Twitter & the Diplomacy of the Man-Bump

If there’s one thing a Prince of Saudi and a Canadian Prime Minister can teach us, it’s that all men worldwide have but one thing on their mind, every waking moment and most of the unwaking ones, and one thing only:

Is my penis bigger than your penis?

Donald wonders. Some days he’s pretty sure he needs a wheelbarrow just to get it up the steps of the Capitol, or at least a couple of interns to carry it reverently before him, like a reverse version of Diana’s wedding dress train, but without the scattering of orange blossoms.

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Those are the days when he wakes up in a panic in case he’s tossed and turned, unwittingly wrapped his penis around Melania’s neck and strangled her in her sleep, but before he’s had a chance to call Ivanka to ask how he should feel about this, he remembers the FLOTUS is at least two wings away in her pink bedroom and with the door padlocked, from the inside.

It’s just one disappointment after another when you’re Apprentice Prez!

Other days he’s a bundle of male sexual anxiety, and honestly, can you blame him? QAnon rattles him with their insistence that Melania’s a pre-op male-to-female transexual, and even Candy Boxxx, his porn-star girlfriend, insinuates that the First Lady’s constant migraines and penchant for doggy-style might just be a coincidence, or, on the other hand, might just not be.

He spends countless hours trying to come up with a logical explanation, but, as usual—nothing.

So off he goes for some ego-stroking time with the boys! He kits up, commando, in jogging pants and hoodie and orders his driver to pull up outside local school playgrounds while he sits in the back with a bag of licorice whips and a couple of Secret Service guys, just in case.

Once he’s lured the youngsters over to the open window and pulled his jogging pants down, he screams, “Check out that babymaker, guys, and do you know who I am? I’m Donald Trump and I’m YUGE!!!!”

Then he speeds away, leaving the traumatized tots crying but definitely impressed with the Republican agenda, and with a lifelong determination to find people even smaller and more helpless than themselves so they can be Yuge Republicans, too.

James Comey wonders, in a smirky, superior, smarty-pants, stick-out-your-tongue girly kind of way that tells us that, size be damned, his penis will always be cleaner and tidier and somehow smelling of roses, so there, nyaaaaah.

James Comey, and it must be said, is a faggot, in that sense described by comedian Louis CK as having nothing to do with being gay, but everything to do with, well, being a faggot.

(I’m gay, by the way. I once lived with a faggot, a little black faggot, if you must know, and believe me, there’s nothing I wanted to do more than smack his little black faggot face repeatedly with my fake Louis Vuitton make-up bag; smack it long and smack it hard until he learned to cry like a real, honest-to-god grown-up black gay man.)

Does Rudolph Giuliani wonder? Does the Pope wear off-the-rack? Please!

Rudi’s Italian-American, bada-boom, bada-bing! He reeks of garlicky swagger, of his confidence, instilled by generations of adoring black-clad widows, that a spicy, pungent Italian salami, swathed in yards of saggy grandad foreskin, will always bring tears to the eyes of mangiacakes — those pussies who actually pretend they’re telling the truth instead of just blustering through with blatant lies like we did in the old country.

You call yourselves lawyers? Malocchio! Malocchio! Nonna will take care of you, amici miei!

In our smaller, less impressive, diffident way, Canadian men, as always, follow but do not lead.

Andrew Scheer, fiery angel of the Conservative Party’s second coming, beads with nervous sweat as he wields his throbbing light-sabre of the Lord and, lo! there’s nary a frail, backsliding daughter of Eve in full-length calico dress and bonnet, sewn at home on the vintage Singer, who doesn’t kneel down in repentance and offer up her ovaries on the collection plate once she has seen him trample the grapes of wrath.

Which, to be honest, are just the same old tired, withered raisins in that same old tired, dry-as-dust Oppression Cake, the corrective treat for uppity whores of Babylon who dare to talk in church.

Doug Ford, Ontario’s Premier Penis, the Regular-Guy-People’s-Penis, is just a wobbling, blustering, fake-smiling butterball turkey of penis-wondering. He doesn’t yet understand that once you’re pushing three hundred pounds you might as well just give up the battle and buy yourself a deluxe pair of padded tweezers with a rear-view mirror to check if it’s still there, assuming you can remember where to rummage around under the flap.

His biggest fear? Your wage may be minimum, but is it minimum enough? No wonder he turns beet-red!

Now, should you land that prized position at the urinal next to the Penis-Called-Trudeau — and surely there is a line-up of penis-wondering wannabes outside the washroom closest to his Parliament Hill feminist-man-cave (a room with the dimensions of a railway car and specially lined with red velvet) — Justin will once again confound your expectations.

He will point Pierre at the porcelain and describe his retaliatory trade tariffs, or recall his days in the classroom, or give you the old nod and wink regarding that great piece of reporter tail he might or might not have touched, maybe accidentally or maybe not, and anyway, hellooooo, TRUDEAU, OK? — but he’ll never, not even once, sneak a peek at yours.

Justin may be the one man for whom size doesn’t matter, because, whatever the actual dimensions, he knows you’ll always want him to be a whole lot bigger than he is.

Men know, deep, deep in their scrotums, that penis-wondering is the prime activity of all men worldwide, which makes it even more curious that our Canadian Feds should have offended the Prince of Saudi by forgetting the most important rule in diplomacy:

When humiliating a male, when calling into question the human rights record of a “kingdom” run by a young, inexperienced, touchy, egotistical, misogynist despot who’s imprisoned a woman who had the temerity to demand rights for women — forgetting, little goose that she is, that it’s men who call the shots on whether women get rights or not — don’t do it in public, on Twitter, in front of three hundred trillion people, and don’t have a woman do it.

Unless Chrystia Freeland also wonders. So many women who achieve power against all the odds toss overboard like so much unwelcome ballast the very qualities we hoped for: Compassion, consensus-building, connection, common sense — or was it just Margaret Thatcher who turned into that über-monster, a being with the unchecked emotional intensity of the female psyche, turbocharged with the balls-deep lust for power that is the eternal undoing of men?

Maggie died before I could send her the bill for the antidepressants and psychedelics I was forced to ingest by the handful whenever I heard her plummy, sing-song nanny-voice tell me how much better off I was lying in a ditch and sucking on an empty Ribena bottle, because now I was free.

But, contumacious old codger that I am, exercising my freedom to choose the only choice available has always left me struggling to convey my gratitude.

I once had a boss, a very fucked-up, incompetent boss who still proved my theory that you always learn at least one thing from everyone you encounter, no matter that they be old wads of used Kleenex otherwise, and from this fucked up boss I learned the following concept:

If your boss tells you to do something really, really stupid — or by extension, before you act on a really, really stupid impulse, such as being a female and humiliating a male in front of thirty trillion people — just reply, or tell yourself, “no.”

Chrystia, what were you thinking? I love you to bits, honestly, best thing since sliced conservative on toast — but you can’t grow a penis, honey, it’s just the bad luck of the draw, and seriously, why would you want to?

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This just proves how very, very old I am getting, because, little kiddies — and please, do grab your ‘Smores and drag your Hudson’s Bay blankets over to the campfire so you can toast your marshmallows as I reminisce — I remember a time when diplomacy had something to do with actually being diplomatic.

A time when diplomacy, pretentious and elite as it might now seem, was not about YOU and how noble you were, but about cutting through red tape on behalf of someone whose situation was so dire, only you, the Canadian Ambassador, on whose desk sat the special phone, only you who had the privilege of whispering in the ear of the despot-prince, had the slightest chance of saving someone’s wretched skin.

When diplomacy actually had to do with applying a little skilled diplomatic pressure, in private, behind the scenes, person-to-person, on the nut-sac of a Saudi despot in a way that said,

“I’ll never, ever tell anyone how small yours is, if you’ll do the right thing, little prince, and release that wrongfully imprisoned woman, that woman who’s not waiting for your magnanimous gesture but is, like all of those shrieking vaginas on roller-skates, demanding the rights that are actually hers and that you have denied her. OK, chum? And  fuck me sideways with a crowbar, dude, but is that thing small or what?!”

Twitter diplomacy is just stuffing a banana down your pants. As long as the back row can see how impressive you are, how quotable and feminist and full of human rights, you needn’t give a toss that your man-bump has assumed centre stage.

The tragedy is that, in your penile solipsism, you’ve proved nothing but your own ineptitude, forgotten the victim, and left Samar Badawi, a wrongfully imprisoned woman, right where she was.

And, let us be honest, where all women are, and always have been:

In prisons made by men, but with infinite patience, and infinite sorrow, saving the world.

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The images:  Two of the illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley (b. 1872 – d. 1898)  for “Lysistrata”. Top:  “The Examination of the Herald”; just above: “The Lacedaemonian Ambassadors”

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