Athletic prowess and the size of one’s penis.

I was not a good athlete as a child, and I think I came to loathe sports because good athletes ridiculed me for this, as did popular culture, neatly confining my inadequacy within bright lights, hard surfaces, and stale locker room sweat, wherein naked teen boys paraded around pretending not to observe how well-endowed the other teen boys were.

I’m convinced if you could measure the genitals of male athletes and nonathletes, you’d find a correlation between athletic prowess and penis size. Not all the time, and not because there’s a biological connection, but because of the status usually assumed by the bearer and granted by peers.

And it figures not only in the locker room, but the bedroom and boardroom and every room in between.

If you’ve spent any time in a business meeting of any sort (school board, church, lodge, neighborhood), you can easily identify the dance between posturing and acquiescence. It less often features brains than bearing, height, weight, tenor, etc. We learn quickly as children where our strengths lie, and we develop and stock them in our defensive armory.

And there’s nothing especially human about it. Quite the contrary; it’s a primal trait throughout the animal kingdom.

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But back to the topic at hand: I made the mistake of loathing athletes as much as I loathe sports, and that was wrong.

Even so, it’s not wrong to insist that good athletes encourage kids to be more than good athletes, to promote (and model) education and citizenship.

That’s really all I wanted to say today.

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Oh, one more thing. Men have a political advantage over women, not because they are naturally any better, but because they have millions of years learning how this alpha-penis thing works. It’s not a coincidence that rape is a crime of violence (and not sex), or that a powerful woman is sometimes derisively regarded as “having a dick.” Just as we struggle to control our bodies’ enslavement to calories, fats, and oils, so we struggle to wrest it from anachronistic behaviors like this.

If we ask “Should we?,” the answer is a resounding Yes. If we ask “Can we?,” I’m skeptical.

This is just Clarence talking. I know there is hundreds of years of psychological study on this. Just thought I’d share my own unprofessional perspective.

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