Nice girls aren’t supposed to take note of the individual penis in all its clinical details(its potential for beauty or hideousness as well as defining charac- teristics like length, girth, and color)—for fear, I suppose, that the whole delicate scaffolding, the prerequisite of a cock-of-the-walk confidence if a man is to be able to perform in the bedroom, would come crashing down around us.Or perhaps it’s simply that no one wants to know what her hus- band’s or lover’s penis really looks like when seen through the key- hole because it’s too heavy a responsibility—like carrying around a state secret with you all the time, burning a hole in your pocket, imperiling future lives. An article I read in a woman’s magazine about how to maintain strong friendships advised readers not to step over the other person’s “comfort zone” and went on to cite a conversation about penis size—in which a friend of the writer’s revealed in a whisper over lunch that the man she was dating and whom she would later marry had a very small penis (“It’s, like, min- iature”)—as its first and most glaring example of an inappropriate revelation.
