Naturally not being able to go off to war and kill people as well as my failure to have sexual intercourse (with another person) during my seven years of living in the hole lead me on occasion 
to doubt my manhood. This whole manhood thing is a terribly mixed up mess, and in my despair at being unable to reach, wholly introspectively, any sort of conclusion on the matter, I am ashamed to say that on one occasion I attempted a more objective assessment and measured my putz while it was erect.
This was difficult since I didn’t have a proper tape measure but only a straight edged ruler and the putz in an erect state tends to curve upwards. Trying to make it lie flat on the straight edge rule required force and concentration and a concurrent loss of the erection itself. Also how long it was in actuality seemed to differ considerably depending on whether one measured it from below or from above. If from below, determining the exact point where it started or stopped was rather difficult.
Overall the exercise was singularly unrewarding especially as my putz seemed unremarkable either way. Just an average putz in short. But because it was unremarkable in its magnitude, I was able to torture myself by feeling, that, though average, it was shorter than it should be, were I to take the measure of it as a measure of my manhood. I had to admit that my putz, or dangling modifier as I sometimes called it more grammatically speaking, was not a particularly awe inspiring sight.
Such was the lack of my self-esteem that I could take no solace from my knowledge that what was considered a properly masculine dick was, as they say, a social construct and had varied across the ages from culture to culture. The ancient Greeks for example are on record as having preferred your more diminutive “package” as an indicator that the possessor thereof was less under the control of the animal passions and more a creature of reason.
But as I said I could take no solace in this abstract knowledge especially since I was not an ancient Greek living in an ancient Greek culture but in one that seems to feel a truly manly man has a dick as big as that of a horse or thereabouts. That I—a person of high intelligence—should attempt to measure my manhood by the measure of the “little man” suggests how primitive all of us still remain. How primordial indeed. Especially in this age where the package and packaging seems to count more than the thing packaged, where appearances count for much more than realities, and one can tell a book my its cover.
Women of course know about this probably more than men. I had a lady friend over six feet tall, and according to her sworn testimony small men pursued her in droves. When I asked why, she said, because she looked like Mount Everest and they all wanted to prove something by climbing her. When I went to my 40th high school reunion my wife asked the women with whom I had gone to school if they had found me attractive. Yes, they said, because I was tall. And according to sociologists the average western woman prefers to date and wed a man about four inches taller than herself.
