If Vaginas Are Weird, So Are Penises

If you haven’t heard, there has been a small movement of late aimed at getting women with larger labias to feel good about themselves. Coupled with all of our cultural talks about letting our pubes grow collectively as the fairer sex, it seems that women are getting more than tired of hearing about how not up-to-par our genitalia are. It’s just exhausting having to constantly listen to all of these rules and regulations about what constitutes the perfect little Barbie vagina, and how much worse we can expect life to be if we don’t conform to it. Hell, people are out here getting literal surgeries to take their perfectly-fine inner lips and get them tucked up into a more porn-ready style in case the next person to open the woman’s pants should prefer things to be compact.

But here’s the thing: vaginas aren’t weird. Genitals are. They are just awkward, and often smelly, and have weird hair that grows in all patchy and poofy. And that’s fine. You can think they’re beautiful if you like, but that’s never been their function. They are supposed to feel good, and make children, and have awesome sex. Their job is not to be aesthetically pleasing all their long lives, and it is absurd to put all of the “sexy privates” pressure on women exclusively. Because this just in: penises are weird, too.

Today a penis came across my Tumblr dashboard that had actual knuckles. Like, it had several rings on it and was bent distinctly downwards. It just looked ridiculous. But you know what? If that penis were on a man I loved, I would totally have sex with it. Hell, it’s not the prettiest thing I’ve seen, but with its knuckle-havingness and downward curvature, I bet it could hit some serious money spots if used in the right position. I’m sure it is a lovely penis, full of promise and joy and a treasure trove of vaginal orgasms. I’m sure it gets the job done just fine.

But this is fundamentally because I’m not here to judge the penis for future Miss America. I’m not here for its beauty. I want it for a million other reasons, and I’m not about to shame some dude on Tumblr for having a knuckly dick. I wouldn’t want him to get surgery to make it more straight or smooth. I don’t care if he’s bringing home the foreskin. I don’t care about any of this because we are not obsessed as a culture with making sure men’s bits look like something made for a Bratz doll. This is not what we expect from men, and we certainly wouldn’t want them to feel bad about themselves for having a slightly wonky peen.

So could we please start affording this same human decency to women? Because it is so incredibly unfair to demand that all women have these uniform, perfect, hairless, tucked-in vaginas which conform to a standard that only a very small number of women will ever be able to achieve. We should be focusing on all the pleasure that can be derived from vaginas, all the wonderful things they can do, and all of the different ways we can appreciate them. There should be no reason to hold a beauty magazine up next to every new vagina and be like, “Nope, sorry, not sexy enough. Go fix yourself to my liking and then maybe I’ll consider having awesome sex with you.” That shit needs to stop, because we are really letting you guys slide on how weird and mushy-looking your penises are.

And don’t even get me started on balls. They look like shar peis with alopecia.