king size and the dancing queens (or was that size queens and the dancing kings?)
"If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution."
- Emma Goldman (or not, as the case may be)
***
Saturday night. Meow Mix. Super-hot drag show with King Size, Montreal’s slick new drag king troupe, and even hotter crowd. I spent most of the night in various states of dance and cuddle, which suits me just fine.
I had the good fortune of spending a good portion of that time in close proximity to a very hot tranny boy. Picture it: we’re dressed all sexy, we’re both sweaty, and we’re grinding like it’s going out of style. One song ends and the next song comes on: "Short Dick Man."
Um. What exactly does one do in such a circumstance?
It’s not exactly subtle, as far as song lyrics go. "Don’t want no short dick man… Teeny weeny eeny weeny shriveled little short dick man… Aww, it’s so cute, an extra belly button! … You must need tweezers to find that… Put that shit away…" It ain’t rocket science: small is not only bad, according to this tune, it’s laughable.
Trans guys are not exactly known for having enormous pulsating phalli. Some of them are extremely upset about this - and understandably. If a person feels like they were born in a female body that’s not quite right, and they spend a considerable amount of time and effort (read: self-analysis, therapy, hormones, surgery, etc.) to gain the male body they feel they should have, a good portion of the time they’ll achieve some degree of success. But surgical technology is simply not advanced enough to have come up with a reliable method of creating a functional penis, not to mention there are risks of sensation loss for any such surgeries, not to mention they can be damned expensive.
So a great many trans guys have a testosterone-modified clit (which they may call other things), rather than an organ that, size-wise, resembles a biologically male penis. For some, this is just fine; for others it causes a great deal of gender-dysphoric distress. And given that I’m not generally inclined to quiz relative strangers about their intimate feelings regarding their own genitalia, that particular piece of information is the kind of thing I’m only ever likely to know about a given FTM if we’re in bed together. Not on a dance floor.
I don’t particularly buy into the "size matters" thing, personally. Sure, when it comes to phalli, big is nice, but general competence is a whole lot more important. And I have yet to find someone whose cock can out-size-queen a fist. So really, the phallus itself, in terms of sexual practice, while potentially enjoyable if it’s attached to someone who knows how to use it well, is largely irrelevant in my criteria for judging whom I might want to sleep with.
And as for my own phalli, well - I’ve definitely had a few people express great enthusiasm about the idea of my having one, but nobody’s ever pulled out a ruler. And dyke phallus size is conveniently flexible. I remember one instance in which I laid out my favourite small- and medium-sized cocks for my partner at the time to choose from. The conversation went something like this.
Me: "So, what do you think?"
Him: "I think we should stick with the small one, I’m not sure I can take the big one."
Me: "You haven’t seen the big one."
In other words: depending what you’re aiming to stuff it in, sometimes size is more of a liability than a selling point.
But our society is obsessed with the idea that the phallus is representative of masculinity, virility, strength, prowess, sexual competence and so forth. And while sex radicals have done an admirable job of queering the phallus, and detaching it (often literally) from its dependence on or relevance to biological maleness, the wider cultural message is still that penis equals man, and the bigger the penis the better the man.
If that weren’t still the case, we’d have no call to keep parodying the connection - I lost track of how many times King Size referred to cocks, packing, balls and so forth within the eight or ten acts that night. The drag troupe’s very name is a tacit reference to the idea of phallus size. The size thing is kinda undeniable as far as cultural tropes go.
So here I am, trying to get dirty on the dance floor with a hottie who espouses at least some version of maleness enough that he physically and legally transitioned from a female to a male gender identity. And I’m suffering from a political crisis: is this song insulting? Is it reinforcing a heterocentric cultural norm that’s damaging to queer existence and condescending to queer sexuality? Is it ironic, because it’s being played in a queer setting that’s explicitly welcoming of trans folks, even more so in a context where phallus size was just the object of parody for an hour or more on stage? Is it bringing up really painful insecurities for my dance partner? Or am I making way, way too much of this?
My solution: I just kept grooving. So did he. We didn’t talk about it. We had a fucking great time and stayed on the dance floor all night. I guess sometimes, when faced with the dilemma of how to respond to confounding cultural messages, that’s really the only appropriate response.
