The Misanthropologist: Personifying the Penis

Not to get too pop psychology or some shit, but it seems like men forge a significant part of their identities out of their relationships with their dicks. It’s not much of a coincidence that masculine, confident bros generally like theirs. Meanwhile, braggy gross bros who drive Hummers and joke about date rape are packing cashews. But my friend G takes this mainly fruitless observation to the next level: every man has an identity that can be reduced to what colloquial word for penis you’d use to describe his penis.

In other words, G wears mirrored prescription aviators and likes to, uh, layer his denim, appears strangely comfortable in Hawaiian shirts and has dinosaur bedsheets. Unsurprisingly, G is packing a “johnson.” G believes every man can be categorized by dick slang (not to be confused with the popular and remarkable dance of the same name).

“Dick” men are the baseline, G explains, as most men have plain old dicks. A lot of people aren’t very interesting, sure, but D describes dick men are those who most enjoy sober missionary sex with people they know.

“Cock” men are generally reasonably confident, normal dudes who aren’t crazy or horrible, kind of traditional males, usually good guys without a lot of sexual hang ups. I.E., fewer and further between than “dicks” but in the same vein.

Things get weird and a little hard to parse after this, but here’s what I could glean.

“Shlong” men are disgusting and infantile, “baby-makers” are weirdly literal, “manhoods” take themselves too seriously, “one-eyed yogurt slingers” think they’re funnier than they are and try too hard, “piss weasels” are at least to the point, “third legs” are narcissists with unrealistic perceptions of themselves, “trouser snakes” have bad teeth, “peckers” are untrustworthy but you can have a good time with them, one should never invite a “pork sword” to dinner, those with “members” will make you squeamish, and nobody likes a guy with a “wang.” Obviously, the more ridiculous monikers for the male member—pink oboe, custard launcher, sweetbreads, etc—can freely be assigned to almost all fourteen year old boys, and let’s hope they grow out of it, or they’ll never be good people.

My friend is obviously taking his thesis to an extreme here and I doubt that most people keep an elaborate running taxonomic system when trying to reduce the personality of a human male to the most fitting name for his dick. But where I believe this is rooted in some kind of cogent thought is that men tend to assign a persona to their penises, or rather, I suspect it’s pretty common that men anthropomorphize the dick. And this obviously leads me to a story.

When my dear friend–here called Schlemiel–was in middle school, he had the extraordinary opportunity to follow a girl who liked him into the woods and be alone with her. She had loved him for some time (as days feel like weeks in eighth grade) and he hadn’t really noticed her until she suggested they go into the woods and be alone, which was really more than enough for him. There was an implicit agreement that they were going to make out.

So, Schlemiel and his awkward sudden love interest soon found themselves beneath a canopy of trees lying in the dirt. After a while, she made the move to go down on him and he, being an eighth grader, made no effort to stop her. When she finished, they went back to making out for a while, and I guess I think it’s pretty admirable that an eighth grade boy wasn’t afraid of accidentally snowballing his first beej.

Then again, he was still an eighth grade boy and obviously made no move to return the favor, which could have been worse because it didn’t seem like she was after that in the first place. They finished making out after a little while, stood up from the dirt and stared at each other. They didn’t say anything more. She kissed him tentatively, turned and started for the way back.

“Wait…” Schlemiel called.

She turned back and was visibly thrilled, whether she thought she was going to get hers or whether she just wanted him to say he’d miss her or that they were together now or she was his forever girl or some tragic shit that matters at that age.

“Don’t you want to say goodbye to him?”

I’ve often wondered at why he assigned his penis an identity then, or at least a gender. It’s possible he just felt like a million bucks and wanted to promote his penis from appendage to compatriot, or that the whole thing seemed so surreal that his penis became separate from him. Either way, the pants came down again and there was a bittersweet goodbye between girl and penis. They never really spoke again after that.

So I guess we haven’t really figured anything out here. But to be honest, I don’t think the issue is much more complicated than: men will anthropomorphize anything if it’ll get people to touch their dicks.