The Big Little Penis Panic
In the age of looksmaxxing, Trump, and “catching print,” men have seized on an enduring anxiety with new energy.
“God blessed me in a lot of ways except for one,” Jon, a 30-year-old aspiring actor, tells me one night in April over dinner. “He made me big in a lot of ways, except for the one very important way.”
We are sitting in a booth at an old-school steakhouse in downtown Manhattan, and Jon is opening up to me about his penis. It’s an ideal environment for such a sensitive conversation — all the gray-haired regulars having already headed home with their doggy bags and enough jazz music tinkling through the speakers that the last remaining diners, in the next booth, can’t hear us. Still, Jon is clearly anxious, beginning more sentences than he finishes and, occasionally, when the conversation about his genitals gets especially graphic, letting out an uncharacteristically high-pitched giggle. “So what was I saying?” he asks me more than once. “My dick is small,” he says, once the liquor starts flowing, “and that is disappointing.”
It doesn’t help that people tend to have large expectations about Jon. He is broad, bearded, and very handsome. He also wears leather jackets, drinks whiskey, and, at almost six-foot-six, lords over most rooms he enters. He strikes me as a gentle giant, and his not-so-giant secret clearly weighs on him. We do not talk about his size in inches, because, he explains, numbers make him “check out” mentally. He does not call what he has a micropenis — a rare condition that affects 0.015 percent of males in the U.S. — but a proper diagnosis (generally speaking: an erect penis under three inches) doesn’t really matter. He knows he’s small, as does anyone who’s ever slept with him. “It’s just so disappointing,” he tells me again.
