From the evidence of recent news reports, it appears that every penis on the planet has now officially either been photographed and either sent as a text or exposed directly to a member (pun intended) of the female human race. So it’s time for some serious discussion as to why this habit of men exposing themselves is so common.

It turns out that multisport athletes ultimately have something to offer the world when it comes to keeping the male genitalia under wraps of some kind, or some sort. But let’s admit something first. Lycra and Spandex do not exactly function as camouflage for the Male Unit. More than one triathlete can be accused of putting it out there a bit too much. The shiny outline of a dick in anything other than black tri-shorts leaves nothing to the imagination. And yet, those dicks in view are still not completely exposed. Thus people of both sexes can look away and tell themselves they have not just been flashed.

Murderous nature

When most males do actually pull their pants down, the typical male member is initially no tribute to masculinity. Even a well-hung penis sort of lolls there like a 7th-grade wallflower at the Middle School dance. Penises look awkwardly slack until they’re erect. And then they frankly often look murderous.

That last sentence reminds me of all the books I’ve read by author Henry Miller. The “murderous” nature of the male penis is somewhat stolen from a tremendously sexual passage in which he’s already come a couple times and now his manhood is entirely within his control, half erect and determined to carry on. He describes it as murderous, and sometimes a penis seems to have a mind of its own.

Fantasies of desire 

This sensation of male domination and control is something men fantasize about at length. In a review of Henry Miller’s work published in the Paris Review, writer Hannah Tennant-Moore ponders why some men seem to feel the need to degrade women in the sexual process.

Yet her treatise shares Miller’s own words of denigration for his penis, engaged as it was in lovemaking with his wife, when a strange objectivity came over him:

It looked disgustingly like a cheap gadget from the five and ten store, like a bright-colored piece of fishing tackle minus the bait. And on this bright and slippery gadget Mara twisted like an eel. She wasn’t any longer a woman in heat; she wasn’t even a woman; she was just a mass of undefinable contours wriggling and squirming like a piece of fresh bait seen upside down though a convex mirror in a rough sea.

Adoration and disgust

I personally love Miller’s work, and have thumbed backwards through his books seeking the sexcapades within. He writes with adoration of some women and disgust toward others. Books such as Miller’s Sexus are about the manic behavior in us all. Sex is one expression of our deep desire to be wanted. But it is just one of many facets of existence. Miller grapples with his work life, and lack thereof. He regards even his closest friends with both angry and gleeful detachment. He marvels at the world of fuck-ups and selfish fucks around him. And he admits he is fully one of them. But he knows better.

Required reading

In fact I think the writing of Henry Miller should be required reading for every male on the planet. It convinces one of both the virtues of the male penis and also the alternating role of priestly engagement and comic lust it plays in the lives of women.

Penises have a purpose, and that is that. Men try to give them more importance because the desire to be wanted drives men to do stupid and unwitting things. That’s what brings on the sad distraction of people such as Louis C.K. who repeatedly whipped his dick out to masturbate in front of cohorts in female comics. It’s a disturbing admission of idiotic frailty and flawed character, but he just couldn’t help himself. Now he’s paying the price.

Behaving like dicks

By contrast Matt Lauer seems to have convinced himself that his dick was some sort of portal to enlightenment for the women he essentially assaulted. Here’s a guy who basically had everything he could desire, and yet it somehow not enough.

That’s how it is with dicks, both literally and figuratively. When young and presumptuous, they sometimes demand attention too frequently and with the least concern for ramifications. Yet this tendency can carry on if it is rewarded somehow or ignored, and one cannot tell which is worse.

That is why men such as Lauer tend to lack judgement over who should see their dicks or not. That’s why famous men with a tremendous need for approval so often get into trouble due to their dicks. It’s a sad admission that they’re frankly incapable of being satisfied with the approval they’ve already gotten. It drives them to seek attention, even the negative sort, in uncomfortable ways.

Shrinkage

It’s rather funny that among male endurance athletes, the penis often shrinks during exercise or through exposure to cold or wet circumstance. The Seinfeld character George Costanza famously freaked out when his potential love saw his penis in a small state of existence. “Doesn’t she know about shrinkage?”

So it’s a convenient fact of fate that when men are doing something productive such as working out to the point that all the blood in their body is occupied with grander things, the penis takes a back seat, so to speak, and simply goes along for the ride.

So it should be with more activities in life. Penises are not something women want (or need) to think about in the calculus of daily life. Nor do they want to be confronted with that issue unexpectedly, especially in the workplace. That is abhorrent, wrong and frankly disgusting.

But it is men dissatisfied and not properly engaged with what they’re supposed to be doing that are causing all these problems. That’s why the athletes among us, prolifically engaged in increasing endurance and strength (not flashing their penises) that are prime examples of intelligent behavior.

So if you know someone whose focus is too much on their dick, tell them to go workout. It can cure what ails them, and shrink what travails them.