Tori Amos once sang, "Look, I'm standing naked before you; don't you want more than my sex?"
The cultural anxiety over penis size has led to the glib counter of "size doesn't matter; it's how you use it." Often, we hear this phrase when people seek to reassure their partners who may worry or fret because they don't measure up. Yet this overlooks the large-scale social currency a large penis has, as it boasts a potency lacking in its average-sized and small brothers. Of course, I don't mean to say that men walk around wearing their penis sizes on their sleeves and people react accordingly in proportion to the dimensions. However, a similar phenomenon frequently occurs in homosocial settings, such as locker rooms and public showers.
Men, presumably heterosexual and repulsed by others' penises, often size each other up literally and figuratively through penis size. This sizing up doesn't necessitate physical nudity. Words can often carry just as much weight as physical evidence. Perhaps then, the desire to win the intragender competition is of more importance than the fear of being potentially dismissed by one's partner. This hypothetical preference would fit neatly within the masculine script that requires winning and, at the very least, being a formidable competitor. But regardless of whether these informal size contests matter, the sense of masculine supremacy conferred on the wielder of the large penis cannot be denied in our cultural imagination.
As is often the case, the question of whether size actually matters, or whether people only believe size matters, does not really matter. The powerful fantasy of the large penis and the resultant acknowledgement of virility and superiority overshadow any contentions, legitimate or otherwise. The cultural consciousness informed by the media and socialization in a phallocentric society have led to a conflation of the concepts of penis size and masculinity, among other faulty and problematic conflations. Thus, male dominance is connected to the penis, which gives birth to the construction of the phallus — a construction that has its roots in history and has inevitably transformed and changed over time.
Susan Bordo, a feminist philosopher, characterizes the modern phallus as a construction that transcends the physical realm in its representative power. It is much more than a penis or an object shaped like one. According to Bordo in her book "The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private" (2000), the phallus, as mentioned before, "stands … for genetic male superiority" over all species and not just women. This suggests that the presence of phallic symbols in the media cannot be simplified to a mere correlation of shape. Perhaps the sticks in "The Lord of the Flies" (1959) are nothing more than sticks, but we cannot ignore the context and the signification surrounding phallic symbolism.
To better illustrate this, let's look at the discourse surrounding gun imagery. The power to kill and subdue others lies in the hands of the one holding the gun. Representations often place guns in the hands of cisgendered — as opposed to transgendered — men, or even if they do not, we associate guns with men, attributing to them authority, power, strength and control. In considering this connection between men and deadly weapons with the various cultural significations previously mentioned, we can perhaps understand the inclination to see phallic symbolism in a gun.
So then, if the phallus is beyond the physical world, does size actually matter? First off, the question itself ignores this possibility, for it is rooted only in the biological realm, yet as we have seen, the issue is as intellectual as it is corporeal. It continually engages with the social imagination of our culture. So if you ask me if size matters, I'd say definitively, yes.
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Elisha Sum is a senior majoring in English and French. He can be reached at Elisha.Sum@tufts.edu.
