the penis as public part: embodiment and the performance of masculinity in public settings

8/9/2019 The penis as public part: Embodiment and the performance of masculinity in public settings

1/21

Sexualities

14(6) 704–724

! The Author(s) 2011

Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1363460711420461

sex.sagepub.com

Article

The penis as public part:

Embodiment and theperformance of masculinity in publicsettings

Jared Del RossoBoston College, USA

Abstract

Drawing on an online ethnography at PeniSanity.com, a support site for men whoperceive their penises to be small, this article examines site members’ descriptions of their everyday experiences of exposure to the gaze of other men. Site membersdescribe offline exposure as inducing anxieties about having their ‘small penises’ seen.In contrast, online exposure, particularly at the website itself, is often described asliberating. I conclude with a discussion of the contextual resources available in thesesettings 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 butrarely exposed in popular films 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 final decade of the 20th

century may be marked by cultural high water marks involving the penis. Having

opened with Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings, which featured references

to ‘Long Dong Silver’, ‘private parts’, and ‘the size of sexual organs’ (Bordo, 1999a:

24–25), the 1990s then offered 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: [email protected]

at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya on February 5, 2015sex.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://sex.sagepub.com/http://sex.sagepub.com/http://sex.sagepub.com/http://sex.sagepub.com/


2/21

(Lehman, 2007: 235), John Bobbitt’s severed penis, President Bill Clinton’s ‘dis-

tinctive’ penis (Bordo, 1999a: 24), and, finally, 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

men’s sexual performances and self-understandings (Loe, 2001; Potts, 2000;

Potts, 2004; Tiefer, 1986). Cultural representations of the penis and, especially,

the conflation 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 men’s understandings of their penises

and penis size.1 This oversight may reflect the fact that the public has paid more

attention to erect penises and their sexual performances than to flaccid 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 self-

understandings related to the sizes of their penises. The internet has provided

one arena where public conversations on this topic occur. Amongst the many

sites offering 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). Specifically, I examine sitemembers’ experiences of exposure to the gaze of other men in offline settings, such

as restrooms and locker rooms, and online ones, such as at PeniSanity.com. I find

that site members’ accounts of exposure in these places are dramatically different;

while offline 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 men’s local, interactive

performance or display (Goffman, 1979, 1990) of gender, I conclude with a discus-

sion of the contextual differences between settings that result in these divergingexperiences.

The visible penis

The allure of penises as symbolic stand-ins for masculinity derives from the phys-

iological 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 real-

ization that the visible organ is ‘superior to the counterpart of their own small andinconspicuous organ’ (Freud, 2002: 16). We need not accept Freud’s psychoana-

lytic reading of girls’ responses to anatomical differences to recognize that the

externality and size of (most) penises provide a (contested) terrain for the

making and stabilization of sex differences. The rich literature on the treatment

Del Rosso 705




3/21

of intersexed infants finds 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 pro-

cedures that unexpectedly affect the size of a man’s penis, such as hormone treat-

ment or prostatectomy, can blur the boundaries between feminine and masculine

bodies (Oliffe, 2005, 2006). As one interviewee informed John Oliffe,

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 man’s got nothing to show’.

(Oliffe, 2006: 419)

The ‘normal penis’ is large enough to be visible, if not strikingly so, whenexposed. Yet the visibilities of genitals do not constitute a dichotomous variable.

Vision is discerning and sees differences amongst penises, rather than simply

between penises and their absence. In this section, I discuss the cultural making

of one of those differences: that between large and smaller penises, as well as the

consequences of this difference for men’s experience of their bodies.

Making size matter

Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity draws attention to the interplay betweenpeople’s everyday practice of masculinity and cultural ‘ideals’ or ‘exemplars’ of

masculinity (Connell, 1995: 77). I accept the value of thinking of masculinity at

different social ‘levels’, as Connell and Messerschmidt (2005: 849) put it; however, I

find the terms Connell provides for conceptualizing cultural constructions – ideals,

exemplars, and models – insufficient 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 mas-

culinity (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 isnecessary, 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 film Boogie Nights and its protagonist Dirk Diggler pro-

vides one such model. Although the film represents Diggler’s large penis as the last

resort of an otherwise failing masculine subject, it also portrays it as an absolute

marker of Diggler’s masculinity and sexual desirability (Addelston, 2008) and a

visual spectacle that overcomes its viewer (Bordo, 1999a). The visibility and cele-

bration of the large penis, whether cloaked by a layer of clothes in advertisementsor 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

men’s penises further reinforces the social worth of the large penis, thereby

706 Sexualities 14(6)




4/21

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 couldn’t measure up to the Navy’s 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-270’s advertisement, the text of a penile augmentation

advertisement appears tame: ‘He’s the nicest guy I ever dated. But he’s just toosmall ’ (Bordo, 1999a: 73, emphasis original). The messages, however, are compa-

rable: as Bordo puts it: ‘penis size¼manliness’ (1999a: 73).

As these advertisements also suggest, the dominant, cultural differences between

large and normal or small penises are just as often made by the representation of

stigmatized or negative models. Many films and television programs include derog-

atory jokes about characters with small penises; typically, women deliver these

while rejecting men as sexually unappealing or underperforming (Lehman, 2007).

Moreover, many films and novels feature characters with large penises (or some

phallic stand-in) triumphing over and, in fact, killing unnamed or contemptiblecharacters described as possessing smaller, if not small, penises (Lehman, 2006). In

fact, as Lehman’s research on cultural representations of penis size shows, these

often converge, as in Robert Altman’s film McCabe and Mrs. Miller when an

‘unnamed cowboy’ is first mocked at a whorehouse for the small size of his penis

and then goaded into a gunfight, during which he admits ‘that he cannot shoot

well’, before being killed (Lehman, 2007: 126–129). The anti-model, the man with

the small penis, fails twice; he sexually underperforms and is also unable to com-

pete 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 women’s sexuality, the construct

has destabilized white men’s 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 mat-

ters most in his life is his sexual performance, and size, he thinks, is part of this.

(Schmitt, 2002: 40)

Del Rosso 707




5/21

The penis is ‘multivocal or polysemic [with] more than one piece of social infor-

mation’ (Goffman, 1979: 2) encoded in it. This means, too, that men’s 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,

significant effects. 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. It’s like I’m some kind of walking clich[e]’ (2005:

47), and compares being in locker rooms, where he is the focus of other men’s

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 bodyimage problems. Indeed, there exists compelling evidence that the cultural celebra-

tion and display of the large penis have significant consequences on men’s percep-

tions of their penises and self-image. Most men who seek medical advice or

treatment for a ‘short’ flaccid 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 Peplau’s researchalso found that perceived penis size affected men’s body images, as men’s 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, men’s perceptions of the import of theirpenises and penis size are not reducible to the realm of the cultural. Men’s

perceptions are also shaped by social experience. Indeed, most men who seek

treatment for their ‘short’ penises associate their concern with childhood expe-

riences 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 flaccid penises, not that of their erect penises. This,

as well as Lever, Frederick, and Peplau’s finding 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 andstigmatization of the small penis occur during everyday, often mundane, expe-

riences of exposure. To date, however, this topic has been given little socio-

logical attention. It is the purpose of this study to address this limitation by

analyzing data gathered during an online ethnography.





6/21

[email protected]

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 Hine’s advice that that the virtual ethnographer should avoid

‘lurking’, so as to expose one’s ‘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 afew ‘identity-driven site[s]’ (boyd and Ellison, 2008: 218) or ‘shared identity site[s]’

(Hertz, 2009: 157) organized around the identification 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 commu-

nity for men who felt insecure about the sizes of their penises, the site was a virtual

meeting place at which members developed personal profiles, 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. Despitethese 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 offered 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 pro-

mote 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 men’s penises. In the forums, moderators and veteran site

users reminded wayward posters of the site’s 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 antago-

nistic markers of many online forums, such as ‘flaming’, which is characterized

by postings of ‘profanity, obscenity, and insults that inflict harm to a person oran 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 pan-

acea. For instance, the site did a particularly poor job addressing the hostility that

some straight men expressed toward women. Although ‘the small penis’ appeared

Del Rosso 709




7/21

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 caus-

ing, their anxieties about their penises. Still, as I discuss later, many site members

who wrote about the site’s contributions to their self-image speak of the site as a

positive influence in their lives and the site’s relative success in the vastness of the

World Wide Web suggests its value to site members.

As an online community with no obvious offline analogue, PeniSanity.com pro-

vided 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 sub-

jects’ who manifested themselves in ‘public documents’ (Markham, 2007), I have

avoided directly quoting from publicly available text at the site. Instead, I para-phrase exchanges, presenting them as if they were excerpts from fieldnotes, 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 field site is reachable from any networked computer, I have tried to preserve

it, while writing with the caution and circumspection one might if anonymitybe lost.

[email protected]

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 first 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 researcherand 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 specific aim, such as to read a

certain thread, gather profile 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 postsand 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





8/21

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 briefly 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 intro-

duced 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 significant

constituency at the site and are disproportionately active in the forums. When I

first noticed these trends, I sought explanations for them off-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, offered anexplanation: Gay men are not anxious about their penis sizes since they have sig-

nificantly 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 offered a slightly different rationale. Gay site members, he claimed, are

not asking about the potential of their penises to fulfill other men’s sexual expec-

tations because,

Among homosexuals, so some posts would indicate, it’s not uncommon for guys toask about a potential partner’s 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 confirm the opinions expressed at

TGPD.com, as both the site user and TGPD.com claimed that gay men are

more certain of the significance 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 men’s insecurities and anxieties

about the sizes of their penises. Indeed, in a public post, this same poster statedthat this knowledge heightens awareness of the significance 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 part-

ners, co-workers or friends.

With these observations in mind, I directed my ethnographic focus to dis-

cussions 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 aquestion 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 men’s penises

Del Rosso 711




9/21

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 pod-

cast, which site administrators made in response to the question posed in the

Peeking@Penises thread. Finally, I participated in several threads on onlineexposure, asking site users to discuss the pleasures and anxieties of showing

their bodies and, especially, their penises to an online audience. These conver-

sations 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, facil-

itates experiments in identity performance (Turkle, 1997). As such, there is

nothing that guarantees that the online accounts offered at PeniSanity.comprovide 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 people’s

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 men’s self-under-

standings of body image and penis size or concerning performances of mas-

culinity involving the flaccid 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 theywould otherwise be and does not diminish the significance of studying the

production of masculine accounts or narratives (Riessman, 2003); however, I

have made an effort to treat accounts offered at the site in a way similar to

how site members treat them.





10/21

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 men’s 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 flaccid penises as the source of their anxieties.5 In these cases, site members

did not enumerate any potential future consequences of having one’s body seen,

nor did they indicate whether observers’ responses to the ‘small penis’ figures intheir 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 conse-

quences 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, neigh-

bors, or co-workers. A site member, for instance, wrote that, as a manager, he

would find it difficult 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 boss’s 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_John’s descriptions of his anxieties suggest a fear of having his penis

become an available marker by which his co-workers might evaluate his everydayperformance 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-floating’

anxieties (Wright, 2001: 282) were realized. Notably, these descriptions hinge on

Del Rosso 713




11/21

interactive recognitions of differences 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’, flaccid 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 poster’s girlfriend a small kiss.

Later, the poster’s girlfriend used the man’s first name, indicating to the poster that

the man was an ex-boyfriend.

Significantly, 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 poster’s penis, the

other glancing. Both accounts concluded with the boys grinning ‘broadly’ and ‘cheekily’,

then making a great display of shaking their penises before finishing in the bathroom. Theembarrassment 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 finishing 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 differences in penis size meaningful by acknowledging it throughsecondary 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

other’s 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





12/21

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 passion-

ately 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 difference between being rude and

seeing another man’s exposed body:

Well it is [rude] if you’re gonna stand there and stare at them. But we’re talking about

just as you zip up, and look down, and make sure your junk is back in, and you back

up off the urinal. Nobody knows anything. You barely saw it. All you’re 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 one’s 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 men’s expectations

of penis size, two site members suggested that some men ‘fluff up’. In other words,

some men cajole their penises into a semi-erect state, achieving larger, flaccid-appearing 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 Poulson-

Bryant writes,

In other words, I should be hung like a horse ... But I’m not. I guess I could spend the

last few seconds of my shower doing my own fluff job, spanking little Scott into some

semierect state that speaks more to the size of my actual sex-ready self. (Poulson-

Bryant, 2005: 6)

By ‘reducing the distance’ (Davis in Brooks, 2004: 228) between one’s flaccid

penis and the masculine ideal or between one’s flaccid penis and its ‘actual’ size’,

fluffing 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 specifically about their experiences of exposure in two

Del Rosso 715




13/21

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 specific question: How does it feel to have posted photo-

graphs 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 expe-

riences 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 offline. Another poster wrote that the ‘space’ that the web provides allows for a

variety of interactions: One can broadcast one’s 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 offline 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 significant, private pain.

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

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





14/21

other users. Specifically, site members’ cited the attitude that PeniSanity.com takes

towards penises.

One member noted that he expects validation, rather than ridicule, from other site mem-

bers. 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 pos-

itive benefits, such as the mutual acceptance of similarities and differences 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 flattens the cultural and masculine hierar-chies associated with the shape and size of men’s bodies and, specifically, 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; McGuffey, 2008; West andZimmerman, 1987). Indeed, the public exposure of one’s penis in the (offline or

online) presence of other men is akin to Goffman’s ‘gender display’ with the penis

operating as ‘expressive equipment’ (Goffman, 1990: 24) that allows observing men

to ‘immediately know the social (and sometimes the personal) identity’ (Goffman,

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 enact-

ment ... fraught with danger, with the risk of failure, and with intense relentless

competition’ (Kimmel, 2005: 33), men who perceive their penises to be small artic-

ulate both immediate and deferred anxieties about having their penises seen byothers. 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 dramatictransformation 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.

Del Rosso 717




15/21

Yet this malleability, if not instability, also affords men an opportunity: They may

engage in performance enhancing practices to prepare the penis for its public dis-

play. By ‘fluffing up’, for instance, a man decreases the physical distances between

cultural ideals of the flaccid penis, the self he wishes to perform, and his publicly

displayed penis.8

The differing responses of men to exposure in public, offline and online settings

require that we think beyond the interaction to the context of such exposures. Site

members’ discussions suggest diverse contextual features that influence their expe-

riences of public exposure. First, there are important differences in how both online

and offline spaces are ‘bounded’. In his definition of regions, Goffman noted that

performative stages are bounded ‘to some degree by barriers to perception’

(Goffman, 1990: 106; see also Cahill, 1985; Latour, 1996, 2005; Lynch, 1996)

that have differential effects. As Goffman (1990) writes,

[T]hick glass panels, such as are found in broadcasting control rooms, can isolate a

region aurally but not visually, while an office bounded by beaver-board partitions is

closed off in the opposite way. (1990: 106)

As described by site members, offline 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 mem-

bers’ descriptions suggest, access to no other physical barriers or normative pro-

tection (Cahill, 1985) to delimit other men’s vision.9 Put differently, in the offline

spaces described by site members, one must opt-out of visual interactions and the

visual exchange may be described as binary: One’s 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 body’s visual presence, its materiality, is mediated through

texts, as at online communities that Turkle (1997) studied, video, as at the inter-active 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 body’s ‘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 materialpenis 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 oppor-

tunity differs from the experience of offline exposure, where one, unless hidden





16/21

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 viewer’s 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 with-

hold 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. Offline, no such gap is available. At a minimum, in an

anonymous, offline exchange, the exposed penis is immediately traceable to the

physical, material person; descriptions of deferred anxieties, when differences inpenis 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 size¼manliness’. Quite literally, the virtual frame allows

site members to detach the penis from the man; site members’ claims about them-

selves, particularly about their masculine selves, no longer need be staked on the

penis.

Offline, the public display of stigmatized bodies makes men ‘vulnerable to beingdenied 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 man’s self-worth is defined as the size of his

penis. The rejection of this association, however, may not be easily lived offline, as

embodied and affective 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 onlineself-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 effects of which were amplified by offers 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 dis-

played 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 experi-

enced public exposure as both ‘liberating’ and consequential, making, as some saidit did, offline exposure easier.

These observations suggest the importance of continuing to study masculinity at

the intersection of different ‘levels’ (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005), as it

appears that the cultural association of the large penis with masculinity continues

Del Rosso 719




17/21

to have profound effects 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 difference,

perhaps even a therapeutic or rehabilitative difference, 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 McGuffey, Leslie Salzinger, and Ted Gaiser

for their support, guidance, and feedback on this research. The author also gratefully acknowl-

edges Ken Plummer and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this manuscript. This

article also benefited 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 men’s constructions of masculine identity following treatments for prostate

cancer, John Oliffe (2005, 2006) has examined men’s 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 percep-tions regarding the sizes of their penises. In these cases, however, men’s 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 one’s 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 viewer’s 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 pub-lic 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’.





18/21

7. Such statements are consistent with earlier research that finds that individuals’ perfor-

mances 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).

References

Addelston J (2008) Doing the Full Monty with Dirk and Jane: Using the phallus to validate

marginalized masculinities. The Journal of Men’s Studies 7(3): 337–352.

Alexander JC and Smith P (1993) The discourse of American civil society: A new proposal

for cultural studies. Theory and Society 22(2): 151–207.

Alonzo M and Aiken M (2004) Flaming in Electronic Communication. Decision Support

Systems 36(3): 205–213.

Bordo S (1999a) The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Bordo S (1999b) Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to OJ .

Berkeley: University of California Press.

boyd dm and Ellison NB (2008) Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship.

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1): 210–230.

Brickell C (2005) Masculinities, performativity, and subversion: A sociological reappraisal.

Men and Masculinities 8(1): 24–43.

Brooks A (2004) ‘Under the knife and proud of it’: An analysis of the normalization of

cosmetic surgery. Critical Sociology 30(2): 207–238.

Cahill S (1985) Meanwhile backstage: ‘Public bathrooms and the interaction order’. Urban

Life and Culture 14(1): 33–58.

Charmaz K and Rosenfeld D (2006) Reflections of the body, images of self: Visibility and

invisibility in chronic illness and disability. In: Waskul D and Vannini P (eds) Body/

Embodiment. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 35–49.

Collins PH (2009) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of

Empowerment. New York: Routledge.

Connell RW (1995) Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Connell RW and Messerschmidt JW (2005) Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the con-

cept. Gender & Society 19(6): 829–859.

Egan RD (2004) Eyeing the scene: The uses and (re)uses of surveillance cameras in an exotic

dance club. Critical Sociology 30(2): 299–319.

Ellis C (1998) ‘I hate my voice’: Coming to terms with minor bodily stigmas. The

Sociological Quarterly 39(4): 517–537.

Fanon F (2008) Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.

Fausto-Sterling A (2000) Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality.

New York: Basic Books.

Del Rosso 721




19/21

Finn J (1999) An exploration of helping processes in an online self-help group focusing on

issues of disability. Health and Social Work 24(3): 220–231.

Freud S (2002) Some psychological consequences of the anatomical distinctions between the

sexes. In: Adams R and Savran D (eds) The Masculinity Studies Reader. Malden, MA:Blackwell, 14–20.

Friedman D (2001) A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis . New York: Free

Press.

Gerschick TJ (2000) Toward a theory of disability and gender. Signs 25(4): 1263–1268.

Gerschick TJ and Miller AS (1996) Gender identities at the crossroads of masculinity and

physical disability. In: Gergan MM and Davis SN (eds) Toward a New Psychology of

Gender. New York: Routledge, 455–476.

Goffman E (1979) Gender Advertisements. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Goffman E (1990) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.

Haiken E (2000) Virtual virility, or, does medicine make the man? Men and Masculinities2(4): 388–409.

Hertz R (2009) Turning strangers into kin: Half siblings and anonymous donors. In: Nelson

MK and Garey AI (eds) Whos Watching?: Daily Practices of Surveillance Among

Contemporary Families. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 157–174.

Hillier L and Harrison L (2007) Building realities less limited than their own: Young people

practising same-sex attraction on the internet. Sexualities 10(1): 82–100.

Hine C (2000) Virtual Ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Humphreys L (1976) Tearoom trade: Impersonal sex in public places. In: Golden MP (ed.)

The Research Experience. Itasca, IL: FE Peacock, 85–100.

Kessler SJ (1990) The medical construction of gender: Case management of intersexedinfants. Signs 16(1): 3–26.

Kibby M and Costello B (1999) Displaying the phallus: Masculinity and the performance of

sexuality on the internet. Men and Masculinities 1(4): 352–364.

Kibby M and Costello B (2001) Between the image and the act: Interactive sex entertainment

on the internet. Sexualities 4(3): 353–369.

Kimmel M (2005) The Gender of Desire: Essays on Male Sexuality. Albany, NY: SUNY

Press.

Latour B (1996) On interobjectivity. Mind, Culture, and Activity 3(4): 228–245.

Latour B (2005) Reassembling the Social . New York: Oxford University Press.

Lehman P (2006) A ‘strange quirk in his lineage’. Men and Masculinities 9(2): 226–235.Lehman P (2007) Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body.

Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

Lever J, Frederick DA and Peplau LA (2006) Does size matter? Men’s and women’s views

on penis size across the lifespan. Psychology of Men & Masculinity 7(3): 129–143.

Loe M (2001) Fixing broken masculinity: Viagra as a technology for the production of

gender and sexuality. Sexuality & Culture 5(3): 97–125.

Luciano L (2001) Looking Good: Male Body Image in Modern America. New York: Hill and

Wang.

Lynch M (1996) DeKanting agency: Comments on Bruno Latour’s ‘On Interobjectivity’.

Mind, Culture, and Activity 3(4): 246–251.Markham A (2008) The methods, politics, and ethics of representation in online ethnogra-

phy. In: Denzin NK and Lincoln YS (eds) Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative

Materials. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 247–284.





20/21

McGuffey CS (2008) ‘Saving M:’ Gender reaffirmation, sexuality, race, and parental

responses to male child sexual abuse. Social Problems 55(2): 216–237.

Miller JK and Gergen KJ (1998) Life on the line: The thereauputic potentials of computer-

mediated conversation. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 24(2): 189–202.Mondaini N, Ponchietti R, Gontero P, Muir GH, Natali A, Caldarera E, et al. (2002) Penile

length is normal in most men seeking penile lengthening procedures. International Journal

of Impotence Research 14(4): 283–286.

Oliffe J (2005) Constructions of masculinity following prostatectomy-induced impotence.

Social Science & Medicine 60(10): 2249–2259.

Oliffe J (2006) Embodied masculinity and androgen deprivation therapy. Sociology of

Health and Illness 28(4): 410–432.

Pennebaker JW (1997) Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process.

Psychology Science 8(3): 162–166.

Plummer K (2001) The call of life stories in ethnographic research. In: Atkinson P, Coffey A,Delamont S, Lofland J and Lofland L (eds) Handbook of Ethnography. Thousand Oaks,

CA: SAGE, 395–406.

Potts A (2000) ‘The essence of the hard on’: Hegemonic masculinity and the cultural con-

struction of erectile dysfunction. Men and Masculinities 3(1): 85–103.

Potts A (2004) Deleuze on Viagra (or, what can a ‘Viagra-body’ do?). Body & Society 10(1):

17–36.

Poulson-Bryant S (2005) Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America. New

York: Doubleday.

Pronger B (1992) The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex.

New York: St Martins Press.Riessman CK (1993) Narrative Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.

Riessman CK (2003) Performing identities in illness narrative: Masculinity and multiple

sclerosis. Qualitative Research 3(5): 5–33.

Scheper-Hughes N (2001) Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural

Ireland . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schmitt R (2002) Large propagators: Racism and the domination of women. In: Tauna N

(ed.) Revealing Male Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 38–54.

Shamloul R (2005) Treatment of men complaining of short penis. Urology 65(6): 1183–1185.

Tannis M (2008) What makes the internet a place to seek social support? In: Konijn EA, Utz

S, Tanis M and Barnes SB (eds) Mediated Interpersonal Communication New York:Routledge, 290–308.

Tiefer L (1986) In pursuit of the perfect penis. American Behavioral Scientist 29(5): 579–599.

Tikkanen R and Ross MW (2003) Technological tearoom trade: Characteristics of Swedish

men visiting gay internet chat rooms. Aids Education and Prevention 15(2): 122–132.

Turkle S (1997) Life on the Screen. New York: Touchstone.

Valentine G (1993) Negotiating and managing multiple sexual identities: Lesbian time-space

strategies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18(2): 237–248.

Weinberg MS and Williams CJ (2010) Bare bodies: Nudity, gender, and the looking glass

body. Sociological Forum 25(1): 47–67.

West C and Zimmerman DH (1987) Doing gender. Gender and Society 1(2): 125–151.White M (2006) The Body and the Screen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wright JM (2001) ‘Aside from one little, tiny detail, we are so incredibly normal’:

Perspectives of children in lesbian step families. In: Bernstein M and Reimann R (eds)

Del Rosso 723




21/21

Queer Families, Queer Politics: Challenging Culture and the State. New York: Columbia

University Press, 272–290.

Wylie KR and Eardley I (2007) Penile size and the ‘small penis syndrome’. BJU International

99(6): 1449–1455.

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 dis-

sertation 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.


the penis as public part: embodiment and the performance of masculinity in public settings

Documents