Getting Cocky

This morning on the drive in to work, I caught a radio report about men in the UK seeking penile enlargement in ever increasing numbers. To avoid the cost of professional surgery, some were injecting their ‘lad’ with oils, Vaseline and other substances presumably sold under the counter for that express purpose. Fortunately the NHS is, as ever, on hand to rescue people from self-inflicted injury and self-directed stupidity.

As I get older I rarely claim any more to have the first clue what is going on in society. News, politics, science, etc, I get, but I have never been completely at ease with the sheer banality of ambition of the narcissists who strut and preen among us. The women who want to look exactly like Barbie, the doll. The incomprehensible need of many to adopt the Instagram pout and adorn their portrait with puppy noses and ears. The obsession of – while otherwise aiming for normal body proportions – white women trying to achieve the over-inflated, genetically specific, steatopygia arse. What is wrong with you all?

The cosmetic/beauty/fitness/glamour industries and all their offshoots occupy far too much of the national consciousness. So-called ‘reality’ TV and the public flaunting of your vanity, ignorance, lack of shame and sheer vacuity ought to be a target for ridicule. Instead it just encourages the morons to gag for more. Worse, nonentities end up becoming idols for people whose former life dreams rarely strayed far from their next fix of fried chicken and contraband cigarettes.

But all that pales in comparison with the phenomenon of blokes injecting oil into their old man. Why? Seriously, by the time you get the chance to deploy your wee man-missile, the battle has been won. Unless you have an acorn instead of a mighty oak it is unlikely she will even notice unless, you know, she has lots of very clear memories against which to compare your, er performance. But isn’t performance what it’s all about? Titchy Tom Cruise plays the giant Jack Reacher, for heaven’s sake; doesn’t that tell you anything?

We are not all blessed with looks, health, height and brains, but we make up for it with working with what we’ve got. Work faster, smarter, longer, harder or with more sheer persistence. Set goals and when you fall at the first hurdle, pick yourself up and start over; the only real architect of your success is you and when you sit at that drawing board you have to consider how to use what you have.

All the props – lift heels, hairpieces, tattoos, muscles – say far more negative things about you than you may imagine. What really matters is not how you change how you think you appear but how you deal with the hand you’ve been dealt. There is a level of vanity which is normal and makes us human. But vanity has got out of hand and self-awareness has been banished, along with personal responsibility; lost in the me-me-me culture which pervades.

So, if you’re looking in the mirror at your dick and wondering whether the object of your desire would admire a thicker one, just remember the object of your desire is almost certainly yourself. If you think that by having surgical alteration of a part of you that isn’t used as often as you’d like would improve the situation, consider how much action you’ll be having when the corrective skin graft is healing. Think once, think twice and don’t make a bigger prick of yourself than you already are.