Explaining American Exceptionalism with an Extended (You'll Pardon the Expression) Metaphor about My Penis

I want to tell you about my dick.

I was neither an early nor a late bloomer. My pubescence was in the fat middle of the bell curve, but with the exception of those hairy monsters whose voices changed in the fourth grade, all puberty-tortured boys imagine themselves to be the last to get hair down there. So, though I was surrounded by other gawky, broken-voiced, wispy-pubed young adolescents, I was convinced that I was the last to sprout. America's strange nudity taboos only make these feelings worse. I suppose we did shower in junior-high gym class, but most of us shuffled there and back shame-facedly, clutching towels, afraid that wandering eyes made us gay. (Postscript: wandering eyes made me gay.)

This was also the period of my own budding sexuality. It happened to coincide with the early days of IRC and AOL chatrooms and the like. (Yes, grrrrrrl, I am soooo younger that you. With the skin to prove it.) And we all know how big everyone's dick is on the internet. And we all know how big everyone's dick is in high school. Huge!

And all of this is to say that for years as a teenager I was convinced that I had a small dick. I mean, even before I'd ever really messed around with another dude, I had pretty much resolved that I would have to be a bottom, insofar as I sort of understood what a bottom was. It wasn't like anyone would ever want me to fuck him, since I had such a teeny tiny dick.

Then I started having sex with dudes. And as my usable sample size grew so that the anecdotal became effectively statistical, I was able to conclude that I did not in fact have a small dick. Indeed, it appeared that I was at very least on the upper side of average. It appeared that, though I was not going to be shortlisted for any pornographic top billing in the near future, I at least had no reason to be embarrassed about the damned thing.

Simultaneously, it began to dawn on me that all the boys who bragged about their own tremendous size were in fact petrified by the same fear that had once frozen me.

Fags do talk and compare cocks, and certainly the internet is still curiously overpopulated by the over-eight-inchers, and yet it's also my experience that gay men are a lot less worked up about their potential inadequacies than the straights, who, because they have comparatively so little intercourse, you'll pardon the expression, with their own kind, are less able to contextualize their own endowments, consider them realistically, fairly judge their virtues and shortcomings. So too, America, whose habits of bluster and braggadocio, whether by Presidents or National Review "journalists," are histrionic overcompensation for what is, at the end of the line, nothing more or less than a petrifying fear of coming up short in some measure of comparison.