Revealing Male Bodies

Chapter 1. Does Size Matter?

Chapter 1 Does Size Matter? s u s a n b o r d o CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE MATTER OF SIZE The young girl stands in front of the mirror. Never fat to begin with, she’s been on a no-fat diet for a couple of weeks and has reached her goal weight, 115 lb., at 5⬘4⬙—exactly what she should weigh, according to her doctor’s chart. But goddammit, she still looks dumpy. In her mind is this Special K commercial that she’s seen a few times on television: a really pretty woman admiring herself in a slinky, short, black dress, long athletic legs, every curve perfect, lean-sexy, nothing to spare. Self-hatred and shame start to burn in the girl, and other things too. When the commercial comes on, the woman’s sleek body is like a magnet for her eyes; she almost feels in love with her. But envy tears at her stomach, and is enough to make her sick. She’ll never look like that, no matter how much weight she loses, no matter how many hours she spends on the Stairmaster. Look at that stomach of hers, see how it sticks out? Those thighs—they actually jiggle. Her butt is monstrous. She’s fat, gross, a dough girl. It’s a depressingly well-documented fact that when girls and women are asked to draw their bodies or indicate their body size with their hands, they almost always overestimate how much space they take up, and tend to see themselves as too fat no matter how thin they are. This once was thought to be a ‘‘body image distortion’’ unique to those with anorexia nervosa. We now know that seeing ourselves as ‘‘too fat’’ is a norm of female perception. Average weight statistics and medical charts are irrelevant. What matters is the gap between the self and the cultural images. We measure ourselves not against an ideal of health, not even usually (although sometimes) against each other, but against created icons, fantasies-made-flesh. Flesh designed to arouse admiration, envy, desire. I’ve been writing and lecturing on these female body issues for years. At almost every talk I’ve given, someone in the audience (mistakenly concluding that because I had talked about women, I believed they had the This is a slightly altered and expanded version of a chapter by the same name in The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). 20 / Susan Bordo exclusive franchise on body-insecurity) has challenged me: What about men? What about baldness? Height? Muscles? All these examples are well taken. But no one has ever brought up the best analogy: men’s insecurities about penis size. I myself did not realize exactly how perfect the analogy was until I read a 1996 study in which pediatrician Peter Lee found that college men, no matter what their actual dimensions, tend to underestimate their penis size. In a mirror image of women’s perception of themselves as too big (even when they are at or below average weight), men tend to see themselves as too small—even with ‘‘average’’-size penises (currently defined by doctors as four inches non-erect and six inches erect). Where do men get their ideas about how big their penises ‘‘ought’’ to be? Some, like comedian Tim Allen, first get them from a child’s-eye view of their fathers’ penises: My father would take me and my brothers to pee, and you’re just dick tall, and your dad’s is out. This whale of a penis would fly out, and you have a mushroom cap that two hands could barely pull out from your body. And your dad’s penis would—thrummm! And you’d scream at this huge, hairy beast of an ugly—‘‘Goddamn! Aw, God!’’ And we’d leave the bathroom and all go, ‘‘Shit! Did you see that?’’ (quoted by Nancy Friday in The Power of Beauty) Some men get their ideas about penis size from other guys in the locker room. Some become convinced they are too small because a partner has told them they don’t measure up; Scott Fitzgerald, as Hemingway recounts in A Moveable Feast, developed anxieties after Zelda told him (Hemingway quotes) ‘‘that the way I was built I could never make a woman happy. . . . She said it was a matter of measurements.’’ (Hemingway takes Fitzgerald off...