Gen V (2023-present), the hot iteration of the wildly a hit superhero satire The Boys (2019), flourishes on scenes of physically outrage. One such episode issues a tender girl who is in a position to shrink – a capability caused through self-induced vomiting.
Her boyfriend persuades her to make use of her powers all over intercourse and we see her touching his penis, which is now taller than she is. We additionally perceive why the boyfriend is so insistent about her transformation: moderately talking, he has a small penis.
In Spouse (2025), a movie a few younger guy who has an abusive sexual courting with a self-conscious robotic, a small penis may be mocked. When the robotic positive factors autonomy, and has an intelligence spice up, she confronts and shames the abusive guy, claiming that he’s motivated in his violent and controlling behaviour through “a below average-sized penis”.
What pursuits me about those works, as a researcher of sexuality and picture, is that they’re in a different way dedicated to wondering reductive concepts concerning the frame. Sure, within the universe of The Boys there may be undoubted glee at the entire exploding heads and superpowered, murderous buttocks, however the keynote is pathos.
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The lady who adjustments her form thru vomiting is arguably representing bulimic enjoy and there are characters whose superpowers can also be understood to barter, as an example, self-harm and dysmorphia. However relating to a person with a small penis, it’s a distinct tale. His frame is known to at once affect each his movements and sense of morality.
Likewise, in Spouse, which is in such a lot of senses a meditation at the fraught courting between thoughts and frame, the small penis of the younger guy is known to be the most obvious supply of his repressive movements.
In each instances, the target market is predicted to chortle on the abuser on account of his small penis. The small penis is framed as each a signifier and reason for abusiveness.
‘We are still so medieval about penis size’
It may well be argued that during Spouse and Gen V, the small penis itself isn’t what’s being mocked. The lads thinking about each are younger, white and heterosexual. The theory is, possibly, that mocking the ones with small penises is appropriate, as a result of on this the creators are in point of fact wondering white, heterosexual and male energy buildings, and that the inadequacy of that energy, its mythic nature, is uncovered.
One problem in that is that as handiest energy held through males with small penises is mocked, the ability of the smartly endowed, irrespective of racial or sexual id, is naturalised.
Similarly, the ones folks of color or queer individuals who have small penises would possibly implicitly be integrated within the mockery, with the implication that they’re by hook or by crook the beneficiaries of energy buildings, misuse this energy, and feature glaring, biologically rooted motivations in so doing.
The trailer for Gen V.
Gen V qualifies the laughter – the woman , speaking later to a chum, makes transparent that there’s not anything unsuitable in having a small penis, simply “don’t be a dick about it”. However the one small-penised personality we see is, after all, being “a dick”.
There were quite a lot of tv presentations that concentrate on penis measurement, however every explores the pathos of getting a big penis: Hung (2009), The Exhausting Occasions of RJ Berger (2010), Intercourse Schooling (2019). Believe an identical regarding a personality with a small – and even merely now not massive – penis.
As journalist Caitlin Moran wrote in a 2023 Father or mother article introducing her ebook, What About Males:
We’re nonetheless so medieval about penis measurement that we see male genitalia as being inimical to a person’s soul. Bear in mind when Stormy Daniels instructed the sector that Donald Trump’s penis was once ‘smaller than average – a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart’. And we had been all like: ‘Yes, it makes sense the horrible man has a small, weird mushroom penis.’ The entire international joined in on that one.
Allow us to as an alternative query the connection between biology and future. And let this motion be taken to not body heterosexual white males as a deprived team, however for the nice people all. Our our bodies are ours to barter, with ourselves, and with our vital others, in addition to the ones others that in finding in them indifference, or extra troubling impacts.
As Gen V and Spouse counsel, in fresh science fiction tales that in a different way reimagine the frame, the small penis can handiest be imagined as shameful. It’s taken to be an glaring motivation for abusive behaviour. Such an working out is helping nobody. Because the science fiction style is particularly smartly positioned to query commonsense concepts concerning the human and its shape, it could be a just right position to start.
