Amongst some people I know though, this tragic event stimulated some conversation about the whole circumcised vs. uncircumcised debate, and led us to an interesting set of theories about why men probably don’t like talking about that topic in particular. The first is the fundamentally brutal nature of the act; in spite of the fact that as teen males, my friends and I always heard the Rod Stewart song The First Cut Is The Deepest in a puerile and humorously different light than our girlfriends and laughed, the fact is, even pondering this procedure is a wince-inducing act for most men. It’s somewhat akin to thinking about the bamboo and fingernail torture methods used by the Viet Cong, or the more evolved methods used by the US military at Abu Ghraib. But once you get beyond that barrier, there’s another whole layer of things going on. Primary amongst those is the fact that until the last decade or so, if you were a male born in the states there was about an 80%-90% chance that you were circumcised. That meant that you could almost reasonably be excused for thinking ALL men were circumcised. You honestly didn’t think about it unless you spent enough time in locker rooms with foreigners, or used a common shower in a youth hostel on your college trip abroad.

The disturbing image and the blog post that started it all.

This has all of course changed, partly because of huge relocation of global populations, partly because of the backlash against circumcision that seemed to first gain traction in the 90′s, and partly because of the wide availability of pornography from almost every country on Earth that has video cameras. So these days, whether or not a man is circumcised has little to do with geolocation, unless the man lives in an area that is primarily populated by people of a religion that dictates the practice.

So this conversation amongst my friends touched on all those issues, but once it came down to specifically talking about the penises of people actually present, rather than hypothetical penises as a cultural phenomena, the tone shifted dramatically. While the women present were quite comfortable expressing their preferences for shod or unshod, making all sorts of tittering or groaning “eeeeyew” sounds as they shared their thoughts, the men remained relatively silent, if in fact they didn’t change the subject to the approaching college football season or recent Olympics events. Part of this is probably because, well, men aren’t particularly interested in anyone’s penis but their own. But I suspected there was something else afoot. Usually, when the topic of penises comes up, men WILL talk about them, at least in regards to the perfection or immense size of their own (or alternately, its tininess, in what one presumes is a clever lowering of expectations). They won’t actually have a USEFUL conversation, but they will at least banter and guffaw for a bit.

I knew that most of the men present knew if the other men were nipped or not, but observed that none of them would reveal their status until a woman of interest to them stated a preference, at which point they became quite forthcoming. So I threw down the gauntlet. No, I didn’t demand a show of, er…hands or anything, but I did ask if perhaps this reticence on the part of the men was based on limiting their possibilities for bagging a potential mate that didn’t already know. After considerable discussion in which the women expressed more open-mindedness than the first time around, the men admitted that yes, although it hadn’t occurred to them, that probably was an underlying motive for their silence on the topic. This led to one of the men finally saying “Alright goddamit, I’m NOT CIRCUMCISED. Big deal!“, which led to a few of the women letting down their charade and replying with a weird chorus of “eeeeeeyeews” and “bow chicka bow wows”.

At the end of it all, I realized I had learned two things:

1.) Like most straight men, I DON’T much care about anyone’s penis but my own.
2.) People are mind bogglingly immature in my social circle

If you happen to be interested in more penis talk, there seems to be plenty on the web. Like, did you know that advocates against the practice of circumcision are called intactivists? Or that there are databases of television references to circumcision, complete with charts and graphs? Don’t scoff; if nothing else, it reminded me of one of my favorite Simpsons episodes.

This space was to be occupied by a picture of a penis, but face it, no-one wants to look at one.

I got an e-mail from a friend this morning asking me what I was going to write about today. I replied with “To be honest, I don’t have dick“. I don’t usually talk that way; this was an old friend who never seems to understand what I’m talking about unless I punctuate every sentence with an f-bomb or reference to bodily functions or the more personal aspects of human anatomy. A few minutes later he sent me a link to this interactive map of penis sizes around the world (there’s another one that correlates the data with IQ if you’re interested). This made me realize that although I’d written about Dick a lot over the last couple years, I hadn’t written about penis since July 2008, and in that instance, it was a rather historically important penis. At this point I’d like to point out that I’m still not writing about penises, I’m writing about not writing about penises. And I have to say that in spite of this extended abstinence from penis (I mean, as a topic) and even after combing Dickipedia, I still came up with dick. So have I finally become just another example of The Peter Principle? Have I risen to my level of incompetence with my own web site? Or is it possible that I just don’t find penises that exciting? Once I started pondering the topic though, I couldn’t help noticing that I couldn’t recall the last time a friend – male or female – had brought up penises in casual conversation. Which seems a little odd. I mean, about half the human race has one, and on a basic level, human life is nearly impossible without them. All the same, I’m personally still okay not talking about them. Although I did learn today that there’s a Wikipedia page (SFW, if the word “penis” is safe where you work) devoted to penis size, and that there’s such a thing as a (NSFW, and frankly, not safe for much of anything) Micropenis. And I also ran across an amusing anecdote. Apparently, when trade was first opening up between the US and the USSR in the 80′s, one of the first exports from the US to Russia was from the condom industry. The Russians insisted that the condoms had to fit a penis of 11 inches in length, and repeated this requirement when the Americans checked,  just to make sure that there wasn’t a mistake in translation. So, the Americans sent the condoms of the specified dimension.  In boxes labeled “???????? ???????” . Which is where a lot of penis talk seems to end up, in jokes about size. So what do you think? Does the world need more penis talk?

As I a teenager, I wasn’t too crazy about history, because I thought “history” meant copying down the dates my surly, alcoholic 8th grade teacher wrote on the blackboard, and then forgetting them at exam time. If only he had possessed the insight to engage our perverted, pubescent minds with the more intriguing, human aspects of history. Like, Napoleons’s penis, for instance. In the words of Tony Perrottet, author of Napoleon’s Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped (available in er, hardcover), “…the French government had been given the opportunity to buy what might have been the most famous sexual organ in European history…they didn’t touch the penis. They wouldn’t have anything to do with the penis.” Read or listen to the piece on NPR, or buy the book here.