The Subreddit That Radicalized Me Against Small-Penis Jokes
Reading Time: 5 minutesI Used to Be Fine With Penis Jokes Like Obama’s. This Is How I Got Radicalized Against Them., It’s hard to think of another type of body shaming that remains so widely acceptable., Penis-Size Subreddits Turned Me Against Penis Jokes
This is part of r/Farhad, in which MediaDownloader contributor Farhad Manjoo delves into the Reddit communities that bring him peculiar joy.
Nobody stands up for the guy with a small penis. The body-positive movement has yet to reach him; there is no Lizzo of tiny dicks.
Instead, everywhere the man with a small penis turns, small penises like his are held up as a fount of suspicion, pity, and comedy. The man with a small penis is defined by it; his size becomes the go-to explanation for anything he’ll ever do.
Is that guy acting like a jerk? Perhaps he’s jealous or controlling? Does he love guns? Does he drive a sports car or a big truck? Is he misogynistic, even an incel? Maybe he’s going around starting wars or serially murdering people? Is he Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Napoleon, or Adolf Hitler himself?
Well, I bet he’s got a super small penis! Can’t you just feel his small-dick energy? Clearly he’s ‘compensating,’ a taunt that implies an inescapable law of manhood: The worse a man behaves, the smaller his penis must be.
All this, at least, is what I’ve learned from r/smalldickproblems, a Reddit forum that will open your eyes to the genuine, unfunny, and really quite sad plight of people with small penises.
In this column, r/Farhad, I profile some of the most arresting corners of the internet’s best discussion site. It won’t surprise you to learn that Reddit has a forum for every penis size. I’ll get to r/bigdickproblems and r/averagedickproblems in a bit.
But it’s r/smalldickproblems I find most fascinating. It’s hard to think of another type of body shaming that remains so widely acceptable; not even Barack Obama is above the small-dick joke. R/smalldickproblems is perhaps the only place in the world where people who are so routinely mocked can find others going through a struggle that is otherwise so hidden, lonely, and unmentionable. There’s only one problem: I don’t know if the subreddit is helping. If you follow its discussions, as I have for some time, r/smalldickproblems often seems to encourage people with small penises to wallow in and echo one another’s anxieties; for some users it might well be intensifying the issues it’s ostensibly meant to alleviate. (In this column I’ve mainly taken a cishet point of view, but much of what I’m describing is even worse for gay or trans men.)
One way it does so is by regularly reminding its members that much of society has yet to recognize that small-penis jokes are harmful. Until I started perusing r/smalldickproblems I hadn’t really intuited the pervasiveness of dick-size jokes in the culture. I hadn’t noticed, either, that they seem to be a particular favorite on the political left, among people who you’d think would know better. At least in his speech at the Democratic National Convention this week, Obama used a suggestive hand gesture to merely hint that Donald Trump’s obsession with crowd sizes might have something to do with his small penis.
Many small-dick jokes are much crueler. For instance, during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, one popular sign read ‘Racism is small dick energy.‘
When Greta Thunberg wanted to clap back at the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, she told him to email her at smalldickenergy@getalife.com. Her tweet is one of the most-liked of all time. In a set with a lot of jokes about why big dicks aren’t better, the comedian Michelle Wolf says, ‘If you have small penis, you should kill yourself.’ Saturday Night Live has also joked about suicide being the only cure for a small penis.
Can you imagine any other physical trait coming in for this type of open, unapologetic ridicule?
‘When did a small dick become a sign that someone is a bad human?’ asked one now-deleted user. In response, another Redditor wrote: ‘Yeah, it’s bad enough that we have to suffer with the issue itself, but then on top of that we are shamed, humiliated, and constantly reminded about it.’ And when the world isn’t suggesting that people with small penises are bad people, it’s telling them that their problem isn’t really a problem. Pinned to the top of r/smalldickproblems is a post with the headline ‘What we don’t want to hear,’ in which a Redditor with a 4.5-inch penis dismantles the many feel-good bits of advice heaped on men with small penises. Things like: Size doesn’t matter. Just be more confident! Get good at oral sex.
Most of the suggestions amount to telling the man with a small penis that he’s just overthinking the whole thing, because sex and relationships and self-worth are about a lot more than penis size. This is of course true; the penis doesn’t make the man. But if so much of the culture is telling him that the penis does make the man—that, say, Donald Trump’s fixation on crowd sizes isn’t just run-of-the-mill insecurity but insecurity about his tiny dick—how can you expect him to believe you? For Redditors on r/smalldickproblems, the situation is made even worse by Reddit’s other dick-size subreddits. People on the small-dick forum often point out how mundane the issues on r/bigdickproblems are by comparison: If you’ve got a large penis you might have to take special care to keep it from touching the inside of the toilet bowl; it’s sometimes difficult to hide your bulge, which can elicit unfortunate reactions; condoms are uncomfortable.
The people who post on r/averagedickproblems, meanwhile, seem mostly to be looking for reassurance. The average-dicked man’s biggest fear is that his dick isn’t enough, a phenomenon that has been extensively studied and for which there are many causes, including pornography, ‘girl inches‘ (women are bad at estimating penis size), and ignorance about what constitutes an average-sized penis. (One study notes that most men who seek penile-lengthening surgery have ‘normal sized penises.’)
But if even average men feel like they’re not big enough, what hope is there for the small?
When I say that I doubt that r/smalldickproblems is helping, it’s because a kind of tragic hopelessness pervades the place. So many posts are from men just giving up—and others reaffirming their resignation.
‘I’ve tried to think positive and believe in hope but honestly there is none,’ one poster recently declared. Another wrote that he felt ‘defeated‘ by his genes; the top response was: ‘there is no hope brother.’
Or: ‘i just wish i felt like theres someone out there who would feel excited by my body, penis included.’ To which another poster responded, ‘Small penis is only just one aspect to a bigger problem that is just being unattractive all around. It sucks and has gotten nearly impossible for me to even imagine someone finding me attractive.’
Many of these people are clearly suffering terrible body dysmorphia and aren’t getting the help they need. Because society discounts their problems entirely, they’re seeking comfort in the one place that at least understands what they’re going through. But commiseration and understanding aren’t enough, and real psychological help isn’t something to be found in a subreddit. Perhaps the best thing r/smalldickproblems can do for its members is to help turn the world against the cheap dick joke.
In that, at least, it’s worked on me. Obama’s small-dick gesture had me cringing a little. Donald Trump’s obsession with crowd sizes wouldn’t be any more defensible if his penis was huge. Honestly, I’d prefer not to think of his penis at all.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2024/08/small-penis-reddit-dick-jokes.html
Ref: slate
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