Thou shalt sport a banana in thy pocket: Gendered body size ideals in advertising and popular culture

Abstract

The present article addresses the issue of how idealized accounts of penis size — a bodily feature that plays a crucial role in how masculinity is constructed today — gets produced and reproduced through advertising and popular culture. The analysis shows that there are plenty of normative accounts of a particular penis size, despite a lack of explicit representations in mainstream cultural outlets. These normative messages are so ubiquitous that men in Western consumer cultures are bombarded with the archaic imperative: thou shalt sport a banana in thy pocket. Discourse analysis is used to illustrate the different sets of interpretive repertoires available that circumvent the taboos surrounding penis size in subtle and roundabout ways in order to create a sense of an ideal that should be adhered to. These sets of discourses function to give an ambivalent message in which males are caught in a discursive cross-fire where they are potentially made to feel anxious about their anxiousness and embarrassed about their embarrassedness.