-famous artefact from Egypt, the Turin Erotic Papyrus, is dubbed the lads’ mag of its day (1150 BC, to be precise) by archaeologists for its raunchy depictions of nudity. You can forget E. L. James, too. John Cleland’s book
Fanny Hill
doesn’t just have a comedy name – it’s considered the world’s breakthrough in graphic literature. Originally published in 1748, it sparked the first case of US censorship thanks to its tales of BDSM and anal, which – nearly 300 years ago – was long before our parents were thumbing
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
in the conservatory.
‘There have been so many attempts at preventing sexual material, but, for the most part, it’s uncontrollable,’ says Julie Peakman, author of
The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex.
‘You only need to look at how porn has, at least in part, led the development of technology. It existed in print back in the Renaissance period, in cinemas in the early twentieth century, and now on the internet.’
Still, the drive to control it remains strong – which might explain why Britain is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the most censored countries in the European Union.
‘Hardcore porn has only been available here since
2000 – and that only happened because it was already on the internet,’ says Jerry Barnett, founder of campaign group Sex and Censorship who challenge porn scaremongering.
To this day it has never been allowed on British TV and we’re just one of three EU countries who do this. The US has hardcore porn and twenty-five other European member states allow it, but here even subscribe channels like Television X can’t show penetration of any kind. If they accidentally load the explicit European tape in the UK player they’ll get a fine of £25,000 from Ofcom. It’s very punitive.
What most men fail to realise is that we have a state machine that’s dedicated to stopping people viewing porn – and, if we’re not careful, we’re about to see the same applied to the internet. We’re about to lose the freedom we’ve had online for twenty-five years.
On the one hand there are bodies like Ofcom and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport who randomly censor on our behalf – then, on the other hand, there’s the morality campaigners who create panic and conditions for censorship to take place. Until the turn of the century many of these were Christians or religious fuddy-duddies like Mary Whitehouse, but Britain has become much less religious, so these arguments don’t work anymore. The rise
of feminist morality has replaced it – but there’s very little difference between the two groups: they use the same tactics and the same kinds of language.
According to him, the next big crackdown is mobile phone content.
‘We also have very repressive content possession laws. To restrict what can be distributed is one thing, but to restrict what people possess is another – it means you can have something sent to you in a WhatsApp message and you become a sex offender.’
To flesh this out I approach an expert. ‘Let me tell you a legal joke,’ says leading obscenity lawyer Myles Jackman.
A man walks into a court. He’s charged with an offence under Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 of being in possession of an ‘extreme pornographic’ video of a woman having sex with a tiger.
The video was sent to him by a friend, unsolicited, as a joke. He had no idea what the content of the video was before opening it. Yet the defendant was arrested at his home address, interviewed by the police under caution, charged, then bailed to the Magistrates’ Court and finally sent to the Crown Court. It was here that the judge requested the video be played in full, with the sound on, in open court.
The play button was pressed.
It turned out the ‘tiger’ was a man in a tiger-skin costume, who turns to the camera and says: ‘That’s grrrreat!’ Hilarious. Except that the joke was on the defendant, Andrew Holland, of Wrexham, north Wales, as the story was on the front cover of the
Daily Telegraph
and in numerous articles published across the globe. His name became synonymous with the joke, which had a devastating impact on his reputation.
The Crown Prosecution Service are now reviewing the law.
But what is everybody so afraid of? Porn barely even has a rebellious streak anymore. What was once subversive and exciting (why was it always in bushes and broken shop windows?) is now turning academic, with scholarly publishers Routledge printing the new, official
Porn Studies
journal. Like Hugh Hefner guest-editing
The Lancet,
it’s ‘the first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic and their economic, historical, institutional, legal and social contexts’. Blimey.
Specifically, one of their key findings is that at least 30 per cent of online porn users are women, which helps destroy the myth that it is simply sexist.
The people behind it, university professors Clarissa
Smith and Feona Attwood – women! – studied more than 5,000 people on their sex-viewing trends. Among their findings they also found that men’s use of visual material can’t simply be dismissed as an aggressive, one-way exercise of projecting their hardcore fantasies onto wipe-clean pages. In fact, the opposite is true. It reaffirmed something we, as men, have always known: that it’s more multi-faceted than that.
We
are more multi-faceted than that.
Aside from feeling horny, which is an obvious incentive, men view porn for a variety of valid reasons: to get in the mood (with, or for, their partner), to reconnect with their body or, sometimes, just because they simply can’t sleep (oh, come on, we’ve all been there!). Additionally, hundreds said they viewed porn because they were inquisitive about acts they’d consider doing in the future, which means they were exploring their desires in a safe, consequence-free way – something
Nuts
was part of.
‘At their height, lads’ mags offered men a space in which to consider their bodies, relationships and identities in ways that weren’t really available anywhere else,’ says Jude Roberts of Birkbeck College.
Traditional ideas about masculinity don’t allow much space for consideration of men’s anxieties about their bodies, their sex lives or their relationships, so whilst lads’ mags are far from a bastion of progressive gender
politics, they do provide their readers with a more complex view of masculinity than many other types of media.
Agreed. So, hang on – if we know there’s no proven link between men accessing porn and society’s evils – what exactly is the problem? Why can women go into a shop like Ann Summers and buy a dildo or read clit-lit, yet men are restricted in buying a legally permissible magazine in which models pose freely. Have I missed something? Am I going mad? Or can somebody please name and claim the 7-tonne elephant in the room?
‘When I was in my early twenties,
Loaded
magazine came onto the market and scared the shit out of me. I knew nothing of human sexuality. I’d had sex, but not explored who I was as a sexual being. And, it goes without saying, I knew even less about male sexuality. So I was confused,’ says Paula Wright, an academic who, in her spare time, performs a stand-up comedy smackdown on the idea that sexy isn’t sexist. Yep, the radical notion that men finding women attractive isn’t discrimination.
The feminist rhetoric at the time fuelled that fear. Men were out to get us, to humiliate us. But it was just another salvo response across the barricades. The truth is that it’s all about power. The urge to control female sexuality is about keeping their exchange rate with men high.
She points me in the direction of a study called ‘Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality’ by Florida University professors Roy Baumeister and Jean Twenge. It states: ‘Sex is a resource that men desire and women possess. To obtain sex, men must offer women other desired resources in return, such as money, commitment, security, attention or respect.’ In other words, life’s a marketplace where women are the sellers and men are the buyers. Like eBay, but played out in restaurants and nightclubs.
‘The harder it is for men to obtain sex, the more they’ll be willing to offer women in return,’ it continues.
Sexual scarcity improves women’s bargaining position … whilst the general suppression of female sexuality reduces the risk that each woman will lose her male lover to another woman. Throughout history men have been willing to leave one woman for another, especially when the new one is sexually more appealing.
Explosive? Yes, but also true. It’s the classic ‘treat them mean, keep them keen’ incentive – which is undermined when the lads’ mags give it away. Trouble is, the internet has already thwarted this. Sex is already out there.
More importantly, who exactly do these objectors represent? Is their campaign the result of a lengthy consultation with the glamour models themselves – women
who, terrified of their readership, ran to them for help? Is this actually some makeshift workers’ union – or just a storm in a D-cup? ‘They haven’t spoken to me or any of the women I know, so they certainly don’t represent us,’ says Hayley Ann Newnes, a model who’s appeared in
Zoo, FHM
and
Nuts
. ‘Nobody bothered to ask us for our opinions. They assume either we’re too stupid to understand or will contradict them. It’s classic propaganda. They’re the ones using us for their own gratification, not men.’
I put this to both UK Feminista and OBJECT, but am greeted with radio silence. Lose the Lads’ Mags have suddenly lost their voice.
‘I grew up in a family with a lot of feminists and, although they might not like my career path, they ultimately respect it,’ Newnes tells me.
