Article

The penis as public part:

Embodiment and the
performance of
masculinity in public
settings

Sexualities
14(6) 704724
! The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1363460711420461
sex.sagepub.com

Jared Del Rosso

Boston College, USA

Abstract
Drawing on an online ethnography at PeniSanity.com, a support site for men who
perceive their penises to be small, this article examines site members descriptions of
their everyday experiences of exposure to the gaze of other men. Site members
describe offline exposure as inducing anxieties about having their small penises seen.
In contrast, online exposure, particularly at the website itself, is often described as
liberating. I conclude with a discussion of the contextual resources available in these
settings that account for these differences.
Keywords
ethnography, gender, internet, masculinity, penis size

Introduction
Over the past four decades, the penis became a public part. Gestured toward but
rarely exposed in popular lms of the 1970s (Lehman, 2007), the penis, its size, and
its erection have been thoroughly medicalized, commercialized, and politicized; in
other words, publicized. In America, the passing of the nal decade of the 20th
century may be marked by cultural high water marks involving the penis. Having
opened with Clarence Thomass conrmation hearings, which featured references
to Long Dong Silver, private parts, and the size of sexual organs (Bordo, 1999a:
2425), the 1990s then oered up the melodramatic penis of The Crying Game

Corresponding author:
Jared Del Rosso, Department of Sociology, McGuinn 426, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue,
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA
Email: delrosso@bc.edu

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(Lehman, 2007: 235), John Bobbitts severed penis, President Bill Clintons distinctive penis (Bordo, 1999a: 24), and, nally, the Viagra penis.
The past four decades have also witnessed a proliferation of research on the
body part. Much of this work has focused on the medicalization of the penis,
particularly the erect penis, and the consequences of this medicalization on
mens sexual performances and self-understandings (Loe, 2001; Potts, 2000;
Potts, 2004; Tiefer, 1986). Cultural representations of the penis and, especially,
the conation of masculinity with large penises have likewise been well studied
(Addelston, 2008; Bordo, 1999b; Lehman, 2006; Lehman, 2007). Relatively little
sociological research, however, has examined mens understandings of their penises
and penis size.1 This oversight may reect the fact that the public has paid more
attention to erect penises and their sexual performances than to accid penises and
their sizes, particularly since the pharmaceutical solutions to erectile dysfunction
have gained considerably more mainstream acceptance than have the cosmetic
treatments, such as phalloplasty, of the small penis.
Yet men are, in fact, engaging in public discussions of experiences and selfunderstandings related to the sizes of their penises. The internet has provided
one arena where public conversations on this topic occur. Amongst the many
sites oering to help men increase their manhood (Wylie and Eardley, 2007:
1453) are other self-help sites aimed at aiding men who are struggling with body
image issues related to their penises. This article draws on ethnographic research
done at one such site, PeniSanity.com (a pseudonym). Specically, I examine site
members experiences of exposure to the gaze of other men in oine settings, such
as restrooms and locker rooms, and online ones, such as at PeniSanity.com. I nd
that site members accounts of exposure in these places are dramatically dierent;
while oine exposure inspires both immediate and deferred anxieties about being
seen as small by other men, online exposure is experienced as liberating and leads
many site members to alter how they think of the relationship between their penises
and self-worth. Conceiving of public exposure as part of mens local, interactive
performance or display (Goman, 1979, 1990) of gender, I conclude with a discussion of the contextual dierences between settings that result in these diverging
experiences.

The visible penis

The allure of penises as symbolic stand-ins for masculinity derives from the physiological fact that the externality and size of many, if not most, penises renders
them visible. Indeed, Freud staked girls penis envy on their sighting of the penis of
a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of large proportions and their realization that the visible organ is superior to the counterpart of their own small and
inconspicuous organ (Freud, 2002: 16). We need not accept Freuds psychoanalytic reading of girls responses to anatomical dierences to recognize that the
externality and size of (most) penises provide a (contested) terrain for the
making and stabilization of sex dierences. The rich literature on the treatment

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of intersexed infants nds precisely this, as one of the primary criteria by which
surgeons evaluate the success of genital surgery is if it produces a penis that looks
right (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: 58; see also Kessler, 1990). Conversely, medical procedures that unexpectedly aect the size of a mans penis, such as hormone treatment or prostatectomy, can blur the boundaries between feminine and masculine
bodies (Olie, 2005, 2006). As one interviewee informed John Olie,
I could see this tiny ... really shriveled-up looking little penis, and the boys [his sons]
came in. I said, Have a look at this. This is what happens to you when you
take these bloody female hormones. You see, your old mans got nothing to show.
(Olie, 2006: 419)

The normal penis is large enough to be visible, if not strikingly so, when
exposed. Yet the visibilities of genitals do not constitute a dichotomous variable.
Vision is discerning and sees dierences amongst penises, rather than simply
between penises and their absence. In this section, I discuss the cultural making
of one of those dierences: that between large and smaller penises, as well as the
consequences of this dierence for mens experience of their bodies.

Making size matter

Connells notion of hegemonic masculinity draws attention to the interplay between
peoples everyday practice of masculinity and cultural ideals or exemplars of
masculinity (Connell, 1995: 77). I accept the value of thinking of masculinity at
dierent social levels, as Connell and Messerschmidt (2005: 849) put it; however, I
nd the terms Connell provides for conceptualizing cultural constructions ideals,
exemplars, and models insucient to capture how contemporary culture makes
penis size matter. These terms suggest that culture only tends to represent exalted
or celebrated versions of masculinity. Yet negative or stigmatized models of masculinity (Gerschick, 2000) are also symbolized in culture (see Alexander and Smith,
1993 for a general discussion of culture and the symbolization of the negative). It is
necessary, therefore, to consider the cultural construction of both celebrated and
stigmatized models of masculinity.
There are, no doubt, occasions when a celebrated model of masculinity is made
out of a large penis. The lm Boogie Nights and its protagonist Dirk Diggler provides one such model. Although the lm represents Digglers large penis as the last
resort of an otherwise failing masculine subject, it also portrays it as an absolute
marker of Digglers masculinity and sexual desirability (Addelston, 2008) and a
visual spectacle that overcomes its viewer (Bordo, 1999a). The visibility and celebration of the large penis, whether cloaked by a layer of clothes in advertisements
or exposed in pornography, also contributes to this coding (Bordo, 1999a). The
proliferation of cosmetic treatments, such as phalloplasty (Haiken, 2000; Luciano,
2001), and other, quasi-medicinal treatments that promise to increase the sizes of
mens penises further reinforces the social worth of the large penis, thereby

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entrenching the problem it is designed to solve (Bordo, 1999b). Bordo (1999a)

illustrates this dynamic by reproducing an advertisement from the 1980s for
NSP-270
Boys who couldnt measure up to the Navys proud standards of manhood ... who
would never be able to satisfy a woman in every port ... who would disgrace the
uniform if they were ever allowed to wear it ... were given massive dosages of this
amazing sex nutrient ... [and] suddenly and dramatically experienced: Proud erections!
Dramatic new ability in Intercourse! Supercharged Sperm That Now Can Do the
Job! ... And, most amazing of all, fantastic growth in penis size! (Bordo, 1999a: 73)

Compared with NSP-270s advertisement, the text of a penile augmentation

advertisement appears tame: Hes the nicest guy I ever dated. But hes just too
small (Bordo, 1999a: 73, emphasis original). The messages, however, are comparable: as Bordo puts it: penis size manliness (1999a: 73).
As these advertisements also suggest, the dominant, cultural dierences between
large and normal or small penises are just as often made by the representation of
stigmatized or negative models. Many lms and television programs include derogatory jokes about characters with small penises; typically, women deliver these
while rejecting men as sexually unappealing or underperforming (Lehman, 2007).
Moreover, many lms and novels feature characters with large penises (or some
phallic stand-in) triumphing over and, in fact, killing unnamed or contemptible
characters described as possessing smaller, if not small, penises (Lehman, 2006). In
fact, as Lehmans research on cultural representations of penis size shows, these
often converge, as in Robert Altmans lm McCabe and Mrs. Miller when an
unnamed cowboy is rst mocked at a whorehouse for the small size of his penis
and then goaded into a gunght, during which he admits that he cannot shoot
well, before being killed (Lehman, 2007: 126129). The anti-model, the man with
the small penis, fails twice; he sexually underperforms and is also unable to compete with men in other masculine arenas.
To be sure, the cultural celebration of the large penises and the denigration of
small ones intersect with other systems of oppression (Collins, 2009). Historically,
in America (Schmitt, 2002) and in European colonies (Fanon, 2008), the large penis
has been associated with the black penis. Schmitt (2002) has recently argued that
this coding has had disparate, almost contradictory, consequences: Even as white
men have mobilized this cultural construct to simultaneously solidify white
supremacy and patriarchal dominance of white womens sexuality, the construct
has destabilized white mens sense of masculine worth, since
If Black men have bigger penises and their sexual performance outshines that of
White men, what does greater power, intelligence, wealth, and even beauty
matter? After all, in some primitive corner of his soul, a man thinks what matters most in his life is his sexual performance, and size, he thinks, is part of this.
(Schmitt, 2002: 40)

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The penis is multivocal or polysemic [with] more than one piece of social information (Goman, 1979: 2) encoded in it. This means, too, that mens everyday
experiences of their penises may collide with these multiple meanings. So, as I show
later, even though the cultural celebration of large penises has had predictable
consequences for men who perceive their penises to be small, there are other,
signicant eects. Scott Poulson-Bryant, for instance, recounts the experiences of
Simon, an African-American man with a ten-inch dick (Poulson-Bryant, 2005:
43). Simon refers to his penis as a burden, expresses frustration at being perceived
as the black guy with the big dick. Its like Im some kind of walking clich[e] (2005:
47), and compares being in locker rooms, where he is the focus of other mens
looks, as like being on a slave block or something (2005: 49).
In this article, however, I focus on the portion of men who perceive their penises
to be small or short and for whom this perception causes anxieties or other body
image problems. Indeed, there exists compelling evidence that the cultural celebration and display of the large penis have signicant consequences on mens perceptions of their penises and self-image. Most men who seek medical advice or
treatment for a short accid penis overestimate the average length of penises
and have statistically average length penises (Haiken, 2000; Mondaini et al.,
2002; Shamloul, 2005). While recent survey research suggests that a minority of
men perceive their penises to be small, 90 per cent of those who do and 46 per cent
of men who perceive their penises to be average reported that they wished their
penises to be larger (Lever et al., 2006). Lever, Frederick, and Peplaus research
also found that perceived penis size aected mens body images, as mens ratings of
their attractiveness, their comfort wearing a bathing suit, and satisfaction with their
faces all increased as their perceived penis size increased. Finally, they found that
men who perceive their penises to be small also report behavioral adjustments to
this perceptual fact, including an increased unwillingness to undress before a sexual
partner and an increased likelihood of hiding their penises during sex compared to
those men who perceive their penises to be normal or large.2
These observations point to the overall import of cultural constructions of
masculinity and penis size. However, mens perceptions of the import of their
penises and penis size are not reducible to the realm of the cultural. Mens
perceptions are also shaped by social experience. Indeed, most men who seek
treatment for their short penises associate their concern with childhood experiences amongst the exposed bodies of other boys, particularly in gym locker
rooms (Mondaini et al., 2002; Shamloul, 2005). Most men, in fact, worry
about the size of their accid penises, not that of their erect penises. This,
as well as Lever, Frederick, and Peplaus nding of behavioral adjustments
amongst men who perceive their penis to be small, suggests that many of
the problems that result from the cultural celebration of the large penis and
stigmatization of the small penis occur during everyday, often mundane, experiences of exposure. To date, however, this topic has been given little sociological attention. It is the purpose of this study to address this limitation by
analyzing data gathered during an online ethnography.

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ethnography@penisanity.com
On 28 January 2006, I emailed the administrators of PeniSanity.com asking them
for permission to research at the site. Two days later, the creator and owner of the
site replied, welcoming me to the site and giving me permission to research there.
Following Christine Hines advice that that the virtual ethnographer should avoid
lurking, so as to expose ones emergent analysis to challenge through interaction
(1999: 48), I was a registered member, occasional poster, and participant-observer
at PeniSanity.com from 30 January until 20 July 2006.
The World Wide Web is home to many non-interactive or semi-interactive web
sites, such as general medical and health sites, that provide advice, information,
and forum space for those seeking support for issues around penis size. However,
PeniSanity.com is, as of April, 2010, a thriving, online community and one of only a
few identity-driven site[s] (boyd and Ellison, 2008: 218) or shared identity site[s]
(Hertz, 2009: 157) organized around the identication of site members as men with
small penises. At the time of this study, the site housed over 43,000 registered users,
most of whom identify as white, American men.3 Originally founded as a community for men who felt insecure about the sizes of their penises, the site was a virtual
meeting place at which members developed personal proles, exchanged private
messages with other users, chatted in real-time, shared photographs, listened to a
podcast made by site administrators, and conversed in the forum on topics as
various as erectile dysfunction, sexuality, humor, and current events. Despite
these diverse purposes, PeniSanity.com retained its original focus, as it was
Small Talk, the discussion board reserved for conversations related to small
penises, that was the most active board in the forum, hosting, when I left the
site in July of 2006, over 2000 threads of discussion with nearly 40,000 posts.
As a virtual community, PeniSanity.com oered its members a place where they
could have passionate, humorous, confessional, and explicit discussions about their
penises. Moreover, it was the stated mission of the site that these discussions promote healthy attitudes towards and acceptance of penises, regardless of their
shapes and sizes. In my time at the site, I often witnessed this mission in action.
Although maintaining the site was costly and the owner encouraged site users to
support the site with (voluntary) monetary donations, PeniSanity.com did not
accept online advertisements from any merchant of products that promised to
increase the size of mens penises. In the forums, moderators and veteran site
users reminded wayward posters of the sites absolute ban on posting materials
humiliating to another or to oneself. In my early visits to the site, I was struck
by the tone of the exchanges in the discussion boards. Missing were the antagonistic markers of many online forums, such as aming, which is characterized
by postings of profanity, obscenity, and insults that inict harm to a person or
an organization (Alonzo and Aiken, 2004: 205). In their place seemed to be a
collective ethos of care and support. The site, of course, was by no means a panacea. For instance, the site did a particularly poor job addressing the hostility that
some straight men expressed toward women. Although the small penis appeared

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to me to be a potential site for men to empathize with body image concerns of

women, straight men at the site often blamed women for exasperating, if not causing, their anxieties about their penises. Still, as I discuss later, many site members
who wrote about the sites contributions to their self-image speak of the site as a
positive inuence in their lives and the sites relative success in the vastness of the
World Wide Web suggests its value to site members.
As an online community with no obvious oine analogue, PeniSanity.com provided me with rich and dense conversations of experiences that are typically brief
and anonymous. Users of the site, however, did not seem to perceive it as a private
community, accustomed, as they were, to stumbling upon it themselves through
search engines. However, because PeniSanity.com was constituted by human subjects who manifested themselves in public documents (Markham, 2007), I have
avoided directly quoting from publicly available text at the site. Instead, I paraphrase exchanges, presenting them as if they were excerpts from eldnotes, and use
pseudonyms for external sites referenced at PeniSanity.com. In place of direct
excerpts from the forum, I use representative quotations from podcasts or private
messages, which are not archived in search engines. I distinguish between these two
forms of data by italicizing the paraphrased exchanges from the forum.
Additionally, when citing from private messages, I use pseudonyms. Although
anonymity fools few and protects none (Scheper-Hughes, 2001: 12), particularly
when a eld site is reachable from any networked computer, I have tried to preserve
it, while writing with the caution and circumspection one might if anonymity
be lost.

the_ethnographer@penisanity.com
As noted earlier, I avoided lurking at the site. At the same time, my participation
at the site was primarily as a researcher. I disclosed my identity as a researcher in
my rst public post and I carried this status with me in all my online interactions,
reminding users who private messaged me about my involvement at the site and
ending my public posts with a signature that described my status as a researcher
and linked to my introductory statement.
My visits to PeniSanity.com were both informal and formal. I made one to
four formal visits to the site per week. These visits were generally planned,
meaning that I logged on to the site with a specic aim, such as to read a
certain thread, gather prole data from the site, listen to a podcast, log into
the chat, or private message another site member. Formal visits generally
lasted 30 to 90 minutes. Informal visits were more frequent, but briefer.
They included quick checks of my private message inbox at the site to see
if any members had contacted me. Frequently, I also skimmed my latest posts
and threads to see if they had garnered any replies. Often, during informal
visits to site, I browsed the Small Talk forum, skimming new posts that caught
my interest. While formal visits to the site provide the bulk of the data for
this research, informal visits were valuable in that they integrated my

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participation in the site into my overall web activity and these visits helped me
keep up with the 40 to 60 posts that members typically added to the forum
each day.4 By frequently and briey logging on to PeniSanity.com, I could
keep pace with new posts, ascertain their relevance to my research and then
adjust my formal visits to account for relevant, new discussions.
During my time at the site, I noticed that young, straight men frequently introduced themselves to PeniSanity.com by posting about their fear of having to drop
[their] pants and expose their small penises to sexual partners. Gay men were not
making comparable posts, even though men who identify as gay are a signicant
constituency at the site and are disproportionately active in the forums. When I
rst noticed these trends, I sought explanations for them o-site, turning to
TheGreatPenisDebate.com (TGPD.com), an oft-discussed webpage that presents
itself as a no-nonsense guide to penis size anxieties. The site, in fact, oered an
explanation: Gay men are not anxious about their penis sizes since they have signicantly more occasions to see penises, their range of sizes, and how those sizes
matter than do heterosexual men. I brought this explanation to Small Talk, where I
posted it and requested that site users respond. In a private response, one site
member oered a slightly dierent rationale. Gay site members, he claimed, are
not asking about the potential of their penises to fulll other mens sexual expectations because,
Among homosexuals, so some posts would indicate, its not uncommon for guys to
ask about a potential partners dick size up front or even back out of an encounter
when they see the small penis.

On the face of it, the message seemed to conrm the opinions expressed at
TGPD.com, as both the site user and TGPD.com claimed that gay men are
more certain of the signicance of penis size in sexual relations. However, this
poster did not, as TGPD.com did, assert that knowledge about how penis size
matters in intimate relationships assuages gay mens insecurities and anxieties
about the sizes of their penises. Indeed, in a public post, this same poster stated
that this knowledge heightens awareness of the signicance of penis size. A fear of
being seen found out, as some at the site put it as small, motivated men,
regardless of sexuality, to express anxieties about being observed by sexual partners, co-workers or friends.
With these observations in mind, I directed my ethnographic focus to discussions of exposure to others. Two lengthy and popular threads Clean
Clothes/Dirty Body and Peeking@Penises were of particular note, as these
opened conversations about insecurities associated with exposure and provided
the bulk of data used in this study. Clean Clothes/Dirty Bodies began with a
question about locker room showers. Why, the initial poster wondered, do
some men especially young men keep shorts, boxers, or bathing suits on
in gym showers? In Peeking@Penises, the initial poster asked if other
PeniSanity.com members enjoy, as he does, peeking at other mens penises

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in public restrooms. This question led to debate about whether and how it is
acceptable to look at other men in public restrooms. While of note for the
content of their conversations, I also paid close attention to these threads
because they were two of the most popular discussions at the site. Clean
Clothes/Dirty Bodies was the fourth most discussed thread in the Small Talk
forum with 29,806 views and 264 replies, made by 106 unique posters.
Surprisingly, a newbie (a poster new to the site) initiated this thread.
Peeking@Penises was the 19th most popular thread at the site, with 11,044
views and 123 replies, made by 71 unique posters. In addition to participating
in these threads, I also engaged in a private conversation with a site user
(Tommy_John) about these topics and listened to the Peeking@Penises podcast, which site administrators made in response to the question posed in the
Peeking@Penises thread. Finally, I participated in several threads on online
exposure, asking site users to discuss the pleasures and anxieties of showing
their bodies and, especially, their penises to an online audience. These conversations allow me to compare site members accounts of exposure in dissimilar,
homosocial settings: public places, such as locker rooms and restrooms, and at
the site itself.
Finally, a note about how I employ data in this study. I am aware that the
internet, in allowing people to be absent while present in online spaces, facilitates experiments in identity performance (Turkle, 1997). As such, there is
nothing that guarantees that the online accounts oered at PeniSanity.com
provide an objective, transparent window on underlying actualities. I take
this point, however, as a general feature of human accounts. One response
to the inherent uncertainty between the correspondence between peoples
accounts and the things and events to which those accounts refer is to treat
narratives or accounts as the objects of sociological study (Riessman, 1993).
Another would be to treat them, as research that rests on realist assumptions
does, as resources (Plummer, 2001: 399) providing more or less transparent
windows onto events, experiences, and subjective experiences. I have chosen to
treat statements made at PeniSanity.com as resources for, rather than
objects of, study. I have two reasons for treating them in this way. First,
there is a relative scarcity of sociological research concerning mens self-understandings of body image and penis size or concerning performances of masculinity involving the accid penis. One objective of this article is to produce
claims regarding these self-understandings and displays, so that they may be
empirically validated or rejected. Second, and more importantly, is that many
users appear to value PeniSanity.com as a space at which they may speak
openly about experiences that they otherwise would not (cf. Tanis, 2008).
This alone does not ensure that user accounts are more objective than they
would otherwise be and does not diminish the signicance of studying the
production of masculine accounts or narratives (Riessman, 2003); however, I
have made an eort to treat accounts oered at the site in a way similar to
how site members treat them.

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Exposing the secret hiding in my pants

Men at PeniSanity.com articulated both immediate and deferred anxieties about
public exposure of their penises to the eyes of men. Immediate anxieties concern the
fear of having a bodily stigma (Ellis, 1998) that can ordinarily be covered by clothes
seen. For example, a few PeniSanity.com members expressed fear that their
bodies would not compare favorably to cultural expectations of mens bodies
perfect, great, intimidating. Much more frequently, site members who
expressed concerns about publicly exposing their bodies, as well as those users
who stated that they avoided publicly showing their bodies, cited the small size
of their accid penises as the source of their anxieties.5 In these cases, site members
did not enumerate any potential future consequences of having ones body seen,
nor did they indicate whether observers responses to the small penis gures in
their anxieties; indeed, the anxiety, as described, seems to be exhausted in the act of
exposure itself.
Deferred anxiety refers to anxieties about future consequences of having been
observed with a small penis. Typically, site users described these future consequences as happening in places other than the public restroom or locker room
and they tended to describe fears of being seen by peers, such as classmates, neighbors, or co-workers. A site member, for instance, wrote that, as a manager, he
would nd it dicult to run a meeting if another man attending it knew about his
penis size. In a private message, Tommy_John, a member of the site since 2002,
described, in uncommon detail, this anxiety.
It was just easier to maintain my mental image of myself if I knew the other guys in the
room did not know the secret hiding in my pants ... Guys like to be Johnny Macho
Man or at least personify that image. I call it the King of the Hill mentality. If
you do something noteworthy on the job and attention is given, then your peers
call you a suck-up or accuse you of being the bosss bitch, etc. You must be humbled
(pulled-down) a notch in the group ... So, my fear was/maybe still is, that if they
know I have a small dick, then that could be the lever pulled to take me down a notch.
To keep me on an even keel . . . If one of my co-workers knew I was smaller than
him, it would always be tucked away in the back of his mind. On an even deeper level,
him seeing me naked left me COMPLETELY EXPOSED in every sense of the
phrase. He has seen me naked. He knows all my shortcomings. He always has the
trump card to play. He can call me out and expose me to others whenever it may be
useful to him.

Tommy_Johns descriptions of his anxieties suggest a fear of having his penis

become an available marker by which his co-workers might evaluate his everyday
performance of masculinity and, in this case, the anxiety is oriented to future
actions that the observer might take.
On three occasions, site members described instances when these free-oating
anxieties (Wright, 2001: 282) were realized. Notably, these descriptions hinge on

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interactive recognitions of dierences in displayed penises and, importantly, this

recognition appears to be embodied in smirks and grins. For instance, a site
member who described his own penis as below average in length and circumference
recounted an encounter in a locker room
with a black man with an eight inch, accid penis. What troubled this poster is that the
man, after catching the poster staring at his penis, told the poster not to worry and that
he gets stared at a lot. This embarrassment turned to intimidation when the poster, who
was sitting with his girlfriend (and future wife) outside the locker room, received a
cocky grin from the man after the man gave the posters girlfriend a small kiss.
Later, the posters girlfriend used the mans rst name, indicating to the poster that
the man was an ex-boyfriend.

Signicantly, grins and smirks are central to the negative experiences of seeing
and being seen that two men describe in the public restroom thread. In both cases,
the posters described
standing at urinals next to young boys (ten to twelve years in age) whose penises
appeared to be average to above-average in size. In both cases, the boys noticed the
smaller penis of the adult poster; one was described as staring at the posters penis, the
other glancing. Both accounts concluded with the boys grinning broadly and cheekily,
then making a great display of shaking their penises before nishing in the bathroom. The
embarrassment that this encounter caused both men was palpable; both feared being the
butt of jokes amongst the boys and their friends. Indeed, one of the posters indicated that
he was laughed at by a group of friends that the boy had approached after nishing in the
bathroom.

In these descriptions of deferred anxieties, site members described the others in

the visual interaction the black man and the two boys as doing something:
putting a large or, vis-a`-vis the site member, relatively large penis on display and,
then, making the dierences in penis size meaningful by acknowledging it through
secondary displays, such as smiles and grins.

The inevitability of publicity

Notably, men with these anxieties have few tools to avoid being seen in public
spaces. Indeed, at PeniSanity.com, there was consensus that men, regardless of
sexuality, believe that it is normal and appropriate for men to look at each
others bodies (see also Poulson-Bryant, 2005; Pronger, 1992) and site members
maintained this consensus even against the protests of a few other site members.
For instance, in the Peeking@Penises thread,
a poster expressed discomfort with other site members acceptance of peeking; he was
one of only three posters amongst the 153 unique posters to do so. In response to his

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complaints, site members told him that in a public restroom his body is a public body; if
he wants privacy, one poster insisted, he should use a stall with a door.

Similarly, in the Peeking@Penises podcast, the site owner responded passionately to two female site members, who argued that looking at the exposed bodies of
other men in public spaces is rude and an invasion of privacy. The site owner
resisted these criticisms, repeating that there is a dierence between being rude and
seeing another mans exposed body:
Well it is [rude] if youre gonna stand there and stare at them. But were talking about
just as you zip up, and look down, and make sure your junk is back in, and you back
up o the urinal. Nobody knows anything. You barely saw it. All youre doing is ...
checking out a sight.

The consensus about public looking suggests that men, when in public places,
have no other recourse from being seen than to avoid the gaze of men, by using
stalls with doors or, as the initial poster in Clean Clothes/Dirty Body suggested, by
keeping ones clothes on when in proximity to the eyes of others.6
There is, however, one other response to public exposure that site members
mentioned. In order to diminish the risk of failing to live up to mens expectations
of penis size, two site members suggested that some men u up. In other words,
some men cajole their penises into a semi-erect state, achieving larger, accidappearing penises. Although a peripheral part of site members conversations on
public exposure, this practice has some cultural currency. For example, responding
to racial stereotypes of black men and expectations of penises, Scott PoulsonBryant writes,
In other words, I should be hung like a horse ... But Im not. I guess I could spend the
last few seconds of my shower doing my own u job, spanking little Scott into some
semierect state that speaks more to the size of my actual sex-ready self. (PoulsonBryant, 2005: 6)

By reducing the distance (Davis in Brooks, 2004: 228) between ones accid
penis and the masculine ideal or between ones accid penis and its actual size,
ung up attempts to limit the chance of being observed with a penis that does not
measure up to cultural expectations.

Another look: PeniSanity.com as social support

Notably, site members anxieties are context-dependent. While site members
described exposure in public restrooms and locker rooms as inspiring anxieties,
site members also wrote that online exposure helps them overcome their own
insecurities. Posters wrote specically about their experiences of exposure in two

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Sexualities 14(6)

threads: Feeling Your PeniSanity.com Penis and Pleasure, Pleasure, Pleasure:

Who Enjoys Being Enjoyed While Masturbating. I initiated the former thread,
asking site members a specic question: How does it feel to have posted photographs of your penis at a website? Another poster started the latter thread; I posted
in it, asking users to elaborate on their statements about the pleasures of being
watched by others (usually men) while masturbating.
In Pleasure, Pleasure, Pleasure, much of the discussion centered on mutual experiences of sexual satisfaction; early in the thread, several posters noted that turning
on another person is itself a turn on. I intervened in this discussion, asking site
members to discuss what is pleasurable about sexual exhibition. In response,
a few posters noted that such performances, as done online, allow for experimentation.
One poster wrote that he enjoys engaging in sexual encounters with men while online but
not oine. Another poster wrote that the space that the web provides allows for a
variety of interactions: One can broadcast ones body to a group or one can perform
one-on-one with another web user.7

Amongst this discussion, a site member initiated one about liberation and, in
response, other posters elaborated on the experience of liberation by discussing the
openness that web-camming forces on them. Camming, they wrote,
eventually becomes easier, as does exposure in oine public spaces. These posters noted
that the acceptance and encouragement that they receive from their observers is key to
this feeling of liberation.

Site users describe similar liberating experiences in considerably greater detail,

in Feeling Your PeniSanity.com Penis. Asked to articulate what liberation meant,
one user noted that this liberation meant showing the part of his body that had previously
caused him signicant, private pain.

In the thread, posters noted disparate features of PeniSanity.com that inuenced

their experiences there.
Some site members say that they prefer exposure at PeniSanity.com to the exposure
experienced elsewhere because, at the site, they remain physically distant from viewers
who look at their photos and they can decide whether to provide their names, email
addresses, or locations to viewers. Also, they can choose whether to provide photographs
of their faces.

Online anonymity appears to be a general feature of online interaction that

provides a safety net (Hillier and Harrison, 2007: 89) for personal self-disclosure
(Miller and Gergen, 1998; Tanis, 2008). There are, however, aspects unique to
PeniSanity.com that contribute to site members comfort exposing themselves to

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other users. Specically, site members cited the attitude that PeniSanity.com takes
towards penises.
One member noted that he expects validation, rather than ridicule, from other site members. Another noted that there is no expectation at PeniSanity.com that a displayed penis
is going to be large. Another described the safety of PeniSanity.com as preventing certain
negative reactions sarcastic jokes and innuendos, namely and providing certain positive benets, such as the mutual acceptance of similarities and dierences between men.
Permission is also part of this safety; by voluntarily posting a picture, site members say
they invite others to look.

These descriptions suggest that PeniSanity.com allows site members to expose

their penises within a context that attens the cultural and masculine hierarchies associated with the shape and size of mens bodies and, specically, their
penises.

The penis as public part: Discussion and conclusion

The discussions at PeniSanity.com are consistent with the interactionist position of
gender and masculinity studies, in which masculinity is understood as a precarious,
everyday, interactive accomplishment, achievement, or performance (Brickell,
2005; Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; McGuey, 2008; West and
Zimmerman, 1987). Indeed, the public exposure of ones penis in the (oine or
online) presence of other men is akin to Gomans gender display with the penis
operating as expressive equipment (Goman, 1990: 24) that allows observing men
to immediately know the social (and sometimes the personal) identity (Goman,
1979: 2) that is, the masculine worth of the exposed man. Given the cultural
stigmatization of small penises and the fact that masculinity is a homosocial enactment ... fraught with danger, with the risk of failure, and with intense relentless
competition (Kimmel, 2005: 33), men who perceive their penises to be small articulate both immediate and deferred anxieties about having their penises seen by
others. These anxieties concern the possibility that the publicly displayed penis will
be viewed, like other bodily stigmas, as discordant with the claims (Charmaz and
Rosenfeld, 2006: 42) that men make about themselves. As the private message from
Tommy_John suggests, even those men who successfully prove their masculine self
in the workplace feel that this status can be undone by a poor, physical masculine
display elsewhere.
We must resist, however, thinking of the penis as a relatively stable signifying
part or expressive equipment for public displays. Bordo captures the instability of
the penis nicely, describing it as overtly mercurial ... capable of such dramatic
transformation from passivity to alertness (Bordo, 1999a: 43). This instability is
famously close to unpredictability and autonomy, as the penis is described as
having a mind of its own (Friedman, 2001). The penis, too, can let down the
man, failing to perform (in the case of sex, become erect) when the man wishes it to.

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Yet this malleability, if not instability, also aords men an opportunity: They may
engage in performance enhancing practices to prepare the penis for its public display. By ung up, for instance, a man decreases the physical distances between
cultural ideals of the accid penis, the self he wishes to perform, and his publicly
displayed penis.8
The diering responses of men to exposure in public, oine and online settings
require that we think beyond the interaction to the context of such exposures. Site
members discussions suggest diverse contextual features that inuence their experiences of public exposure. First, there are important dierences in how both online
and oine spaces are bounded. In his denition of regions, Goman noted that
performative stages are bounded to some degree by barriers to perception
(Goman, 1990: 106; see also Cahill, 1985; Latour, 1996, 2005; Lynch, 1996)
that have dierential eects. As Goman (1990) writes,
[T]hick glass panels, such as are found in broadcasting control rooms, can isolate a
region aurally but not visually, while an oce bounded by beaver-board partitions is
closed o in the opposite way. (1990: 106)

As described by site members, oine settings such as locker rooms and public
bathrooms are notable for their relative lack of material or technological barriers
to perception. Men may opt out of public exposure by keeping a partition between
their penises and their viewers, as when they shower with clothes on or use a stall,
rather than a urinal; however, if they choose not to do this, they have, site members descriptions suggest, access to no other physical barriers or normative protection (Cahill, 1985) to delimit other mens vision.9 Put dierently, in the oine
spaces described by site members, one must opt-out of visual interactions and the
visual exchange may be described as binary: Ones exposed body is either visible to
an other or it is not.
Online, the body is simultaneously present and absent (Kibby and Costello,
2001). Whether the bodys visual presence, its materiality, is mediated through
texts, as at online communities that Turkle (1997) studied, video, as at the interactive sex communities that Kibby and Costello (1999, 2001) have examined, or
both photographs and videos, as at PeniSanity.com, its materiality remains distant,
absent; simply put, the material bodys presence is not concrete (Kibby and
Costello, 2001: 362). Internet users have exploited this resource to perform as
members of an opposite or alternative gender (Turkle, 1997; White, 2006), as
well as to explore non-hegemonic sexual performances (Kibby and Costello,
1999). At PeniSanity.com, the simultaneous presence and absence of the body
allows site users to opt-in to visual interactions. A site member may, like the
man who showers in a bathing suit or consistently uses a stall, keep his material
penis visually unavailable; he may lurk or only engage in textual interactions. At
the site, however, he may instigate a visual interaction by sharing an image of his
exposed body; such an act is understood as inviting another to look. This opportunity diers from the experience of oine exposure, where one, unless hidden

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behind a physical barrier, is vulnerable to the gaze of others, regardless of whether

one wishes to be or not.
Online exposure is not simply a matter of invisibility and volunteered visibility;
it is, instead, experienced along a continuum. Site members may employ the virtual
frame of a digital image as a second barrier to the viewers visual perception,
keeping their faces out of digital images of their penises. They may also, as
many users of online support groups do (Finn, 1999; Tanis, 2008), choose to withhold their names or other identifying information from the community, identifying
by their handles, or log-in names. By doing so, they exploit the simultaneous
presence and absence of the body to produce a gap between the exposed penis
and the masculine self. Oine, no such gap is available. At a minimum, in an
anonymous, oine exchange, the exposed penis is immediately traceable to the
physical, material person; descriptions of deferred anxieties, when dierences in
penis size are imagined as undoing masculine performances that follow a visual
interaction, suggest just how powerful the fusion of the publicly displayed penis
and masculine self can be. In contrast, the gap produced by the perceptual barrier
of the virtual frame facilitates the communal rupturing of the equation proposed by
Bordo (1990a: 73): penis size manliness. Quite literally, the virtual frame allows
site members to detach the penis from the man; site members claims about themselves, particularly about their masculine selves, no longer need be staked on the
penis.
Oine, the public display of stigmatized bodies makes men vulnerable to being
denied recognition as ... men (Gerschick, 2000: 1264). At PeniSanity.com, the
stigma associated with having a small penis is rejected (Gerschick and Miller,
1996), as is the equation by which a mans self-worth is dened as the size of his
penis. The rejection of this association, however, may not be easily lived oine, as
embodied and aective responses to the risks of exposure linger. For instance,
Tommy_John, a member of PeniSanity.com for four years when I arrived, wrote
of his anxieties in the present tense; he also admitted that, although he knew that
his self-worth has nothing to do with [his] penis size, he still felt a little uneasiness
when he undressed in front of a co-worker or fellow club member. Yet by online
self-disclosure (Tannis, 2008), both visual and textual, site members engaged in a
form of therapeutic work (Miller and Gergen, 1998: 200; see also Pennebaker,
1997), the eects of which were amplied by oers of valuable resources in terms
of validation of experience, sympathy, acceptance, and encouragement (Miller and
Gergen, 1998: 198). And, to paraphrase Turkle (1997), having written and displayed their online personae into existence, PeniSanity.com members appeared
to be in a position to be more aware of what [they] project into everyday life
(Turkle, 1997: 263). It is within this therapeutic context that site members experienced public exposure as both liberating and consequential, making, as some said
it did, oine exposure easier.
These observations suggest the importance of continuing to study masculinity at
the intersection of dierent levels (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005), as it
appears that the cultural association of the large penis with masculinity continues

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Sexualities 14(6)

to have profound eects on local enactments of masculinity. These observations

also suggest the importance of closely examining the context of local enactments.
PeniSanity.com members accounts of exposure are replete with references to
diverse and surprising aspects of the settings of exposure that make a dierence,
perhaps even a therapeutic or rehabilitative dierence, to their self-performances
and self-understandings. Attention to these resources, particularly online where
virtual spaces and embodied relations continue to develop, will enable researchers
to unearth the local practices and resources by which masculinity is made.
Acknowledgements
The author is indebted to Stephen Pfohl, C. Shawn McGuey, Leslie Salzinger, and Ted Gaiser
for their support, guidance, and feedback on this research. The author also gratefully acknowledges Ken Plummer and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this manuscript. This
article also beneted from conversations with Jennifer J Esala. An earlier version of this article
was presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Notes
1. In studying mens constructions of masculine identity following treatments for prostate
cancer, John Oliffe (2005, 2006) has examined mens responses to decreases in their penis
sizes. A recent publication by Weinberg and Williams (2010) reports findings from interviews
with college age, heterosexual men and women on their subjective experiences of nudity. In
these interviews, men frequently discussed their experiences of nudity vis-a`-vis their perceptions regarding the sizes of their penises. In these cases, however, mens understandings of
their penises are a sub-focus, rather than the primary research topic.
2. Weinberg and Williams (2010) have recently referred to this behavior as spectatoring the
reflexive monitoring of ones own nude body during sex in a way that interferes with the
slide into erotic reality and sexual responsiveness (Weinberg and Williams, 2010: 50).
3. I collected data about site members from two sources: a random sample of 381 user
profiles and a census poll created by a site user that included questions about race,
sexuality and relationship status, age, and location.
4. On 5 July 2006, I randomly selected a week of posts to sample from the 16 full weeks that
had passed since I made my first post at PeniSanity.com. Between 8 and 14 June 2006,
PeniSanity.com members started 37 new discussions and added 339 new posts. These
posts were made in only eight of the forums; the Small Talk forum received 143 new
posts, or approximately 42 per cent of all new posts. Each complete 24 period over this
week registered more than 40 new posts. On Tuesday 13 June, 60 new posts were added,
the most of any during this week.
5. This fear is often referred to as locker-room syndrome (Luciano, 2001) or small penis
syndrome (Wylie and Eardley, 2007).
6. This is not to say that the viewers actions are unregulated. Site members differentiated
between legitimate looking, which they described as brief and discrete, and illegitimate
looks, which they associated with staring and ogling. Site members also suggested that public looking was regulated by the threat of violence: men who get caught looking are liable to
be victims of verbal aggression, if not physical violence. The site owner, although he
defended legitimate looking in public places, suggested that a man who deliberately
engages in illegitimate looking needs to be punched between the eyes.

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7. Such statements are consistent with earlier research that finds that individuals performances of sexuality may be spatially variable (Humphreys, 1976; Tikkanen and Ross,
2003; Valentine, 1993).
8. Unlike those who weave the flaccid penis into different modes of erotic relations (Potts,
2004: 31), the man who fluffs up leaves the distinction between the flaccid penis as a
non-erotic signifier of gender and the erect penis as an erotic signifier of desire intact; the
fluffed up, semi-erect penis is, after all, meant to pass as a flaccid, undesiring penis.
However, fluffing up does suggest that the categories typically used to characterize
penises flaccid and erect may overlap and be experienced by men as, like gender
more generally, performed or achieved social statuses.
9. To be sure, ethnographic research in such settings might turn up diverse, creative uses of
the physical environment to produce such barriers (Egan, 2004).

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Jared Del Rosso is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Boston

College. His research interests are in culture, knowledge, and interaction. His dissertation is a study of American political discourses of detention, interrogation,
and torture. His recent publications include articles in Social Problems and
Symbolic Interaction on the construction of knowledge.

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