What first attracted me to Maria was the way she had no reservations about saying she didn’t like Walt Whitman’s poetry, even though our freshman-year professor in Introduction to American Literature had made Whitman’s work central to the course. When I told her one day as we were walking out of class that I admired her honesty, she smiled, said something about how most literature professors had more hot air in them than substance, and walked off to wherever she had to go next. A few days later, when I saw her sitting alone in front of the library, the hello I stopped to say grew into an hour-long chat, and after that, for the next month or so, we met every few days at a table in the back corner of the Rainy Night House Café, where we sat for hours drinking tea, eating bagels, and talking. One afternoon, just as we were getting up to leave, Maria said she’d been given a bottle of good wine as a gift, and she asked if I would come to her room that evening to help her drink it.
She was already several glasses ahead of me when I arrived, and while I played catch-up with the wine, our talk turned to a subject we’d never before discussed, love and relationships. We circled the question of our own budding involvement warily, letting it drop in and out of the conversation, each of us waiting for the other to risk saying, or doing, something first. Then Maria asked me, “Richard, do you like your body?”
“Yes,” I answered, “why?”
She got down from her chair and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me, “No, I mean do you really like your body?”
“Yes,” I said again, but before I could ask if she liked hers as well, she leaned forward and asked her question even more emphatically, “Are you truly satisfied with every part of your body?”
Confused, and beginning to feel a little threatened, I allowed a small edge of anger to sharpen my voice, “What are you talking about?”
Maria smiled to herself, put her hand warmly on my knee, and said, “You know, do you think you measure up physically?”
Finally I understood, but what I understood only confused me more since the challenge implicit in Maria’s words–or at least the challenge I felt to be implicit in Maria’s words (she might not have meant them as a challenge at all)–seemed to shift the basis of what was happening between us from the mutuality of friendship to the adversarial stance of performer and critic. I knew that bigger penises were supposed to be better when it came to having sex, but I was inexperienced enough that I didn’t really understand how “better” was supposed to work. How big did “big” have to be to make a difference, I wondered, and what precisely was the nature of “better?” More pleasure? For whom? These were questions I’d asked myself and been unable to answer every time the subject of penis size and sex came up, and now that Maria had asked me the question directly, I was speechless, caught in what felt to me like a damned-if-I-did-damned-if-I-didn’t situation. Anything I said—yes, no, maybe, let’s find out—seemed to me a picking up of the gauntlet I thought Maria had thrown down, and since I didn’t think I knew enough to compete, my first impulse was to remain silent. On the other hand, to say nothing was probably to lose my chance to be with her, and I really wanted to be with her. So I decided to turn the tables. “I don’t know. Do you measure up?” I asked her.
Maria’s face changed immediately. The gently mocking anticipation with which she’d been waiting for my response vanished, and she searched my face with eyes that were suddenly sad and deeply suspicious. She kept her hand on my knee until she found, or didn’t find, what she was looking for and then, so softly that I almost couldn’t hear her, she said, “Sometimes,” and for a moment I thought she was going to cry.
Maria got up and went back to her chair. We talked a while longer, trying to recapture the easy banter from earlier in the evening, but she was suddenly unable to look me in the face, and when I finally stood up to leave, all Maria did was wave a silent good-bye from where she was sitting. We saw each other on campus a few times after that but never said more than hello, and Maria only had once to turn and walk the other way as I approached for me to understand that she didn’t want to talk to me again.
When I went home at the end of the semester, I told this story to my mother, asking her what Maria’s reasons might have been for trying to seduce me in the way that she did. My mother’s answer only added to my confusion. The size of a man’s ego, she explained, could be measured by the size of his penis. To illustrate her point, she told me a story about a man who tried to pick her up in a bar she’d gone to with her friends. At first, she refused him politely, but as he grew more and more insistent, she grew more and more annoyed until, having had enough, loudly, so that the people around them could hear, she told him that unless he had a “baseball bat” between his legs, she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He, of course, protested that he’d “never had any complaints,” but my mother slapped her palm on the bar and told him that if he had what it would take to have her, she wanted to see it right then and there. If he didn’t, well, he knew what to do.
Needless to say, the man walked away.
It was hard to know how this story answered my question, so I asked my mother if she thought Maria’s challenge about whether or not I “measured up” had been intended to put me in the same position as she had put the man in the bar. My mother’s response confused me even further. “Only small men,” she said, “say size doesn’t matter.”
///
“Next time,” my mother is laughing—but the smile on her face is a thin line of contempt, and when she leans forward to tap the polished nail of her right index finger in rhythmic emphasis on the wooden surface of the dining room table, her eyes smolder—“Next time, tell your father you don’t have such problems. Tell him you wear a steel jockstrap.” I am sixteen, four or five years younger than I was in the story I told you above, just home from a visit to my father in Manhattan, and I have just shared with my mother his first and only attempt at a father-son talk with me about women and sex. Walking from the restaurant where he’d taken me for lunch to the subway where I would catch the train home, he’d put his arm intimately around my shoulder, leaned his head in towards mine, and asked, “Do you have a girl friend?” I told him no, which was a lie. “Well,” he responded, “you will soon, and once you start dating, you’re going to run into situations you won’t know how to handle.” He moved a few steps ahead and turned to face me, searching my eyes to make sure I knew what he was talking about. “I just want you to know you can call me.”
“I know,” I said, and the look of relief on his face as he quickly changed the subject to how I was doing in school made me want to laugh out loud. There was no way he could’ve known that I’d already lost my virginity, but knowing that he didn’t know and realizing how easy it had been to deceive him made me feel superior, and it was this feeling of superiority that I brought to the table when I told my mother the story. “What does he think he’s going to teach you, anyway?” she asks, letting her smile loosen into a softer, more conspiratorial grin. “You probably know more than he does already.” She laughs again, but something in her tone makes me uneasy, and so, when I laugh with her this time, it’s more because I think she expects it than because I think what she’s just said is really funny.
Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.
Interesting, and well-written, but would be interesting to hear how you’d interpret those situations now.
Penis size has always been something I’ve felt strange about, as a woman. I feel like part of me has always felt that it was deeply unfair and cruel to tease a man or make fun of him for his size, because it is something he has zero control over, and it is something that men apparently care about so very much. Furthermore, I’ve always been the kind of straight woman who isn’t all that excited about penetrative sex; I generally do it because it feels OK and because I perceive that my partner wants to do it and I want to make my partners feel good. So when the topic of penis size comes up, I am for my own sake uninterested, and for the man’s sake wary of making him feel bad.
I just never know what to say. If it is someone making fun of someone else, I usually gently chide them (“that’s an awful thing to tease someone for!”), but when it comes to men bragging about themselves to me, I am tongue-tied. What do I say to the man whose penis is “average” at best, but who brags to me that it’s huge? On one hand, he’s either misinformed on how long an inch is (or how long “average” is), but on the other hand, it’s not like I have a problem with his size, and pointing out that he’s not 8″ but more like 5″ would come across as a criticism or complaint, it seems. And I have never been comfortable lying, (“oh yeah, it’s huge and I love it”) especially when it’s a lie that encourages something that I think is stupid and harmful. And then what do I say to a man who brags about his size, and it actually is large? Again, it’s not like I particularly care, but I don’t want to make him feel bad by not being impressed, but I don’t want to lie or by lying encourage this stupid cultural obsession with dick size.
At least if a man is small and he knows it, I can be honest, and reassure him that I don’t care in the slightest, except in that bigger means more likely to cause me pain, and pain is not so great.
Denise, I think it’s OK if you just say how you feel about the issue, i.e. you don’t really care about that.
If my understanding is right, these are men you were intimate with, and in such case, it’s not right to lie just to make a guy feel good (or not make him feel bad). Guys who are obsessed with the size of their dicks, whatever that size is, are immature and I would think that for most women it is not quite sexy to fuck with someone immature.
In general I think the act of sex is construed that way in our culture: men are the performers, and women are the critics. But with regards to sexual attraction, it’s the other way around.
And in neither case am I saying there isn’t still some pressure on the other gender. But in both cases, it’s not quite the same. (Also, this is clearly hetero-centric. I can’t speak to the experience of homosexual people.)
@ Denise –
At risk of turning the conversation goofy, I’ll just say you’re bringing up something worth noting here: bigger isn’t necessarily better, because, let’s say, certain mechanical difficulties arise at a certain point. Far’s I can tell, those of us who are unusually large don’t actually brag about it, because it’s a problem as often as it’s a benefit.
@ Cessen –
That’s a keeper, there. Any objection to me quoting you over at Clarisse’s place?
Gosh, what an awful way to destroy someone’s trust in you by twisting the conversation like that. I wonder what she was thinking. While it didn’t get you the outcome you wanted, Richard, I think your response was probably the best one, all things considered.
Women face unspoken criticism every day in the media of what we are supposed to look and be like. There’s a reason many women hate shopping, and it’s not just trying on things that don’t fit. It’s coming away feeling like you’re not attractive because the clothes don’t and can’t fit you the way they do the models or the mannequins. Don’t get me started on bra shopping.
Men probably have a similarly bad time with penis size, and I’ve commented before on the circumcision post that it’s stupid to see that as a status symbol, but I recognize that the world doesn’t quite agree with me. The only difference I see is that it’s not something for public consumption while a woman’s waist size is – you might not know the number of inches but you can tell immediately if she doesn’t fit the model category.
@Motley:
Sure, go ahead. There is of course additional subtly to it. As Simple Truth points out about penis size (but which is also true of sexual performance in general), it isn’t an obvious external trait visible to everyone. Whereas a woman’s supposed attractiveness is.
But yeah, feel free to quote me.
So Simple Truth
What is the problem with this? As far as I know this blog has been flowing over with women defending the right to preference, i.e. in the Nice Guy debate there has been a rather large surplus of women telling about how niceness is not in and of itself a right to have sex, the woman is fully entitled to chose sex with the jerk if he turns her on.
The same applies here, if your physical properties don’t fill my criteria of attractiveness, then I am free to reject you. The only obligation any man has to any woman is to not discriminate her. No man has the duty to do anything more for a woman than he would do for a man.
Only if you have certain other privileges. In the absence of markers for it we just invent ones – hand size, foot size, height, skin color. And the memes created around them are rather persistent.
I think it’s interesting that in discussing “penis size,” men usually focus on length, while the only penis dimension that I’ve ever known to make a difference to women (outside of the too-big-to-fit) is circumference. Part of the larger misunderstanding of how women’s bodies work?
Anyway, I’m not surprised that you found your interaction with Maria confusing. As a middle-aged woman, I’m pretty much at a loss for what the desired acceptance of the invitation (?) might have looked like. Or why she would choose that particular tack if it came so close to such a zone of unease on her own part. But then, adolescents finding their way, not always very conscious or very pretty…
I have to add here. I have personally witnessed women bragging about dumping boyfriends because they were dissatisfied with the boyfriend’s penis. So these things happen, for some women it might hold true that size doesn’t matter. But I have witnessed cases where the womans only stated reason for dumping the guy was the size of his penis.
IC:
“I have to add here. I have personally witnessed women bragging about dumping boyfriends because they were dissatisfied with the boyfriendâ��s penis. So these things happen, for some women it might hold true that size doesnâ��t matter. But I have witnessed cases where the womans only stated reason for dumping the guy was the size of his penis.”
Not only is it apparently a valid reason for breaking up with a guy but if she wants to insult chances are she is going to go for the penis size/sexual performance jokes.
Here are some more examples.
http://community.feministing.com/2009/09/penis-size.html#comment-301156
http://www.feministing.com/archives/006581.html#comment-66556
It doesn’t even seem to be above outspoken feminists to use penis size as an insult.