Woke Up This Morning, Got Yourself a Gun

But Not Because Your Dick is Too Small

A few weeks ago, I took a pair of teenagers to the mall. It was before the official holiday shopping season had begun, and we were surprised to find the parking lot was packed. People apparently hadn’t gotten the memo that brick-and-mortar shopping is dead. I drove up and down a few full rows of parked cars before a nice man carrying a few shopping bags pointed to his generic SUV in a neighborly indication that I should grab his space when he vacated it.

As I was turning my minivan (don’t mock, I love my minivan) left into the space, a small BMW darted in from the right and snatched it. The man in the driver seat was shorter than average with well-coifed dark hair and douchebro fleece vest. He shrugged away our cries of foul-play and walked toward Bloomingdale’s without the tiniest sign of a guilty conscience.

The teens were horrified by someone doing something so utterly unfair—we were there first, we had our blinker on, hell, we were “given” the space by its previous tenant—and not caring at all. We consoled ourselves by agreeing that between the expensive sports car, giant watch, and product-heavy hair, the man was giving off small dick energy.

The inverse dick-to-dickish-behavior ratio is one that has been assumed in many arenas from cars to politics. Drive a truck that’s ridiculously large? You probably have a small dick. Make too many casually misogynistic jokes at the expense of your wife, daughter, or coworkers? You probably have a small dick. Own a big gun? You probably have a small dick. Run for President on a platform of racism and retribution? You get the picture.

As a sex educator, I’m supposed to be above this. I’m supposed to tell you that size doesn’t matter. (It doesn’t. In fact, whether it’s going to end up in their mouth, their vagina, or their anus, most-people realize that a mega-dick would get uncomfortable fast. Even hands cramp.) I’m also supposed to tell you that it’s never okay to make fun of anyone because of their penis size or any other aspect of their body. (It’s not. Bodies come in all shapes and sizes and that includes genitals). But I’m sadly not above the concept of small dick energy or using it to make myself feel better when men behave badly.

As such, I’m disappointed that new research on gun ownership suggests that the big-gun-small-dick association does not hold up. See below.

Before we get there, however, I want to apologize for an inaccuracy in my last issue. I added Dr. Oz to the list of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Trump appointees at the last second and mentioned a study that found the information offered on his TV show was less accurate than what viewers learn on Disney Junior’s Doc McStuffins. I remembered the headline from way back when and didn’t check my sources. It turns out that said study was actually just an article from an Onion-like satire site.

While I am saying sorry to you for being suckered by a convincing headline, I don’t feel I owe Dr. Oz himself an apology. That study was fiction, but a real study published in the very legitimate British Medical Journal found that only 46% of the recommendations made on Dr. Oz’s show were supported by evidence. That means that over half of the medical recommendations he gave to his television audience were unsupported claims (39%) or actually contradicted by research (15%). I watched a lot of Doc McStuffins (so much that I occasionally still wake up singing the theme song), and I’m sure she did better than that.

Vaccines Work, Cervical Cancer Dropped Among Young Women

As we prepare for our public health system to be taken over by men who do not believe in the entirely provable science of vaccines, we get yet another study showing that they work. This time we’re talking about the HPV vaccine and cervical cancer. The study, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that cervical cancer deaths among women under 25 have steadily decreased due to widespread vaccination.

We’ve discussed this half a gazillion times in this newsletter, so I’ll just hit the highlights. Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) is ubiquitous in our world. There are well over 150 types of the virus including those that cause warts on our finger and the ones on my toes that were so stubborn earlier this year. Other types of HPV infect the genitals.

Most people who have sex will get HPV at some point in their lives. Most people who get HPV, however, will never know they have it because our immune systems can usually clear the virus before it does any damage. Unfortunately, some HPV infection are persistent.

Persistent infections with “high-risk” types of the virus can lead to cancer of the cervix, penis, vulva, anus, and throat. Cervical cancer used to kill a lot of women in this country, but it doesn’t anymore for two important reasons. We can screen for it using pap tests or HPV tests, and we can prevent it with a vaccine that was first introduced in 2006. The vaccine now protects against nine types of HPV—the two that cause most cases of genital warts and seven others that have been linked to cancer, including types 16 and 18 that cause most cases of cervical cancer.

We already know that the vaccine is working to prevent HPV infection in young women. Research has found that infections with the “high risk” HPV types covered by the vaccine have dropped 88 percent in teens and 81 percent in young adult women. We also know that precancers caused by these types of HPV are dropping.

For this most recent study, researchers looked at cervical cancer deaths among women under 25 between 1992 and 2021. It found that the number was already declining by about 3.7% each year between 1992 and 2015, which was likely a result of improved screening. The decline became more pronounced after 2015. Since that time, cervical cancer mortality decreased 15.2% per year for a total of a 62% reduction in deaths. The steep decline in deaths came as the first group of people who had been vaccinated became young adults in their 20s.

Cervical cancer is normally a slow growing disease and deaths of people under 25 are thankfully rare to begin with. There were only 398 cervical cancer deaths in this age group reported over the entire two decades of data included in the study. The researchers estimated that without the vaccine-induced decline there might have been 26 more.

That doesn’t sound like a lot—though obviously it’s meaningful to those 26 young women who never got cancer or survived it. Moreover, this group of women will remain protected as they get into their 40s, 50s, and 60s when dying of cervical cancer historically becomes more common.

There are an estimated 13,800 cases of cervical cancer in the U.S. each year and 4,300 deaths from the disease, but this should change because we have all of the tools we need to prevent this cancer. We have good screening and a good vaccine.

Unfortunately, the HPV vaccine has been subjected to both the standard anti-vax nonsense and the anti-teen-sex nonsense since it was released. And that double nonsense may be running the CDC in a few months.

Trump has nominated former Florida Congressman Dave Weldon to run the agency which is in charge of making recommendations on who gets which vaccines when. Weldon doesn’t think much of vaccines, has tried to take control of them away from the CDC, has repeated false claims that thimerosal in vaccines causes autism, and used to run the Space Coast Family Forum which he liked to compare to the Christian Coalition (putting him firmly at the intersection of vaccines and abstinence-only approaches to teen sex).

This isn’t scary at all.

No Relationship Between Dick Size and Gun Ownership

The official version of “small dick=big gun” is called the psychosexual theory of gun ownership. It goes something like this. Manliness is a desired trait. A big penis makes you manly. Guns are manly. In the absence of a big penis, you might consider getting a gun.

Said in a more academic way by the authors of a new study published in the American Journal of Men’s Health, “By allowing men ‘who have felt disempowered to engage with an archetypal symbol of power’ (Nathenson, 2020, p. 210), guns may provide some men with a means of psychosexual compensation.”

To test this theory, researchers used data on penis size dissatisfaction, experience with penis enlargement, social desirability, masculinity, body mass, mental health, and a range of sociodemographic characteristics from the 2023 Masculinity, Sexual Health, and Politics survey. They then conducted regression analyses to determine if gun ownership was a function of any of these other factors most notably penis-size dissatisfaction.

It was not.

In fact, the research found that men who are more dissatisfied with the size of their penises are less likely to personally own guns including military-style rifles. The researchers don’t have a lot of answers as to why this inverse relationship might be true, but they are confident that the psychosexual theory of gun ownership—which posits that poorly endowed men get sad and buy guns—does not hold up under real world scrutiny.

Fine, but I still call small dick energy on the guy who stole my parking space.

Update: Parent Files Suit over the Mattel Wicked Misprint

Remember when Mattel accidentally printed the URL of an adult film producer on the box holding their Wicked fashion dolls? We laughed about it and declared it exactly the type of non-political story about sex that we needed in our post-election depression. Well, it’s gotten political or at least litigious.

A South Carolina mom has filed a potential class action lawsuit against the toy maker alleging emotional harm. Here’s what happened according to court documents:

• On or about November 11, 2024, Plaintiff purchased a Wicked Doll for her minor daughter.

• After opening the box that contained the Wicked Doll, Plaintiff’s minor daughter used an iPhone to visit the website shown on Defendant’s packaging.

• To her absolute shock the website, “Wicked.com”, had nothing to do with the Wicked Doll. Rather, Wicked.com pasted scenes of pornographic advertisements across her phone screen.

• These scenes were hardcore, full on nude pornographic images depicting actual intercourse, and can be available for an in-camera review by the court as necessary.

The court document goes on to argue that the Plaintiff had no reason to believe that a doll marketed to those 4-and-over would “contain access to such an inappropriate web link.” After all—and this is my favorite stipulation—"Other manufacturers formulate, produce, and sell similar products without pornography websites printed on them.” (It’s true. We had a Doc McStuffins doll once. No porn on her box.)

The Plaintiff appears to have two primary complaints. First that Mattel pulled dolls from the shelves and issued an apology, but did not offer a refund to people who had purchased the “now worthless” product. And second that both she and her minor daughter “have experienced emotional distress” as a result of the inadvertent visit to the porn site.

I call foul on all of this.

If the doll is out of the box, it is no more or less valuable than it would have been had the website been printed correctly. The URL is not tattooed on the doll. If the doll is in the box, on the other hand, it is undoubtedly far more valuable than it would have been.

As for the visit to the porn site, I don’t know how old the kid is, but I highly doubt she’s scarred for life. (A quick look at porn—no matter how naked or full-on intercourse-y it was—should not scar a grown woman for life either.) If the story is to be believed the kid has unchaperoned access to an iPhone so I have to question whether this was her first encounter with porn, which, as we all know makes up approximately 99.9% of the internet.

I also question how she got to hardcore porn so quickly. When I went to wicked.com the first time nothing showed up until I verified that I was over 18 by checking two boxes. Even then the front page of the website was pretty tame. All of the actors are dressed. Are porn pop-up ads still a thing? On an iPhone? Did the daughter click through the age verification and past the home page of the site?

Finally, I have to question the timing of all of this. This all allegedly happened on or about November 11^th. Okay, but the story was all over the news by then, having appeared in mainstream publication like USA Today and the LA Times the day before and on TikTok even earlier. By November 12^th, it was an SNL joke. Can anyone argue “absolute shock” about such a well-publicized misprint?

I realize I’m becoming the conspiracy theorist here, and I’m mostly joking, but this lawsuit is ruining the story for me. It’s no longer just silly fun with a typo, it’s yet another “won’t anyone think of the children” pearl clutching story. Where’s the joy in that?