Honey, You Shrunk My Penis!

Well, they have finally managed to make subtext just plain old text.  Perhaps revealing too much about his personal life, Rush Limbaugh has recently complained that "feminazis" are causing men's penises to shrink.

 I think it’s feminism. If it’s tied to the last 50 years — the average size of [a male's] member is 10 percent smaller than 50 years — it has to be the feminazis, the chickification and everything else.

Give ‘em time and they’ll blame Bush. But air pollution vs. feminazis? Ha!

 

Limbaugh apparently pulled his information about "shrinkage" from this chacha.com story, which cites an unsourced Italian study.  According to chacha.com, the study blames mostly obesity, environmental factors, stress, and smoking for the decrease.  Somehow the unnamed study managed to overlook feminism as a leading cause in the decrease in penis size.

One researcher, hearing the Limbaugh story, wrote a very lovely article about how penis size is not shrinking, and even if it were, feminism is not to blame.  Which is reassuring.

Penis size doesn’t seem to have changed over the past few decades. Rid yourself of any ideas that penises are undergoing mass shrinkage (or growth). Although the average penis size varies by study, penile length and circumference are always within a small, limited and definite range of sizes. Studies that enroll very few men have less stable averages simply because there are fewer observations on which to draw. If you look mainly at the studies that measured the penises of 100 or more men, however, the numbers are far more stable and the difference from study to study is only about a centimeter or two.
 

 But that has always been the underlying fear against feminism, hasn't it?  That women being treated equal to men somehow emasculates men.  When the suffragettes were agitating for the vote, men were cautioned that if they allowed women the vote, the men would be forced to stay at home, while *gasp* women went out to earn a living.  And then modern anti-feminist, who state that all feminists are ugly lesbians who hate men.  There seems to be the very palpable idea for some that you can only be "big"  if your boot is on the neck of someone else, and that to release that boot diminishes you, and makes you "small".  Limbaugh was just expressing, in his usual coarse way, a feeling that has been ongoing throughout much of human history, but which Americans in particular, no longer like to express (out loud).

There also seems to be the not-so-secret belief amongst many on the right that women, and by extension, their lady parts, are magic.  Thanks to Republicans, we also now know that uteruses are capable of distinguishing "rapey" sperm from non-rapey sperm, and can "shut that whole thing down", to prevent pregnancy. Now Limbaugh informs us that feminists are capable of shrinking penises.  With our supernatural powers, it's a wonder why women need equal rights at all.