It’s a quandary, to be sure. Where does a guy put a penis that came in a clear plastic bag when he’s not using it?
I bought a trans ftm packer at a tasteful adult store in Palo Alto a few months ago. The cheerful co-ed who was helping me apologized that they were out of stock in “vanilla.” Perhaps “caramel” would work for me. I’d seen the vanilla-colored soft packer online. I’m fair-skinned. Pale, really. Sometimes gaunt. But I don’t think I’d ever been that shade of vanilla on my worst day. I liked to think that if I’d actually sprouted a real penis in utero that it wouldn’t look like someone had plucked it from a specimen jar topped off with formaldehyde.
She pulled a sample unit from the cabinet below the display so I could be sure it was flaccid enough for my purposes, not too … substantial. She took hold of the squishy silicon shaft and pulled to loosen it from the box. The three-inch unit stretched to about six in her grip. I winced and touched the fold of my 501 button fly, hoping for some guy’s sake she didn’t have a date later that night. “Stretchy, then, I guess,” I said, and told her she could put it away. Did I want some help choosing a harness, she wanted to know. No, I didn’t think I did.
Turns out it is a little bit substantial, at least for wearing in public and not wanting to silently declare a certain alertness, particularly one that may not even be true most of the time. I really just need a slight presence, something to fill a bit of the void in that fold but not something that attracts attention. Where I live, where I work, where I grocery shop, these are all places that these days I’m happy if I can slip by as neutral, hoping against hope not to have to be her, the woman, Ma’am, but not ready yet to ask for Sir.
So most days I just fold a sock into the pocket of my boxer briefs, allow only the hint of substance. I suppose there’s not much difference, really. White cotton rolled up is no more a male organ than the caramel silicon, no matter the realistic veining. One is no more real, the other no more fake. But it seems on those mornings when something’s been threatened (one could call it my virility, I imagine) I pull out the packer and maneuver it into a pair of Spare Parts trunks and try to hold my head a little higher here, alone in a home office where no one can see if I’m a man or something else. No one is here to question or call me otherwise.
Once in a while when I’m packing, while I work at my desk I open my fly and let the caramel silicon peek out. If another guy told me he did this, I think there was something wrong with him. But I’m hoping that seeing it there, where a guy’s parts ought to be, might somehow help me connect to it, begin to believe it’s a part of me even though I know it’s not. Sometimes I even touch it, though if my mother knew she would surely tell me not to. Mothers are forever telling their boys not to touch it, even frightening some into believing that if they do it will fall off.
Of course, all of that is already lost on me. It’s already fallen off, so to speak. I’m the kind of guy that might take his penis off if he wanted to have sex.
Back to the question. Where does a guy like me keep his penis? Leaving it on the counter in the bathroom like a pair of false teeth could be alarming.
I stash it, wrapped in plastic, behind the neckties in my underwear drawer. I trust the sacredness of that space to contain such tender secrets, feigning ignorance at the absurdity of it all. Indeed, if one stumbles upon the boxers, it hardly matters if one sees the neckties or neatly packaged penis.