Feb 2013, Men’s Health Magazine, The Sex Issue

 

I come from a part of the country (Tamil Nadu) where names like Ramalingam, Shivalingam, Amrutalingam and Mahalingam are proudly given to little boys, unmindful of where they may end up later in life, say for instance at Yale, in a class filled with sniggering freshmen, having to explain the etymology.

Parents can be short–sighted and cruel.

But in India, where we literally worship that mightiest of manly weapons, no one will dream of calling an AL or an ML, ‘Dickhead’ behind this back. Not at all.

Such names are symbols of hope and optimism. RL or SL is a mnemonic for what the boy is expected to become. A he-man of mythical proportions who will have the meek, the humble (and lesser-named mortals) grovelling at his feet while he snatches fame, wealth and glory from the air before it karmically zooms off into the future.

There is a lesson in here somewhere and I’ve been trying to find it.

I once read a story in the Indian Express, that a man named NC Saxena who worked at The Indian Council of Medical Research, was going to study, “The length and width of the male organ in different parts of the country.”

For a brief moment, I thought the government had finally lost its marbles. Was it setting the stage to give the Indian man’s wee-wee even more power than it already wielded?  Hadn’t the population already prematurely squirted past the billion mark?

But I was relieved to see that Saxena only wanted to study erect penises from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, as the saying goes, to determine if the men of Tamil Nadu differed from the men in Srinagar and by how much.

If the men in Bengal needed more latex than the men in Maharashtra. Or if the full-grown, adult Punjabi needed a smaller product than his counterpart in Kerala. That sort of thing. A scientific survey to make condoms of exactly the right size to avoid spillage, since some men are clearly more equal than others.

I would love to have access to this research. It would make a great sidebar on Shaadi.com, giving the prospective bride an unbiased, scientific peek into what she can expect in the bedroom. Maybe it can be called ‘Attributes’ right under ‘Body Weight.’ For the average partner-seeking woman, it is every bit as important as Annual Income which already has plenty of prominence on the site.

Maybe if he reads this, he can get in touch with me. I am on Facebook.

Oh, and Mr. S, pictures would be great.