You have to feel sorry for Dr Alicia Walker. She tried to do a noble thing, which was to conduct a study into how a man’s penis size is related to his self-esteem and other factors, only to find that the internet responded to her request for pictures (or “dick pics” as the media framed it) accordingly and flooded her with joke images of cartoon characters. She cancelled the study this week, saying the quality of the data had been compromised. I imagine she is royally dicked off.

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Dicks are funny. We know this from the classic schoolboy doodle ingrained in us from youth, our insults, our hand gestures, our punchlines. As far as I know, I’m the only writer to have successfully got the word “chode” into these esteemed pages (and what a discussion that led to in the newsroom).

When it snows, the countryside is dotted with snow penises. Norway has its Trollpikken, a rock formation that looks like an erection. Belgium has the Manneken Pis. This month, a penis so large that it could be seen from space appeared on Google Maps, having been drawn on the bed of a dry lake in the south west of Australia. The internet loves a dick. I’m still recovering from Lenny Kravitz’s 2015 mishap, where his penis slipped out of his skintight trousers at a Stockholm concert. Oh how we laughed/marvelled.

The latest manifestation of our penis obsession has been endless discussion online of “big dick energy” – what it means, who has it, who doesn’t. It’s all in good fun: a few knob gags, a good laugh, and everyone goes home smiling.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Norway has its Trollpikken (above), a rock formation that looks like an erection. Belgium has the Manneken Pis.’ Photograph: Ingve Aalbu/EPA

And yet. Walker’s is a serious line of scientific inquiry that is worth pursuing, and it is now not taking place because the public couldn’t take it seriously. “I’ve talked to men who haven’t been to the doctor for a physical in over a decade because they don’t want to be naked in front of their doctor,” she told Vice. “I’ve talked to men who have never even approached anyone for a romantic relationship because they don’t believe anyone would be interested in them because of their size. I’ve talked to men who have attempted suicide because of their size.”

“From the moment a boy is born it’s drilled into him that size matters. And not just the size of his penis: it’s also the size of his muscles and the size of his wallet,” Chris Hemmings, author of Be a Man tells me. “The general size of our being becomes inextricably linked to our sense of self-worth, and with it comes shame and embarrassment when we don’t stack up. This study was a great opportunity to find out how damaging that correlation can be, but instead it’s been hijacked by the very people the researcher was trying to help the world understand. Until we, as men, accept that tropes about our body can damage our psyche, we’ll continue to be trapped within the very system most of us would like to escape.”

Men can't keep saying we need to focus on male mental health, and then play silly buggers when someone tries to help

You can’t have it both ways, fellas. You can’t keep insisting to feminists that the ways in which men suffer are gendered, too, that we need to pay more attention to male mental health, and then play silly buggers when someone tries to help. Was it significant that media coverage of Walker’s “dick pic” request was accompanied by pictures of her looking attractive, blonde, youngish, in lipstick? Would the reaction to an older male professor have been the same? Or did her appearance make men feel even more insecure? Or are dicks just so funny that it overrules serious mental health consequences, even suicide?

Women are used to seeing our bodies studied, measured, dissected. An alarming and amusing amount of resource goes into bullshit reports about men’s ideal breast size, for example. Headlines will blurt that “this is the ideal female body”, complete with waist measurements. Culture warriors like Jordan Peterson spin dubious evolutionary psychology about gender roles, the latest being that women wear blusher because it emulates red fruit, which men want to eat. Historically, we are used to our bodies being publicly assessed for male approval in ways men aren’t, though this is changing. We are used to our bodies being politicised, too. In 2012, the Virginia state senator’s support for a transvaginal ultrasound bill resulted in hordes of women posting “vagina updates” to his Facebook page. “I wanted to know your thoughts on a possible yeast infection …” one poster wrote.

Is this how Walker’s study felt to men? An invasion of privacy, a failure to stay in her lane? Maybe. You can try and dismiss the reaction as just a bit of a laugh, but it’s fairly obvious that there is a lot of discomfort and insecurity underpinning this. Women know it’s a sore spot for a lot of men. We know that they fear being laughed at. We talk about it, just as we talk about our bodies. The honesty is healthy.

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We don’t avoid going to the doctor – on the contrary. We have other health inequalities to contend with, such as being taken less seriously by medical professionals, but the silence and stigma that used to surround, say, gynaecological cancers, is being steadily dispelled. The same needs to happen with penis size. You may scoff, but think back to being a teenage boy for a moment: the insecurity, the anxiety. This is important.