Norwegian Wood

I’ve been thinking a lot about penises lately. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, or perhaps it just makes a girl more likely to settle. I have an appointment with a particular penis later this year, and while deriding my tendencies toward international booty call; it was Mr. G&T who realized that this continental penis would most likely be uncircumcised. Of all the obsessing I’ve been doing over this unseen and oft thought about penis, that was one thing that I hadn’t focused on. I suppose because that is more the norm than the exception in my experience. No, my concerns regard the size and shape, not an excess of skin. This seemingly shallow anxiety has far deeper roots than any petty stereotype.

I met the Norwegian over six years ago, through a friend I’d made while living on the East Coast. We were the type of casual friends that would email occasionally, not hearing from one another for months. It was casual and light. Then something shifted and the emails increased in frequency and intensity. I had been invited to sightsee for years, and I finally agreed to fly over for spring break and recognized that our friendship would be tipping into far more intimate territory. I mean, those emails had been getting fairly incendiary and I’m a lot easier than I like to admit to myself.

I’d dated someone whom I mocked for his repeated laments. “I’m fat, I’m balding, I have a small penis.” Well, he didn’t say these things in tandem, but all three were stated with such frequency, that they seemed like a run-on sentence. Thus, going into my first liaison with the Norwegian, I decided that I wasn’t going to judge his sexual prowess by the size of his penis. I was not going to look. I was going in blind, as it were, and going to see what he could do with what he had, rather than judge it all in a biased manner. What a fucking mistake that was.

In school I studied art history as well as fine art, and unfortunately I had a specific image in mind after I finally got a good look at the Norwegian. Sadly, he even resembled the artist a tad too much for my taste. Perhaps you are familiar with the artwork of Vincent van Gogh. Specifically the way he depicted cypress trees. This work, Road with Cypress and Star from 1890 is a fair example of what I was confronted with.


It went to the left. It went to the right. Back to the left again, and ending with a narrow tip no bigger than a standard thimble. Erect. It was horrifying and I could not imagine the trauma involved to create that nightmarish example of manhood. I knew for certain that no amount of alcohol or money could get my mouth near it. I wouldn’t even know what to do or where to begin. It is this lurid imagery that haunts me when I think about my rapidly approaching vacation.

I’m not interested in having any pictures of his penis sent to me for analysis. I know for certain that he wouldn’t do it if only due to the fact that we both use our laptops in pubic. I also recognize that I just really don’t want him to send pictures, even if he was willing. So, it seems that I’ve made my proverbial bed, and now I must lie in wait…hoping that the visuals I am confronted with are of a pornographic nature than an art historical one.