Size–does it matter? Bigger is better; less is more. The rule of thumb (a nice phrase in itself) became that size doesn’t matter. It was what you did with what you had, the sexperts told us. It didn’t matter, they said, whether you carried a pen or a peninsula. The reality for a man is simply that when the penis grows erect, it is in the way, which is another way of saying plenty. The blue whale’s penis is nearly sixteen feet long; the grizzly bear, more closely related to man, has erections that average six inches in length and require more cooperation from his mate. This size thing has generated its own macho mythology, the way that any concealed weapon might.

Size matters, of course, but not in the obvious way. When the penis first does its little parlor trick, standing at attention or even parade rest, of course it is arresting. That the penis could grow alert enough to transform into the rigid, single-minded agent of sperm delivery, every orgasm containing enough male gametes to populate four of the seven continents, is a wonder that handily eclipses the other side of this phenomenon. But size matters through the regular days of regular guys, those moments, hours, days, weeks, and months that make up the 99 percent of our lives when the riot of sex subsides and the smoke has cleared and the citizens have gone to their homes or work and we’re walking around not tall but small. Size matters most frequently to every man in that his penis can shrink, adjust, do everything but disappear and retract like the head of the sage–and long-lived–turtle. We’re not talking normal here but smaller. This isn’t flaccid, another word that has been utterly appropriated for the male organ. This is much tighter than that. The testicles go north, and the penis buttons itself up against the abdomen. It wants one thing now: to be out of the way. This is a fabulous design feature, but not one that men are quick to note or illustrate. It becomes effective and necessary when we run a marathon, ride a horse, sprint across a tennis court to slice a backhand winner, change a tire, sit perfectly still in that chair in the boss’s office going over our expense accounts with the boss himself and the comptroller, or wake suddenly to the ringing phone at quarter past three in the morning. We are not, however, going to read a scene in which a man celebrates how small his little penis was able to become at a moment when he needed it to be tiny, just real tiny: “I was so small, man, it was amazing!”