My Mother’s Rubber Toy And Me
When you’re a pubescent boy, self-conscious about his small penis, the discovery of a lifelike foot-long in your home might be alarming.
“There are things in there that I’m not ready to explain to you yet.” That was the warning my father gave me about his cabinet in the laundry room. For years I watched him reach in there to grab deodorant or aspirin, but there had to be more. That’s probably where he keeps his drugs. I knew that wasn’t it. Dad was open with me about weed and his consumption and distribution of it, so there wasn’t anything to explain. He just doesn’t want me to find my dagger. Grandpa Barbee in Kentucky gave me a sick antique dagger the last time we’d gone to visit, a heavy weapon with an elaborate sheath. Dad had to confiscate it when he found out I was carrying it around our little Kansas town in my pocket “for protection.”
Instead of trying to let it go but cooking to death in my curiosity, I waited until one evening when my father was at work and my mother and sister were asleep, and I did what any and every little boy would’ve done: I opened up the cabinet. What my father wasn’t ready to explain was a stack of magazines, maybe fifty or more, depicting images of hardcore sex between men and women. There was some shit in those magazines I wasn’t prepared to see. I’d never considered the asshole as an insertion point for the penis. I didn’t know one woman could receive the sex from two or more penises simultaneously. These glossy, pre-Pornhub tomes were brimming with revelations my virgin mind needed days of masturbating to process, but there was one common thread that linked every magazine, regardless of brand.
Why are their dicks so big?
Once I could conceptualize the role of a cock in heterosexual sex, I became a self-conscious mess. I longed (no pun intended) for the days when my unimpressive member was no more to me than an evacuation point for my piss, a regular body part that would become stiff at mysterious intervals and hide up inside me when I was cold. It was something else now. My father’s filthy rags revealed a new and intimidating utility: female pleasure-creator. But could I ever do that? My anxious brain, already deteriorating from the nightmare of male puberty, would run intense hypothetical drills, scenarios in which the girls I liked from school would gaze upon my part and scoff. “That isn’t big enough to make me feel good,” they would tell me before running off to do the sex with one of our more handsome, well-endowed classmates.
With time, I learned what lies I had to tell myself to silence these fears so that I could attempt living with normalcy. I’m still young. I’m sure it will grow. I had too many video games to play and hours of professional wrestling to watch to let other guys’ shafts bother me. I would return to my father’s cabinet on a near-nightly basis until I decided to take a few magazines from the bottom of the stack and keep them in my room for easy access. It wasn’t long before we had a home computer, a Gateway if I recall correctly, and dial-up internet service with which I would continue down the rabbit hole of porn desensitization. The cocks online never got smaller, and mine never got bigger, but it didn’t matter. It will be a long time before I have sex. I’m sure it will be fine.
Everything was fine until that fateful day.
This is a story I’ve told a few people, and I may or may not have used it once in a stand-up comedy bit in front of a small crowd, but the version I’ve always told has a white lie in the beginning. “I was in my parent’s room, searching for Christmas presents,” I would fib in an attempt to protect myself from the much stranger truth, being that I was in my parent’s room trying on my mother’s clothes. That part of the story is for another day, perhaps even another piece on Medium. What’s important for this story is that while digging through one of mom’s dresser drawers for another article to model in her large vanity mirror, I discovered an inanimate piece of rubber that would undo all my emotional progress.
It was so realistic, that 12-inch tool. It was Caucasian, like mine, and like a majority of the ones I’d seen in the magazines or online. It had a detailed head, complete with a useless slit, and even some slightly less detailed balls at the base. I can still remember the weight of it in my shaky hands. My mind was racing, but one horrifying thought drowned out all the rest: So it’s true. This is what girls like. My mother’s secret weapon was confirmation of my fear that I would never be able to satisfy a lady, to make her make the raw, ecstatic facial expressions the women in the pornos made. I was able to write off all those other monster cocks, but this one would not be ignored. This one was an invader in my home, wrapped in a red t-shirt, waiting to give my mother something my father obviously couldn’t.
Around that time, a lot of my male friends were bragging about either the sex they’d had or the sex they would soon be having. In hindsight, I realize they were full of shit, but back then I was convinced my time was coming. The blossoming babes in our grade school were revved up and ready to experience lovemaking, and it would only be a matter of time before one of them chose me, turning up at my front door to tell me it was time to partake in the passage of adulthood. The short and skinny secret I kept tucked in my white briefs would be exposed, and I’d be ridiculed into oblivion. All the while, I thought about my mother’s toy. I would go back to it from time to time, unwrap it from its t-shirt and examine it. Sometimes I would lay it out on the bed and put my erect penis next to it for comparison. I had a third of the length and a quarter of the girth, and that fact kept me up at night. I was going to school with bloodshot eyes and defeated shoulders. My life was over. I was doomed.
In my frenzied state of fear and desperation, I concocted a nonsensical plan, so stupid that it could only come from the mind of a sleep-deprived pubescent child with working parents and a dangerous amount of alone time. The logistics of this plan were at best unrealistic, requiring important questions not to be asked and numerous parts to fall into place as they do in movies. Nonetheless, I put it all together and practiced it thoroughly. Maybe I didn’t have a big, swollen dick like the guys in the magazines, but my mom did. It wasn’t attached to her. I didn’t have to ask her for it. It was in the drawer, waiting to be used, and so I came up with a way to use it. The idea was simple: I would trick a girl into thinking I had a large penis by stuffing my mother’s dildo down the front of my jeans, unzipping them and letting the fake rod out through my zipper hole.
My first practice run was executed with almost no flaws. It was a little tricky at first, positioning the thing in my pants so that it stayed in place, but once I was over that small hurdle it was smooth sailing. I remember standing in front of the mirror with my hands on my waist, fully dressed, staring at the shiny new porn star dick I had hanging from my unzipped Levis. This is natural. I needed to make sure the thing would stay put, so for all subsequent tests I would introduce stress and turbulence in different ways, including a full sprint from one end of my house to the other with it dangling, just to make sure the repeated impact of my heels on the ground didn’t shake it loose. On a separate occasion, I jumped on my mother’s bed like a playful chimp. When I went up the dick went down, and when I came down the dick went up, but it never slid out of position. I tried everything from pillow humping to putting my hands behind my head and doing sensual hip rotations, a move I’d learned from WWF Superstar Val Venis.
For what’s it’s worth, I believe I was ready. I had become familiar and comfortable enough with Lisa’s sex toy to pull off the depraved illusion. Fortunately, I never had a chance to conduct the sad, naïve experiment on a human being. Time does a number on your memories, so I can’t tell you how long I carried on the obsessive, body dysmorphic fantasy booking of my first sexual encounter, nor can I remember what led to me giving up on my plans and going back to worrying about kid stuff. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps in an alternate version of our reality, there’s an adult woman telling her therapist about the time she gave her body to a chubby boy from school with a severe abnormality protruding from the pants he refused to take off. I wonder if the bizarre memory is triggered every time she hears the song “Eat You Alive” by Limp Bizkit. I wonder if anything sums up the confusion and pain of coming into manhood quite like the trauma I was preparing to put some innocent girl through just to prove my stuff was up to snuff.
What I know for a fact is that I lost my virginity years later, and my first partner didn’t seem phased by the size of my actual penis at all. I hadn’t had a high quantity of sexual partners before I settled down with my wife, but the few I did have were either pleased with my dimensions or very good at pretending. I still erred on the side of caution over the years, learning how to put my hands and mouth to great use in the bedroom so that my below-the-waist situation wasn’t as dire. But even more important than that, I became familiar and comfortable with my corporeal self, and with time and experience developed more confidence than the rigged-up rubber ever gave me.
There will be debates about whether or not size matters for as long as human beings still desire sex. My own wife has told me that she’s happy with what I’ve got because too much would be painful, but she’s also told me stories about a coworker breaking up with a nice, handsome guy she was seeing because he wasn’t big enough. It’s a subjective matter, and I’ve never read about anything that suggests the existence of a universally acceptable length or girth. But guys like me aren’t on the front page of any triple-X websites, nor do I ever type something like “average dick manages to sort of please a polite girl” in RedTube’s search bar. Nonetheless, we exist, and if you’re a person who could relate to any part of this while reading it, I want you to keep in mind that having a small dick is far less detrimental to your sex life than obsessing over it.
Don’t let porn, which is entertainment, brainwash you into believing you aren’t sexually competent. Don’t let sex toys, which exist to add some exotic spice to an already healthy sexual relationship, bother you to the point of madness. Instead, focus on being good at sex. Put that energy towards having confidence in yourself. Learn about your partner’s body and the parts of it that matter most.
Then again, this isn’t a self-help article and I’m not a sex guru. The only advice I feel I have the expertise to give you is this: be there for your pubescent children, and be prepared to answer their questions and face their concerns with nauseating honesty, because navigating the world is hard enough before the element of sex comes into play, and you don’t want pornography informing their understanding of sexuality any more than you want Fred Durst informing their understanding of rap. And if you’re a parent who for whatever reason can’t make that commitment, at least make sure your big-ass dildos are well-hidden, lest they become the reason your boys lose sleep.
Follow John Darvin Barbee on Twitter @ moneycough
