3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

Despite being primarily written by men, movies and TV shows have some pretty cockamamie hang-ups about the human willy.
3 Penis Tropes In Hollywood That You Never Noticed

Hollywood can be a real dick when it comes to wieners, and vice versa. It's like, they'll kick 'em, smash 'em, or stick 'em into pies, but actually showing a ding-a-ling on screen would apparently destroy the very fabric of America and plunge the country into a Mad Max-style dystopia. At the same time, though, whenever someone dares to show up to an action movie without a society-ruining baloney pony of their own, Hollywood basically punishes them for it by sticking them with a cliche rape backstory. So, yeah, despite being primarily written by men, movies and TV shows have some pretty cockamamie hang-ups about the human willy, which kind of explains why they also believe that ...

It's OK To Treat People Like Garbage As Long As They Have Gigantic Schlongs

I have three younger brothers so I know the difference between innocent teasing and straight-up abuse. Basically, you can jokingly hit people, insult them, give them fake suicide notes from Santa blaming them for his death etc., AS LONG AS the other person is capable and willing to strike back (usually at my face). That's why I absolutely hate the stock "butt-monkey" TV character whose entire job is to take abuse after abuse without ever doing anything about it. It's what almost ruined Parks And Recreation for me.

On the show, Garry Gergich is a low-level government employee/emotional human toilet for his co-workers, one of whom once said that " face is the symbol of failure." His so-called friends routinely and viciously insult Jerry, delivering slow-mo (but thankfully dingus-free) pies into Terry's face, and persistently calling poor Larry by the wrong name.

But the thing is, even the writers of the show felt bad about treating the character this way, so in Season 5, it was revealed that Garry has an incredibly beautiful wife and three equally beautiful daughters, all of whom adore him in a way that you rarely see outside of cults. So it doesn't matter that Garry's coworkers once "pranked" him so hard that he suffered a heart attack (I ... guess) because he has already won at life. But this wasn't the writers' first instinct. Way earlier, in Season 4, they tried to go a different way by revealing that Garry has a gigantic yogurt pistol, one of the biggest that his doctor has ever seen in fact. THIS ("this" being Garry's beef thermometer) was supposed to make us feel less sorry for the man. It's cool that people loathe his presence, because his dong could sink a ship.

A very similar thing happened with Cyril Figgis, a timid, frail comptroller working for a spy agency on Archer. Cyril gets so little respect on the show that him merely offering to help out with a computer problem ends in him taking a shower of shit coming from his coworkers' mouths. But it's OK because back in the series' second episode, we found out that Cyril has a 12-inch tube steak. How does he get an erection without passing out?

The fact that Cyril is highly-educated and trilingual all came much later. When Archer wanted to make sure we don't feel too bad for Cyril, they immediately pulled out his massive boink rod and patted it to assure us that whatever abuse we throw his way, he can deflect its impact with his mighty meatsicle.

This is taken to absurd, creepy lengths in The Hard Times Of RJ Berger, a show about a nerdy 15-year-old boy with a gargantuan wee-wee (aaaaand that should be the fourth government watchlist I was just added to). At the end of the pilot, RJ literally pulls out his mauve member, rubs it, and then asserts his dominance over his bully by putting his pork-sword-stained hands on his face. Now he doesn't just have dickhandface. He has MEGA dickhandface. That's, like, the worst kind.

Then you have Zach Young on Desperate Housewives: a troubled, loser-ish young man who, before disappearing for three seasons, was revealed to be packing a huge todger. The show literally made "having a big Mr. Happy" into the character's redeeming swan song ... his dwan dong. Other examples include Ned Flanders, the hugely junk-ed target of Homer's abuse on The Simpsons, Chris Griffin from Family Guy, a pimply, unpopular dweeb whose father once confused his trouser snake with a third leg, and David Spade's character on Just Shoot Me!, an effeminate sycophant largely disliked by his peers ... with a dangle-donger you apparently could club a seal to death with.

In all those shows, it really doesn't matter what the Rumpleforeskin-blessed characters do or achieve. All that matters are their pink pickles, from which they are supposed to rub out their self-esteem like it's a magic lamp with a weenie genie in it. And because love muscles are the source of a man's power in movies and TV shows ...

Only Women And Cowards Kick Wangs, While Real Men Shoot Them

On account of them being tall, masculine, and quick to respond to insults with the fury of a thousand Uzi-wielding suns, Hollywood doesn't feel the need to give their tough guys over-sized pricks. But that doesn't mean they don't understand their power. That's why, when a movie or TV hero attacks the shaft, he always goes for the killshot. So in Sin City, we have Bruce Willis shooting the Yellow Bastard TWICE in the boomstick, Marsellus Wallace shotgunning his rapist Zed in the tent pole in Pulp Fiction, Django from Django Unchained castrating a bad guy with his revolver, and Sergeant Stiglitz emptying his gun into a Nazi's crotch in Inglourious Basterds. That last part sounded way dirtier than I intended it to be.

The first time I noticed this trend was probably in True Romance when Christian Slater used a gun to circumcise Gary Oldman. But you might say: "Come on, Cezary. All those movies were either written or directed by Quentin Tarantino, and that dude is just insane. Like, he genuinely scares me. I'm not even sure he's human. I once had this nightmare where flies escape from his mouth as he tells me that I'm going to die in seven days, AND THAT WAS SIX DAYS AGO!" But it's not just Tarantino.

You can also find protagonists blowing off villain thingies in John Woo's The Killer, Chuck Norris flicks, and scores of other action films. And in almost every one of those, it will be a guy doing the blowing. Why? Because, apparently, women prefer to merely injure Private Richard with kicks and punches. Buffy The Vampire Slayer did it. Scully from The X-Files kicked so many guys in their wonder weasels that the only thing her adversaries want to believe is that their crotch pain will end one day. We also saw the same kind of Nutcracker rendition performed by Sandra Bullock's future cop character in Demolition Man, and by Mary Jane in Spider-Man, and Detective Beckett on Castle. And do you know why? Because it fucking works.

Go to any self-defense class run by a guy who does a pretty spot-on impression of an industrial-sized refrigerator, and even they will tell you that one-way tickets to Kiek in de Kok are incredibly effective in combat. But movies and TV shows still have trouble thinking of plonker kicks as anything other than feminine, and the stupid part is, it wasn't always like this. Roger Moore took down the gigantic villain Jaws in TWO movies by kicking him in the drumstick, and no one has ever doubted Moore's manliness. I will, however, doubt Jaws' mental prowess, as he probably should've taken note after The Spy Who Loved Me to watch out for Moore's patented "Ultimate Dick Maneuver."

Speaking of Bond flicks, let's talk about Casino Royale and its villain Le Chiffre. Now, I realize that the world has bizarrely decided that Mads Mikkelsen is sexy now, and we all had to have that talk with our partners about wearing a latex Mikkelsen mask during sex, but Le Chiffre came before that. He was supposed to be the opposite of the tough, macho Bond: a small, unsexy, delicate intellectual. And I know this for certain because at the end of the movie, he hits Bond in the canoodle noodle during the famous rope torture scene.

See, because Le Chiffre didn't have the balls to do some real damage to Bond's tallywhacker and instead just slapped the man's skin flute with a rope, the whole scene became a very unflattering commentary on the man's masculinity. It shows that Le Chiffre isn't like Bond. It shows that he is not manly. Because a real man would give his adversary penile lead poisoning, apparently.

Still, though, it's actually almost always bad guys who get kicked or punched in the flesh joystick, and that might be why ...

Bad Guys Tend To Suffer From Erectile Dysfunction

When I finished rewatching Justified for the 10th time last week, I got a sudden urge to go out and drink bourbon like the show's antagonist Boyd Crowder, despite the fact that I hate bourbon. I mean come on, people, it's just wood-flavored corn vodka. My point is that I and many people like me are easily influenced by movies and TV shows, and that is why Hollywood often tries to give their bad guys some irredeemable flaw that will make you less likely to identity with and emulate them. One of those flaws is making villain hotdogs not work all that well.

So in Kick-Ass 2 you have Chris D'Amico, who finds his mother's S & M gear and becomes a supervillain named The Motherfucker, all while Freud's body spins at the speed of the light in his grave. All in all, Chris is a wimpy, pitiful bundle of emotional issues and lameness, and YET the studio was still afraid that we'd somehow identify with this character. So they gave him ED ... when he was trying to rape someone. It's played for laughs, but it's about as hilarious as catching your dad fucking a couch.

This type of "de-cooling" of villains through their malfunctioning mushroom heads happens disturbingly often. In The Departed, Matt Damon's Colin Sullivan is a police officer secretly working for the mob, and to make sure gullible kids don't start infiltrating law enforcement agencies for crime families, the movie makes Sullivan impotent. And although the character might possibly be double-secretly gay, the message is still the same: Crime ruins your sex life. Speaking of "double-secretly," you all do remember that the president of the stuck-up Omega House from Animal House also had trouble getting it up? So does one of the criminal bodybuilders from Pain And Gain. It didn't help that he was on a lot of steroids, but that's not the point. The point is is that if you want vicious, rock-hard erections, be nice to others. Open doors for people, and the boners will follow.

In all fairness, you can sort of kind of understand the reasoning behind disabling baddy pocket rockets, but some movies take it to ridiculous lengths. In Dr. Strangelove, it's kind of implied that General Ripper went crazy and triggered a nuclear Holocaust because his one-man unit stopped standing to attention.

Hollywood will even sometimes tack impotency onto real people if they don't find them villainous enough, like they did to the bank-robbing outlaw Clyde Barrow in Bonnie And Clyde. The original plan was to make him bisexual in the movie, which he may or may not have been in real life. We don't know. But the 1967 studio "knew" that that would make him too evil and unlikable for a movie protagonist, so instead the film just gave him erectile dysfunction. That way, we would never find him "cool" because anyone without a working underwear ferret is a pathetic excuse of a man, according to Hollywood.

And you have to remember that different people have different definitions of "evil," which is why in the remake of Alfie, Jude Law's ol' one-eye stops working as a punishment for him SLEEPING AROUND. But when you get down to it, this really all goes back to my original point: Movies feel that men should crank out all of their self-esteem from their veiny bananas. And, look, obviously it's OK to be proud of your pecker-related achievements, but only as long as they are actual achievements, like, say, siring a Nobel Peace Prize winner ... Or using 50 synonyms for the D-train in one Cracked article, which I just did. I won't call myself a hero for that, but I also won't stop you if you want to do it.


Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a Cracked columnist, interviewer, and editor. Contact him at c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter.

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