Dick is Cheap

I tweeted today about a recent conversation I had with a friend. Earlier that week, her flatmate had jettisoned a particularly boring and unworthy fuckbuddy, largely at my friend’s behest. The discussion had gone something like this:

Friend: Why are you still with this guy? He’s so dull.

Flatmate: I know he’s dull, but he’s got a great dick.

Friend: Dick is cheap in London – even great dick.

Flatmate: …

And the thing is, it’s true. Maybe not everywhere, but certainly in London and, I’d wager, in most towns of a decent size, dick is exceptionally cheap; and because we live in a shamelessly capitalist economy, that essentially equates to a lack of any real worth. ‘Penis is abundant and low in value’, as one of my followers succinctly put it.

For those of us who happen to own a low-value penis, this should come as both good and bad news. Before diving into that though, it’s worth noting that this situation is entirely self-inflicted. We’ve spent centuries attempting to commoditise cock, and since the rise of the internet and (crucially) the smartphone, our chickens have not only come home to roost, they’ve done an IKEA run and installed central heating.

Familiarity does not breed contempt, exactly, but it certainly creates the sort of market conditions that cease to reward the status quo. Women now have access to dick on demand, and like any ‘on demand’ service, it acts a bit like a rising tide…except the ‘all’ that it lifts refers not to boats, but to female expectations.

Think about it. When you had to trek down to Blockbuster to choose a VHS, or when you were forced to pick between four TV channels on a Saturday evening, your patience levels with substandard entertainment were probably fairly high. If a movie sucked, well, you’d walked for 20 minutes and paid three quid to rent the damn thing, and anyway, the video store was already closed, so what else were you going to do but slog your way through it. At the very least, you’d give it a good half-hour before deciding it was too bad to watch in full. Now? Fuck that. If it doesn’t hook you in the first ten minutes – or provide a compelling reason to believe that it might at some point later on – you’re tossing it in the electronic trash can and streaming something else instead.

If you’re a film studio and you want to catch the attention of the discerning moviegoer, you have to be a lot smarter now than you did back before Amazon, and Netflix, and BitTorrent, and all the rest of it. Actually, more to the point, the market is maturing quickly enough that it’s not even really just the discerning moviegoer that you have to fool/incentivise. Expectations have shifted to the point that the wider consumer base expects flexible, customised service, and if you fail to provide that, you’re unlikely to survive in the modern entertainment industry.

For us guys, the first bit of good news is that dick hasn’t yet reached that level. Women like my friend are the equivalent of early tech adopters; they’re the pioneers who have cottoned on to the fact that they don’t have to put up with the old Ts & Cs, the outdated delivery mechanisms, in order to procure the sort of cock they’re looking for. Not only are there multiple vendors available, for the savvy consumer there’s also a level of product visibility that strips out most of the uncertainty from the process.

When that uncertainty disappears, so does the lazy fetishization of the penis. As guys, we got carried away by how easy new technology made it to immortalise our cocks on screen, and we sent those images out into the world until they were slowly drained of power or impact. Dick alone is not enough – not for the early adopters and, soon, not for the laggards or the Luddites either (if it ever was to begin with). Like the film industry, we’re slowly waking up to the fact that for most of us it’s not sufficient just to get our product out there – we have to package and sell it in the right way, and to deliver the sort of user experience that will get our target audience coming back for more.

When penis is abundant – when dick is cheap – we have to offer something beyond what we keep between our legs. Before Tinder, before Twitter, before the joyous (if incomplete) emergence of genuine female sexual agency, it was perhaps possible to act like a total cunt and rest secure in the knowledge that because the sex was great, you weren’t in danger of being ditched for the next cab off the rank. For one thing, there generally wasn’t any rank to speak of, and even when there was, how could she be sure the next guy would measure up?

Now? Forget about it. However great your dick – however much she loves it, and craves it, and wants it inside her every night – there are literally hundreds of equally appealing alternatives just a few clicks away. That’s always been the case, of course…but now she knows it. Not only that, she can source it, procure it, and consume it, in a way that will render your legacy product obsolete very quickly indeed.

That’s the bad news, right?

Wrong. In the end, that’s the best news of all, for dudes and chicks alike. As men, the availability of dick – even good dick – is no longer a differentiator. We can’t get lazy about that, because if we do, we’ll quickly find that the women we want in our lives will exit stage left, in search of something a bit less one-dimensional. It forces us to raise our game, both sexually and as human beings. Or rather, it presents us with a stark choice between raising our game on the one hand, and (d)evolving into little more than stunt cocks on the other. It’s fine to choose the latter, but in doing so we have to accept that we’re increasingly disposable; increasingly cheap.

Two weeks after dumping Mr Tedious, my friend’s flatmate is seeing three other guys, and getting all the dick she wants or needs. Penis – good penis – is abundant, and increasingly its value will be tied to the other products and services that are bundled with it. It’s hard not to see that as a good thing.