Get Your Poli-dicks Out of My Face

Penis size is not the measure of a leader

Enough already with the penises.

I am sick to death of people poking fun at Trump’s allegedly small, mushroom-shaped penis as a symbol of his unfitness for office. I don’t want to hear another word from leftist bros who cleverly use penis size as shorthand for real working-class manliness. And whoever signed off on the DCCC’s “Big Democratic Energy” tweet deserves a swift punch in the throat.

I mean, I get it. Wisecracks about penis size (or the lack thereof) are pretty universal. Mocking a man’s penis offers an easy – if lazy – shorthand to express disdain for his insecurity, his petty nature, and his cowardliness. So these insults seem cosmically appropriate as a way to demean the current occupant of what’s left of the White House. But mocking Trump’s tiny penis degrades the national conversation and carries an ugly subtext: that only men with armadillos in their trousers deserve political leadership. That’s an insult to every woman, as well as every man who doesn’t fit neatly into some testosterone-drenched cartoon image of masculinity.

To be fair, Trump started it. Or technically, I guess, Spy magazine started it. Back in the 1980s, the magazine gleefully began referring to the then-relatively harmless real estate developer as a “short-fingered vulgarian,” with the clear implication that Trump’s diminutive hands signaled an equally diminutive penis. The epithet clearly touched a nerve; for decades afterward, long after the magazine folded, Trump reportedly sent copies of news photos that showed his hands to Spy’s former editors, fingers carefully circled with a gold Sharpie, along with a handwritten note saying, “See, not so short.”

Trump’s political enemies quickly discerned that jokes about his hands would send him careening into a frenzy of defensive toxic masculinity. That became clear in 2016, when Marco Rubio started including snarky comments about Trump’s hand size in his stump speech. “You know what they say about men with small hands? You can’t trust ‘em.”

The comments bothered Trump so much that he addressed them explicitly during a Republican primary debate that included Rubio in 2016. “I have to say this, he hit my hands,” Trump said. “Nobody has ever hit my hands,” Trump claimed, inaccurately. “I’ve never heard of this one. Look at those hands. Are they small hands? And he referred to my hands as if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee you.”

From then on, Trump’s fingers – and penis size – became fair game for keyboard warriors and late-night talk show hosts. As one extended comedy video on the subject explained to Trump, “You brought it up.” Trump’s “micropenis” even became something of a recurrent character in South Park.

Probably the apotheosis of the Trump penis size joke came during the 2024 Democratic National Convention, when Barack Obama made a fleeting comment about Trump’s obsession with “crowd size,” accompanied by a clearly understandable hand gesture that left the crowd roaring.

It was a hilarious bit. But even in that moment, I wondered: If we all start judging politicians by their penis size, what message does that send to women candidates?

If this sounds like woke women gone wild, it’s not. The rise of “codpiece politics” has inspired some commentators and consultants to prize swagger over substance, and even to celebrate behavior that can only be described as “dickish.”

Consider leftist bro Ken Klippenstein, who denounced any Democrat offended by Graham Platner’s long list of offenses against basic common sense. These neoliberal pearl clutchers prefer innocuous, “smoothgroin” candidates, Klippenstein argued – real-life Ken dolls “with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.” As examples, Klippenstein pointed to Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, and Gavin Newsom (although Newsom’s ex-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle might provide a rebuttal.)

It’s more than a little offensive to be told that my valid concerns that Platner’s problematic (that’s French for Neanderthal) comments about women – and Black people, gay people, mentally disabled people, rape victims, a Purple Heart veteran, and just about anybody else who’s not him – are proof that I am only fit for the kiddie table at Thanksgiving. I also can’t understand why Platner’s record of bullying his girlfriends and sexting other women while on his honeymoon somehow makes him more credible and compelling as a candidate and future Senator. Does Klippenstein think Abraham Lincoln would have been an even greater president if he had sent a few dick daguerreotypes to Harriet Beecher Stowe?

When we equate penis size with courage, competence, and heart, and then go even further to judge presumptive penis size based on the scale of a man’s unapologetic sexism, vulgarity, and general oafishness, what hope is there for any candidate – male or female – running on a platform of decency and care?

This is not a rhetorical question. Already, party insiders are muttering that Andy Burnham, the UK’s presumptive incoming leader, will be “Labour’s first woman prime minister” because of he is “genuinely passionate” about “health, education, family finances and issues like safer streets, social care, online safety for kids, that are disproportionately important to women.” That’s in sharp contrast to a manlier man’s focus on “the bombs and budgets.”

If we want to know what a testosterone-drenched focus on a candidate’s “manliness” leads to, we have only to look at the GOP, led by a foul and fetid man with a downright creepy obsession with penis size – whether his own or someone else’s.

Consider Trump’s heavy-handed revenge on Mario Rubio. Even though Rubio now worships at the altar of Trump, the President apparently decided to have a little fun at his Secretary of State’s expense by giving him a pair of dress shoes several sizes too large for him. “You can tell a lot about a man by his shoe size,” Trump apparently explained. Rubio dutifully made a few public appearances with his narrow ankles flopping around in the President’s oversized Florsheims, looking – as Trump certainly intended – like a kid wearing his dad’s best shoes to the Junior Prom.

Every day, we see what happens to our nation and our standing in the world when our leaders devote their days to endless dick-measuring contests. So let’s get our collective mind out of the gutter, stop equating groin furnishings with political talent, and start measuring political leaders by the content of their character, not the imagined contents of their trousers.

(That’s what she said.)

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