How big is your penis? Average? Largeish? Big? Ah – but is it documentary big? The entry point – and just pardon the puns from hereon out – for qualifying for shows like My Massive Cock (the latest addition to Channel 4’s Truth and Dare season celebrating the channel’s 40th anniversary, though they style it My Massive ****) seems to be 8in [20.3cm] (erect, for the avoidance of doubt). But most of the contributors come in at (I told you – just pardon them all, else we’ll be here all day) around 9.5in and Matt and Andy’s are each 10.5in. “I do get lightheaded when fully hard,” says Matt. That, it turns out, is the least of the poor man’s problems. But we’ll get back to that.
My Massive Cock seems at first to be following in the un-fine tradition of penis documentaries. They appear with what I consider to be intriguing frequency on all channels, suggesting that commissioning editors and/or film-makers have questions unanswered and insecurities they have not yet overcome (be braver, boys! Or go to therapy!). Sometimes they are about small penises, more often about large, but they are all essentially flippant, cleaving to the underlying point-and-laugh formula that has served the British public so well in matters of sex generally, and genitals specifically.
And my God, there were some specific genitals in My Massive Cock. There was Joe’s, which could not have been more specific if he’d tried. “I’m a shower,” he said, shyly, of the 9.5in of schlong clearly visible through even the most carefully designed pants and thrown into even greater relief by the fact that Joe himself was 5ft 6in tall and weighed – well, I think it was less than his penis, which was literally thicker than his forearm. Possibly thicker than all forearms. I’ll let you know when I examine it again later, as the life-size replica he made of it and plonked on the pub table is something I will see every time I close my eyes for several days to come.
Then there were Bonnie (a rare female size queen), her partner Tommy (7.5in long BUT making up for it with a 7in girth. I have so many questions for Bonnie. Or part of Bonnie) and Andy, who planned and executed a threesome without us learning much more about anything except that it’s difficult to watch television and take notes for a review when your eyes are watering so much.
But Channel 4’s Truth and Dare season’s self-declared remit is to return to the broadcaster’s radical roots and original aim of saying the unsayable and giving voice to the voiceless. And so, efforts had clearly been made to give My Massive Cock some thought and gravitas. There was YouTuber Cam – who felt from early on that his 8in penis made him a fetishistic object, particularly to white women – and uses his show Topical Juice to interrogate the myths around Black men and masculinity. There was Scott, whose mates – I want to put the word in quotation marks, but they really are his mates and that is the problem – take photos and videos of him and his 9.4in genitals in the showers after football and share them round town, all without Scott’s permission, in the name of banter. Scott, a gentle soul, eventually plucks up the courage to ask the ringleader, Alec, not to – especially as their interference is hampering his ability to find a proper girlfriend. What follows is a textbook case of denial and victim-blaming from Alec and a grudging, eye-rolling agreement to rein it all in a bit.
Saddest of all there is Matt, single, older than the rest and who has – from the stories he tells of past relationships – been used and exploited by women in ways you would have hoped members of the sex most often used and exploited would not be capable of. He is considering a penis reduction – about as risky and complicated an operation as you would imagine, and so rare that there is little data available about its chances of success.
Questions of agency, vulnerability, social prejudice and pressures rarely asked with respect to men were nosed at but rarely pursued. Still, as the sniggering turned to sympathy and crudity gave way to compassion, it felt different enough to be refreshing. And it did give a little voice to, if not quite the voiceless then certainly the overlooked – our vulnerable men.
