Today's column is for men only. Newsagents, if you please, do not deliver any copies of this newspaper to local convents or girls' schools. Ushers in Dáil Éireann are instructed to burn this column, lest my many female TD admirers be devastated by what follows. Vigilante squads of Christian Brothers are to tour public transport forcibly confiscating any copy of this newspaper found in the possession of a person who does not also possess a penis.
Are we in an all-male zone? We are? Good. Then this column formally begins.
The following e-mail arrived for me the other day.
Hello, do you remember me? I'm Todd from NY, I have taken a new email address.
Remember we spoke about a problem of short penis? I have found at last a good product which is capable to correct this problem!!! This the best that i ever tried!!! My power and pleasure has trippled, my wife can hardly keep up, my penis has gone from 3.5 inches to just over 6 and is still growing! This is More-Size, which I found at http://mutably.net/more/ Try it necessarily!!! -- The best regards, Todd Sands.
Well, stap me vittles, but I don't remember ever meeting this Todd Sands fellow, and I certainly don't recall talking to anyone on the sturdy subject which he raises. Nor do I recall giving him my e-mail address - yet here he is wanting to continue some earlier conversation about penis sizes.
Odd how Todd spells the word "tripple": maybe with the extra size, you also get the extra pee. However, he sounds a personable enough chap, if rather inclined to be, well, a little personal.
But he's not alone. Not a day goes by without my being pestered by some troubled citizen of the USA fretting over my penile qualities. Morning after morning, fresh e-mails arrive, offering me penile extension and erection aids.
Yes, of course, it's touching that so many Americans worry about me, and confirmation of what I've always thought about them: they are a caring species. But on the other hand, I am uneasy. Have they got a little camera about my house which prompts them to make these daily suggestions? Or are they people I have met on planes and boats and trains whom I have assailed with conversations about the male part, which I have then proceeded to forget? That is something of a worry.
To judge from the volume of e-mails on the subject, I apparently have discussed the matter with several hundred people in the past year alone; and I remember not one of them. I must be one hell of a dinner-party companion. (Hello. A pleasure to meet you. Tell me: how big is your husband's penis? Really? That large? Alas, mine is not. Here. Let me show you. . .) Or perhaps I interrupted a concert in the Carnegie Hall in order to denounce myself for my penile inadequacies, and urged people to e-mail me remedies; and that done, I popped round to the local hypnotist to make me forget my little confessions.
Now, if I were receiving comparable e-mails about female needs, this would confirm the hope that these are randomly addressed computer-generated messages bombarding every single inhabitant of cyberspace. Which is why I desperately await an advertisement for a vibrator or a breast enlarger or piece of girlish nip-and-tuck surgery down below which will tell me all is well, all this penis-enhancing stuff is not meant personally. But in vain. For there are never any random messages urging me to try the u-kum-kwik solo stimulator.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall this being an issue in the days of quills and ink. Shakespeare doesn't mention size, not once. No one could call Michelangelo's David well-endowed: but does he live in terror of his morning e-mails? Of course not! Admittedly, the year David was sculpted wasn't a great one for male parts: what Freud called Penis NV.
So whenceforth this obsession? I was recently reading the diaries of Field Marshall Haig, and he doesn't ever mention his penis-size, not once, though the battles of the Somme and Third Ypres are covered in detail. The same for Alanbrook's diaries, 1939-45. Roy Foster's biography of Yeats never comes close to mentioning the dimensions of the poet's peccant part. Tim Pat Coogan's studies of Michael Collins and de Valera, members of the first Dáil, seem to get by without a single reference to the male member of either male member.
T. Ryle Dwyer's comparative biography of the two men is promisingly named Big Fellow, Long Fellow, but actually turns out to be quite disappointing in that regard, though in no other. I reached hungrily (so to speak) for Ruth Dudley Edwards's Triumph of Failure, sure that the explanation for the Easter Rising (another promising avenue opening up there) must lie in Patrick Pearse's penis size. Nope. Not a word. Indeed, as you might say, not a sausage.
Gentle reader: am I alone here? Am I the only male in the world who tremblingly opens his e-mails each morning, for fear of finding himself being confronted yet again by utter strangers over his alleged penile inadequacies? Have they nothing better to do in the shopping malls of Des Moines and Peoria than to gather in babbling assemblies, without regard to age, creed, sex or race, and agree I need some penile assistance?
Or is it possible that you too receive communications from my friend Todd Sands, et alia? Put me out of my misery: do you?