The Meek Shall Inherit the Subreddit
For almost three months I was seeing a guy with a small dick. Steffen—twenty-eight, worked in advertising—and I had met at a send-off party for a mutual friend leaving for a year traveling through South America, Asia, and Australia. We ended up in his car later that night, drunk enough that everything felt like a reasonable idea, and I remember reaching into his jeans and finding considerably less than anticipated: warm and soft and just… not much there. I assumed it was the vodka. A few nights later I had a better understanding of the situation.
A friend of mine, Miri, had once made the philosophical observation that small dicks were purpose-built for anal. Steffen and I took this wisdom on board enthusiastically during what turned out to be a brief and highly logistical relationship. But after a while the rose-tinted glasses wore off and I found I couldn’t manufacture enthusiasm that wasn’t there, so I ended it. Not solely because of the dick—what had really done it was watching whatever ease and warmth Steffen had possessed on the night we met gradually dissolve into something low and permanently aggrieved. By the end he was just a sulking, clingy presence whose smallest problem was the most obvious one. I couldn’t do anything with that combination.
I thought about Steffen again recently when I fell into r/smalldickproblems on Reddit—a forum where men with, as the community tactfully frames it, limited equipment, compare notes on survival. How do you move through a world that treats a large dick as table stakes for masculine personhood? How do you communicate to a partner that you’re, in fact, already inside? What grooming strategies will make the branch look at least slightly more like a trunk? And do the pumps, the weights, the dubious supplements advertised in the sidebar banners actually do anything, or are they just something to spend money on while you spiral?
The forum’s official slogan is: We didn’t choose this life, it chose us.
Which is bleak and accurate and also somehow funny. Inside, the posts range from resigned to actively despairing. I can’t keep hearing that size doesn’t matter,
one user writes. Another: My girlfriend is making fun of my small dick in texts with other guys.
And the quietly devastating: I sent a dick pic a girl asked for and haven’t heard from her since. What do I do?
But there are good stories too. Men who found real love despite all of this, or who found partners who had what can charitably be described as specific taste. Women who turned a preference for smaller equipment into something like a vocation. Couples announcing pregnancies. Because regardless of the geometry—short, narrow, curved, ambiguous—there is apparently always someone out there whose particular configuration is exactly what someone else needed. You just have to find them, which is harder than it sounds but presumably not impossible.
Steffen never quite made it to that conclusion. Last I heard he was still on the apps, still leading with his personality, which was his real problem all along.