2 Phallic 2 Furious
I mean, what am I going to do, not read a memoir by a man born with two dicks? I’m not made of stone. I’m also not a person very into sexual subtlety; as a noted Canadian Internet Pervert, I have a particular brand to uphold.
Last year I, like so many of my fellow Internet Perverts of all nations, enjoyed a uniquely entertaining Reddit AMA. “I am the guy with two penises,” a user named DoubleDickDude posted on January 1st, 2014, the implication being we had all been waiting patiently for the guy to appear like a double-dicked Godot. “Ask me anything.” And people really, truly did ask him anything! They asked him about his sex life, both solo and partnered; they asked him about the physical reality of living with two dicks, wondering how he peed and how he wore pants. Over an entire day’s worth of back-and-forth, DoubleDickDude answered honestly and hilariously, his refreshingly candid answers and frequent use of the 😉 emoticon as much fun to read as the images he posted of the dicks in question were to look at.
Double Header: My Life with Two Penises is available as an ebook here. As a book, it’s pretty fun and pretty sexy but not exactly earth-shattering. If you read the Reddit AMA, you probably know all the stories he shares, and if you didn’t, well, luckily for you, the last two chapters collect his favourite questions and answers from Reddit. I finished it in less than an hour and would rank it somewhere above a great Literotica story and below the actual AMA. It lacks a certain something, although I can’t put my finger on exactly what; the obvious jokes withstanding (what it’s not lacking is dicks etc.), the book is a reminder that the people with the most fascinating stories are often the least capable narrators.
The book isn’t navel-gazing or indulgent or myopic — I think that maybe this is a story that needs a certain element of discovery. That New Years’ Day Reddit AMA was like a collective find on a dick-digging mission we (the people of the Internet, I guess) didn’t even know we were on. Our DDD experienced his body as a site of discovery the same way we all do as we grow and change and become sexually active. He’s always known himself as a guy with two dicks. “I had no idea anyone would give a fuck,” he wrote towards the end of that AMA, “I mean for me it’d be like one of you going ‘I am a man with ten toes. AMA” lol.” There’s that charm; there’s that irreverence; there’s that complete lack of critical understanding towards what we, humans with genitals described by singular nouns, recognize as a gift, a curse, an anomaly, a miracle.
The same day I finished Double Header my sister and I went on an idle walk; the conversation turned to exercising and gyms and the various indignities therein. Women, we agreed, are often assigned identities based on their bodies and their bodies are often used as proof of their personalities. My sister doesn’t really present as white and her new trainer was insistent that she tell him where she was really from, refusing to accept “Canada” as an answer. When she told him her parents were Brazillian, he relaxed, it seemed, and assigned her a workout regime focused on sculpting her ass and thighs. A lazy assumption based on cartoons and other mental shortcuts. At my gym, I told her, I used to get a lot of unsolicited advice from men who wanted to help me keep my “figure,” which I took as code for “breasts large, butt big, waist small.” One elderly man in shorts told me I was “a Marilyn” right as I stepped on a treadmill, a statement that should be considered a compliment, but I just pretended I hadn’t heard and focused on keeping my bouncing to a minimum while he was beside me.
Our bodies are our destinies, or so we’re supposed to believe. One of the more impossible questions Reddit users asked the DDD to answer was whether having two dicks made him bisexual, as though our flesh produces our lust and not the other way around. Like women with certain types of societally-approved bodies, our sexual availability is measured by elements we usually can’t control; big breasts, long legs, small waists, all physical attributes taken as invitations. So here we have a man with double the amount of dick we normally see on human males, and so naturally we’re meant to assume that he has double everything: double drive, particularly. One Reddit user summed it up better than I can, so allow me to copy and paste:
Just to summarize what we’ve learnt.
He’s bisexual. He’s attractive. He’s [sic] lives in a threesome. He likes fisting others and being fisted. He likes putting things down his urethra. He casually mentions the time six people had sex with him simultaneously. He shoots 12 times when he cums. Straight men magically turn bicurious around him.
And on top of that, he has two penises.
Well played, God. Good to know you didn’t waste that extra penis on a prude.
Can you imagine, the subtext reads, what would happen if an asexual person had been born with double dicks? God — lol — doesn’t make mistakes, we’re supposed to tell ourselves, relieved. It would be like looking a gift dick in the mouth.
Perhaps having two dicks does give you double the sex drive. Perhaps he would’ve been just as sexually adventurous with one dick. It doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s the wrong question. The question we’re asking our Diphallic Dude to answer is really the question we’re asking of ourselves and our sexual partners, should we elect to have those: how much sex, really, is enough? Who gets all the sex they want? Who is able to accurately gauge how much sex they need? Here is a man who, allegedly, has more — at least in terms of sex organs — than 99.8% of all men, and not only more for himself but the most of what people who like dicks want. Until a TriPhallic Dude comes knocking on Reddit’s door, here is a nice young man with, literally, the most dicks one person can biologically have, and with that comes a responsibility to live up to our own expectations of what kind of personality a double dick should create.
I’d love for this story to be real, and I hold on hope to the fact that there is a nice young man with two dicks out there, but reading the book just made me more convinced that it’s all fake. I mean, diphallia is a real condition, although don’t look up the Wikipedia page because the photo is gross, but I’m too cynical about this particular case study: do we live in a world where a man with two dicks could remain hidden? He compares his privacy to Superman’s, saying it would be just as disastrous as if Clark Kent’s identity was exposed, but Clark Kent didn’t write AMAs or books or maintain Twitter accounts about his various double-dicked sexual exploits. By his own extensive and graphic accounts he’s had a lot of sex with a lot of different people. Perhaps we’d never see an AMA from a man with ten toes, but surely we might see “I fucked the guy with two dicks,” scrolling past our feeds and aggregated across our blogs, “Ask me anything.”
That doesn’t matter. The fun part is still fun; the discovery, the belief that our bodies could still be capable of surprising us, that there is still more sex to be had, and more than more there is still the most sex being had somewhere out there.
The other book I read recently was Jenny Diski’s Strangers on a Train, because in case you hadn’t noticed I’m recently obsessed with Diski (you should be too, she’s perfect), and with the Diphallic Dude still burned in my brain I found a paragraph that summed his story up better than I ever could. Allow me to copy and paste:
“Strangeness brings people into focus, so that like a firework display, vibrant patterns can be seen in a sudden blazing light before the overall blackness of the sky returns and prepares us for the next revelation. Everyday busyness and regular social contact is more like a firework display in broad daylight. Of course, the other thing about a firework display is that you look at it, but it doesn’t look at you.”
Our bodies are not our destinies, but maybe they’re fated to be revelations. Maybe they’re the most fun when they’re lighting up our Internet sky. Maybe our bodies are best when they’re the subject of a largely one-sided conversation. I read a book by a man with two penises and had a lot of feelings about it; AMA.