On evolutionary psychology and penis puppetry

Things are a bit different in the ladies' room

One of my favorite artifacts from the the post-Y2K culture wars is the little-known 2007 feminist horror-comedy Teeth, in which a purity pledging high school student discovers that she has a bodily anomaly of the "vagina dentata" variety. It's a pretty good movie, perhaps a bit on the nose in its social commentary (albeit a masterclass in subtlety in comparison to something like Promising Young Woman, which I hated). There's also a scene involving a severed penis, a cave, and a crab that is worth the price of admission alone, although I imagine some viewers may find this more traumatic than entertaining, for obvious reasons. Not having the body part in question, it's all fun and games to me.

Which brings me to Lia Thomas and the women's locker room.

For those in need of a refresher (or who blessedly missed it the first time around), Thomas is the trans swimmer, née William, who began identifying and competing as a woman at Penn in 2022. I've already written on the sports controversy aspect of this so won't dwell on it here; suffice to say the result was about what you'd expect from an elite-level athletic matchup between a dozen females and one male, and the fact that this happened at all just speaks to the weirdnesses of a specific cultural moment that is now being vibe-shifted, course-corrected, and memory-holed into oblivion. Penn, for its part, recently announced that it the women who had to swim against Thomas will receive personal apologies from the college, and Thomas will be stripped of any/all victories achieved or records broken while competing in the women's category.

Anyway, in light of this latter news, people are talking about Thomas again, including some former teammates who are being a bit more open this time around about what it was like to share a locker room with a trans woman. This in turn has prompted a whole new round of "dicks out in the ladies' room" discourse — in which, I can't help noticing, all the most strident opinionated participants seem to be, well, dudes.

This crystallized for me while reading the responses to this thread, particularly one in which the poster kept insisting that there was a big difference between a person showing dick in the ladies' and that same dick simply being seen, incidentally, in a context where dick-glimpsing is the norm. So what if these women saw Thomas's genitals?, he kept asking. It's a locker room! Of course there are genitals there to be glimpsed!

But are there? To return to Teeth: in one early scene, the heroine's sex ed textbook has had the diagram of the female vulva censored with a sticker, in keeping with the state policy to promote sexual abstinence. Our purity ring-wearing evangelical heroine tries to defend this: "Girls have a natural modesty," she says, as the rest of the kids snicker and jeer. Like I said: politics not subtle.

But if we set aside the political notions of “modesty” and focus only on the anatomical ones… well, yeah? There are two kinds of people in this world: the ones whose genitals are still pretty much invisible even when fully nude, and the ones whose genitals are not only not hidden, but so prominent that you can do puppetry with them and spin 'em around like a helicopter.

With all due respect to the aforementioned poster, only a person who grew up hanging out (so to speak) in the men's locker room could possibly think this is a meaningless distinction.

And, with perhaps less than due respect: has this guy never seen a woman naked?

This is not to be all stay in your lane to the men who have strong feelings about trans inclusion in women's spaces; go ahead and talk about it, if you feel so moved. But if you are a man, and have always been a man, and as such have never known what it's like to be naked without also being on display, AND you want to register an opinion about the relative insignificance of a naked penis in the ladies’ changing room? Then you need at least enough imagination to realize why it is not standard, in women’s private spaces, to catch a glimpse of someone's genitals — and that as a female-bodied person, you'd have to be doing something pretty weird and norm-violating for anyone else to catch a glimpse of yours. Modesty is downstream of anatomy; the social mores that govern communally naked environments are extremely different for those of us who don't have our bits already dangling comically outside our bodies.

Heartbreaking but true, fellas: there is no female equivalent of the penis helicopter.