THE PENIS

November 28, 2017

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher,

101 Main Street #380

Huntington Beach, CA 92648

Dear Congressman,

Re: The penis

You have one. I have one. It’s something pretty much every man on the planet has. Some big, some small, most middling. We’re born with it. For most of us, it’s our first and most amusing plaything. I’m sure that you, as I, have watched even the tiniest of male tots discover this most delightful and compelling part of their anatomy and explore its tantalizing possibilities.

It’s our great blessing—and our curse. Sticking out there, in front of us, its presence is unavoidable. It seems to have a mind of its own. Its actions and reactions are involuntary, and it gets up to tricks that are hard, sometimes seemingly impossible to resist. I have worked in intimate circles of men enough to know just how many of us are obsessed with it. Without conscious effort and resistance, it leads us into mischief that our better judgment would deplore. It can create in us a sense of power, and that power can so very easily be misused.

I write these thoughts in great sadness, after so many of us men—this morning it is Matt Lauer of NBC News—have been exposed for our misuse of this otherwise glorious gift of nature. Its demands for sensual gratification can be overpowering, and, as men, we need and deserve that gratification—as women deserve theirs. But too often we submit to those demands unwittingly, abandoning all sense of reason, respect, and even common courtesy. We allow it to become an instrument of power and domination.

None of which excuses us, of course. To pretend that we have no control over it is to deny millennia of human progress toward civilized behavior. Yet we continue to behave like cavemen, and not only in our personal lives. We strive for power in business, in politics, in international relations. We wage war, in order to assert our power.

In our obsession with—and obedience to—the almighty penis, Congressman, we men have much to answer for. I have behaved badly. I imagine you have, too. If we are to learn to use our sexual potential wisely, and with joy, we must first get past the lapse of consciousness that allows it to get the better of us. We must understand its power, we must learn to resist the easy and, yes, ecstatic course of pretending that we can’t control it. It is possible to exercise the best of our masculinity in full consciousness, without harming anyone, not even ourselves.

Respectfully,

Peter Clothier, Ph.D.