Taki's Mag

NEW YORK—Last night, after trimming my pubic hair and photographing my penis so I could email it to a half-dozen women and post it on various social networks where the curious could assemble to marvel at it and debate whether it was real or Photoshopped…

OK, OK, I’m lying.

You can relax.

I will not be sharing any monster whangdoodle shots today, or next week, or for the rest of my natural life, and for a very good reason:

I would not want to look at a picture of my penis.

I would not want anyone else to look at a picture of my penis.

In fact, I really don’t want to look at pictures of anyone’s penis, especially when disembodied and shot with a grainy cell phone-camera so that it looks like a boiled bratwurst radiated by an electron gun. I’m even more convinced of this after looking at two pictures of Anthony Weiner’s penis, pictures that I have to presume were taken so that his manliness and sexual prowess would induce moistness and squealing in faraway female admirers.

The first photo—the May 27th photo, the equivalent, in Anthony Weiner’s life, of the Watergate break-in—was not a nude picture at all. It was a bird’s-eye view of his lower trunk, wrapped in soft grey cotton boxer briefs (half boxer, half brief) that are sold by the Jockey company. How do I know this? Because I happen to like this particular men’s undergarment, and I own at least 30 pairs of them, a drawer full of underwear which I will never ever put on my body again. Thanks for the visual, Anthony.

At any rate, all we have here is a bulge, a package, a soft protrusion tucked leftward. We don’t actually see a penis at all. We don’t know that a penis is causing the bulge. For all we know, it could be a tube sock. It’s a strangely unsettling snapshot, partly because of the angle and partly because, after hearing about what a disgusting party pig this guy is, we end up with much less than can be viewed at, say, any beach in Croatia, where the universal affinity for tight spandex crotch-monster Speedo-kinis should qualify the Adriatic as a region where every male sunbather needs to be sentenced to the Nancy Pelosi Modesty Reformatory.

But even if you wanna write off those Balkan Bulges as European oddities, look no further than Fire Island, a mere hour’s drive east from Anthony Weiner’s Congressional district in Brooklyn, and you’ve pretty much got Trouser Snake Jubilee all over the place, all summer long. Weiner’s dangle, in context, is mundane.

So why did this picture, which could have been anybody, which is a thousand times more modest than photos on the cover of magazines with names like Stud Boy that can be viewed at any newsstand kiosk in Times Square, right next door to the Build-a-Bear store, this picture that could possibly be a total fake and which shows no penis—why did this particular picture become the equivalent of the cigar shared by Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, which, let’s face it, is a whole lot more kinky and leaves a lot more icky brain residue when you’re forced to think about it?

Apparently what happened is that sometime on May 27, Representative Weiner uploaded his bulge to yfrog, a photo-sharing service for Twitter, intending it for the eyes of one Gennette Cordova, 21-year-old journalist for The Horizon, student newspaper at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, WA. (Isn’t the Internet great? Anthony pines for Gennette from the Members Gym of the Sam Rayburn Office Building; Gennette yearns for Anthony from the on-campus Orca Bay Café in the lower lobby of the Heiner Building. They discover they have so much in common that they move quickly to the “How big is your thingy?” question.) Then, in one of those “I wonder if I can recall that email” moments we’ve all had, Weiner realized he had uploaded said protuberance to a public page that can be viewed by all. He quickly deleted it and sent out a Tweet that basically said, “Ha ha ha, someone must be playing around with my Twitter account,” but by that time the cat was out of the boxer briefs. Neither Anthony nor Gennette would ever be the same.

But after seeing how harmlessly vanilla the picture is, I wondered how it could attract any attention, even if it stayed online for a full ten minutes.

The answer?

Andrew Breitbart, publisher of IckyLeaks.

Breitbart is a Washington Times columnist who must be one of the most dedicated journalists alive. Apparently his website Big Government had some kind of 24/7 watch on Weiner and the women to whom he was connected on Twitter and Facebook. When you know somebody’s weakness is women, as any intelligence operative can tell you, you can either set what MI6 calls a “honey trap” (use a hot female agent to learn all his secrets, à la Mata Hari or Emily D. West), or you can wait for him to attach himself to a random female who puts him in a compromising position, then either recruit the female or use their relationship for blackmail. Breitbart and his reporters did it the hard way. If Weiner is as big a horndog as he’s reputed to be, a honey trap would have been easier, but instead they were presented with yfrog’s Weiner Wiener Grab. They captured the image, published it, and the world gaped in apparent horror.

OK, side question before we move on. What’s with the whole “mail me your member” trend? NFL quarterback Brett Favre was accused of sending photographs of Mr. Happy to pinup-model-turned-NFL-sideline-reporter Jenn Sterger back in 2008, and the fallout from that little scandal revealed that many other athletes had telegraphed their penes from place to place for various reasons and in various presumably drunken states.

In part there’s a generation-gap thing going on here. There have always been legends about various celebrity dongs’ enormity—NBA star Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain, who claims to have slept with 20,000 women, or Lyndon Johnson, the only president known to have named his penis (“Jumbo”)—but the difficulty of verifying such claims has left it all in the realm of conjectural gossip. A notable exception is Rasputin, the mad Siberian monk. When he was murdered in 1916, legend has it that his killers mutilated his body and cut off his penis before throwing him into the icy Neva River. The penis is reportedly preserved in a formaldehyde jar in St. Petersburg, where Dr. Igor Knyazkin, head physician of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Prostate Center, attests that it measures 11 inches. (Interesting cultural fact: Penes always seem to be measured in inches, never metric units, regardless of the country.) I have not examined the penis in question, nor will I be doing so; I’m only making the point that penile measurement and display are not solely 21st-century phenomena.

My theory as to why otherwise sane men transmit their packages through the Internet ether to random women is that the combination of cheap digital photography, the availability of cell-phone cameras while drunk, and pop-culture porn stars’ creeping cultural influence has resulted in an entire generation of men and women becoming penis-measurers. This, in turn, speeds up the old locker-room debates about who’s bigger.

It took more than 30 years of Hollywood debate to determine whether Milton Berle or Forrest Tucker was better hung—and the issue was never resolved! Mamie Van Doren says she once asked Tucker to tell her the truth about it, and he told a hilarious story about several actors, including himself and Berle, getting drunk and deciding to whip ’em out, lay ’em side-by-side on a tabletop, and determine the results once and for all. The winner: the fleet and petite George Raft, who could barely make 5-foot-7 in dress shoes.

There are enough people out there who want to see photographs of phalli for there to be a sort of “Bigger is Better” culture that’s especially widespread on the Internet, where “Grow Your Johnson” spam has been thriving since, oh, about 1982, when email protocol was first opened to the public. Some quick Internet research reveals that Jonah Falcon, a 40-year-old video-game reviewer living with his mother in Brooklyn, has the largest officially measured penis in the world at 13.5 inches. (Jonah is coincidentally one of Weiner’s constituents, so we should probably check the Brooklyn Waterworks for evidence of the Uncle Miltie Virus.) Porn-film blogs say the late John Holmes, once known for having the Most Monstrous Member on the Silver Screen, was either 13.5 inches (according to his manager—strange that this number keeps coming up) or 10 inches (according to his first wife). Many aficionados believe that gay porn star Chad Hunt has the largest appendage, but people who have worked with him say that it’s “only” 8 inches and appears larger onscreen because he’s compact and small-boned. Given the prevalence of this sort of statistic, it’s not too surprising that endowed guys would start measuring the evidence and sharing it with girls, who either like endowed guys or play the old game of making semi-endowed guys feel massively endowed for reasons that benefit the girls later. I don’t find this strange, I find it inevitable. As fetishes go, Anthony Weiner’s obsession with hot-chatting women and mailing them his appendage is one of the milder ones.

But apparently the Democratic leadership disagrees. Steny Hoyer says what Weiner did is “bizarre, unacceptable behavior.” Debbie Wasserman Schultz calls it “completely unacceptable and indefensible.” Nancy Pelosi has called for an ethics investigation, even though, as far as I can tell, there were no laws broken, no rules violated, and—here’s the most amazing fact of all—no actual sex! The only thing they’ve been able to come up with so far is that perhaps Weiner photographed his penis with a government-issued BlackBerry. (How lame is that? I mean, come on, if he had photographed his dog instead of his dong, would that also be using government property for non-government business?) Then, for a couple days, they said, “Ah-ha! We got him! He was sexting a 17-year-old girl in Delaware.”

Which turned out to be completely untrue. The girl took a school trip to Washington, DC, saw Weiner speak, liked him, “followed” him on Twitter, and they exchanged four or five direct Twitter messages that had nothing to do with anything sexual. This had all the earmarks of a parental freakout and, more to the point, a smear tactic directed at a guy they can’t nail any other way.

The media also had a sort of take-no-prisoners attitude toward the women who were messaging naughtily. One of them, Ginger Lee of Antioch, TN, was described repeatedly as a porn star, even though she appears to be simply a stripper struggling to stay afloat as she battles lupus. The main thing these women have in common is that they believe in the same causes as Weiner—government-funded healthcare, abortion rights, and short walks on the beach. One reason the Democratic leadership can dogpile on Weiner is that they know his district is absolutely safe. If he resigns, they could quickly find another Democrat to replace him, even a Jewish Democrat if they needed to get that specific. The only conservatives in that part of southern Brooklyn are the Ukrainian gangsters in Brighton Beach, who started out as pickpockets on the streets of Odessa and believe everyone should stop bellyaching about the economy, go rent Scarface, and start pulling themselves up by their bootstraps the same way they did.

I’m gonna make two points and then we can let the Weiner Wiener shrink back into flaccid impotence.

The first is that we are a nation of fetishists—get used to it! There’s something phony about the shocked outrage every time some public figure gets caught making the Sign of the Double-Breasted Crotch Lizard with a bimbo he met on the Internet. Wherever you have a free society, you have fetishes, and wherever you have massive numbers of hormonal people with leisure time, you have freakazoid sex. They used to say Caligula’s Rome was human history’s most orgiastic society, but I think the nation that supplies pornography to the rest of the world wins all the Sodom-and-Gomorrah awards currently offered. Demonizing Anthony Weiner is a way of pretending that things such as “furry sex” (copulation in animal costumes) and amputee body painting—just to pick a couple at random from a porn site that has 700 categories of them—are found only in Bangkok brothels. The reason so many pillars of the community are so quick to judge any kind of sexuality—like the high-school teacher who was almost run out of town for writing steamy romance novels in her spare time—is that they sense, correctly, that Main Street USA has become a confusing hippie commune of weird impulses, and they don’t want to believe that the principal or the druggist or the aerobics teacher goes home at night and puts on spiked high heels and a latex bodysuit. Wouldn’t it be easier to assume that the principal and the druggist and the aerobics teacher have brains teeming with disgusting fetishism that we will never understand, and so we don’t ever want to go there?

Which leads me to my second point: The Democratic Party is supposed to promote the rights of gays, lesbians, transvestites, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, midgets, circus performers, and biker gangs. It’s supposedly an article of faith among Democrats, especially when it comes to gay marriage, that there’s no such thing as normal. As long as no laws are violated, every American determines his own definition of a normal life, including a normal life in the bedroom, the swingers’ club, the bathhouse, or anywhere else he, she, or it decides to aardvark around. If suddenly the Democrats have decided that Anthony Weiner talking dirty on Facebook and emailing his Love Log to Vegas blackjack dealers constitutes “unacceptable” and “bizarre” sociopathy—if the standard is that low—then God help them the first time a lesbian Congresswoman from Vermont gets “outed” by her college roommate at Swarthmore who has decided to reminisce about the mostly forgotten Group Grope in Parrish Hall back in ’97 by establishing a Facebook page dedicated to recalling every detail of every girl who may or may not have kissed said Congresswoman or otherwise touched her in a compromising manner. Remember, we’re dealing with the Andrew Breitbarts of the world—it will not go unnoticed.

And yet it should. As much as I admire Andrew’s enterprise and energy, there’s something about hunting down perversions that strikes me as un-American. A couple of weeks after his initial report, Breitbart went on Sirius Radio’s Opie & Anthony Show, and they questioned him about claims he had a fully nude photo of Weiner’s wiener that had never been released to the public. He said that indeed he did and showed them the image on his cell phone. They secretly taped the image and put it on the Internet, even though, once again, it could be anyone, and it’s taken from a weird angle that makes you wonder not how long his penis is, but how long his arms would have to be to get the camera into that position. The point is that this five-time-removed photo—a cell-phone snapshot that was uploaded to the Internet, captured on a second cell phone, photographed off the cell-phone screen with a video camera, and then uploaded to the Internet again—is the sort of journoporn that we should take a pass on in the future. Who besides five or six women and Andrew Breitbart really care what pubococcygeal muscle extension Anthony can achieve with his thingamabob? I mean, come on, what’s weirder—Weiner talking about his body to a girl, or that Breitbart had Weiner’s dong on his cell phone?

We’re a country that should expect people to be proud of their bodies; we have two-hour infomercials dedicated to the subject and million-dollar plastic-surgery practices devoted to cheating nature. More importantly, we’re the country that looks at the naked guy wearing a Viking headdress and says, “Cool.” I like to think we’re also still the country where Marv Albert, the NBC sports announcer, can dress in women’s underwear and sing Broadway show tunes while having sex in a Virginia hotel room, then clean himself up and go announce the Knicks game. We forgave Marv. We forgave Bill. Why can’t we forgive Anthony?

Of all the politicians asked to comment on Weinergate, it was Barack Obama who seemed to have the most compassion. “If it was me,” he said, “I’d resign.”

Key words: If It Was Me.

What was the name of that O. J. Simpson book? Right—If I Did It.

Somewhere back in the presidential brain’s remote lobes, Obama looks at Anthony Weiner, goes over the mechanics of photographing your own penis and uploading it to the Web, and says, “Yep, coulda been me.” That’s a by-God American.