It has recently come to my attention that many men are insecure about their penises. Because insecurity is bad, and because penises are one of my favorite topics, I have decided to do a series on penises, and why they are, in fact, awesome.

This will be a four-part series: this part will discuss the attractiveness of penises; part two will talk about the myth of penis size; part three will explore performance issues; and part four will consider whether penises or vulvas are more “mysterious.” Over the course of the series, the people who are in possession of penises will be referred to as “men”; this is not meant to erase trans people, but since trans people have far different issues with their genitalia that I am not entirely qualified to talk about, they are outside the scope of this series.

Some men feel like their penises are not all that attractive. This goes back to the pernicious Myth of Men Not Being Hot again: given that, apparently, men’s bodies are not physically desirable and they have to pay for their sex with commitment and/or love and/or money, clearly their penises will be the least attractive body part of all.

Of course, this is not helped by the mass media and their hilarity about, for example, the Anthony Weiner scandal. Everyone knows the real porn for women is a man doing the dishes for a woman! After all, who would want to see a man’s dick?

Uh, well, um, I would.

Because I am a bisexual woman, and therefore I like men. I like men’s chests, I like men’s arms, I like men’s faces, I like men’s legs, I like men’s backs and– this is crucial– I like men’s cocks.

Once again we face the Two Rules of Desire. No matter how objective the evidence that people who like men almost always like penises– because penises are awesome! They grow and shrink and shoot stuff! and also because people who are attracted to a gender like the genitalia generally attached to said gender– our culture still insists that penises are just not hot.

Because men are not attractive, so their penises are clearly not attractive.

(Never mind all the slash fic with quite detailed descriptions of penises. Shush. We need to pretend that slash fic is all about women looking for their Twoo Wuv.)

Feminism has long supported women accepting their own vaginas. We perform the Vagina Monologues. We protest vaginoplasty or labiaplasty or the expectation (as opposed to the option) of hair removal or the ideal of the “perfect” vagina. We have raised awareness of the stupidity of douches, because vaginas are supposed to smell like vagina, not floral scents (also, they cause yeast infections). We encourage women to expect their partners to eat them out. Although far too many women still view their vulvas as “disgusting,” many don’t, and to a large degree that is because of feminism.

Unfortunately, for far too many people, especially men, this has created the notion that vulvas are awesome and penises are not. A quote-unquote “sensitive” guy might extoll to his sex partners his love of vulva– the taste, the look, the smell– and of eating girls out. However, compared to their vulvas, clearly his penis is just this… kind of silly, kind of ugly device, instrumentally useful for penetration but not an object of desire by itself; his orgasm is an afterthought.

And that’s just fucking wrong. It’s wrong because men should have the same acceptance and appreciation of their genitals as women should; it’s wrong because men’s orgasms should be valued the same way that women’s orgasms should. And it’s wrong because straight and bi women appreciate men’s bodies and men’s pleasure and should not be denied it.