Ashamed to Admit
Are you ashamed to admit you're not across the big issues and events affecting Jews in Australia, Israel and around the Jewish world?
In this new podcast from online publication The Jewish Independent, Your Third Cousin Tami Sussman and TJI's Dashiel Lawrence tackle the week's 'Chewiest and Jewiest' topics.
Ashamed to Admit
Episode #17 The BIG little shmeckle episode with journalist Marina Kamenev
Do Jewish men have smaller schmeckles than the average population? Co-hosts Tami and (reluctant) Dash are joined by journalist, author and masterful researcher Marina Kamenev to crunch the numbers and unpack the centuries-old racist stereotype. Plus a not-to-be-missed original song which answers the evergreen question: Does size matter?
Special thanks to online men’s health platform MOSH for their support:
And Sigit Anw for giving us permission to use ‘Frank Sinatra My Way Remix [Wildstylez Tribute] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv8bssH5sbo
Articles adjacent to the issues discussed:
https://thejewishindependent.com.au/unnecessary-alarm-over-circumcision
https://thejewishindependent.com.au/why-i-didnt-circumcise-my-second-son
https://thejewishindependent.com.au/a-rabbi-is-overseeing-pornhub-thats-actually-not-so-weird
https://thejewishindependent.com.au/what-does-a-typical-family-look-like-in-the-21st-century
Email your feedback, questions, show ideas etc: ashamed@thejewishindependent.com.au
(You can also email voice memos here).
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The following episode contains references to human reproductive anatomy mostly in Yiddish. Are you interested in issues affecting Jews in Australia, the Middle East and the world at large?
Speaker 2:I'm Tammy Sussman and in today's's special big little schmeck episode I'll be forcing historian, author and TJI's executive director, dr Dashiell Lawrence, to help me unpack a taboo topic that many of you are probably ashamed to admit. You think about quite a bit.
Speaker 1:I'm Dash Lawrence and I'm a bit nervous.
Speaker 2:Join us as we cut through this seriously big or small chewy, sometimes gooey and ooey, but definitely chewy topic.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the Jewish Independent Podcast. A shame to admit. Hello Perth, hello Canberra, mexico City, and hello Centennial in Colorado. Yes, I see you there. You're listening to episode 17 of A Shame to Admit. I'm Dash Lawrence from the Jewish Independent.
Speaker 2:And I'm your Royal Highness Tammy Sussman, direct descendant of the Palata Pickles family established in Marrickville circa 1932, fermented food fanatic Carrots, beets, asparagus. Put it in a jar, add salt, vinegar, water, microbiome. Take it out of the jar, give it to me. I want it all. I don't discriminate. Actually, I do discriminate. I won't go near a pickled onion, especially if it's been sweating and rotting in a barrel in your back shed. Makeshift pickle factory Dash. Do you know what my favourite pickled vegetable is?
Speaker 1:Cucumbers.
Speaker 2:You got it and my favourite size of pickled cucumber.
Speaker 1:Does size matter?
Speaker 2:It's funny. You should ask that, dash. What a coincidence. Completely unscripted. Back in season one, I received an episode request via text and I got a male actor to read this text for today's episode. Here it is hey, dash and Tommy, I'm not ashamed to admit. I've been wanting you to do an episode on Jewish penises for some time now. Is it true that Jews have smaller penises on average than the rest of the population? So I took this question, this idea, to you, dash, in a production meeting and you said you'd think about it. You weren't exactly thrilled with the idea of doing an episode about penis sizes, specifically Jewish schlongs, schmeckles, schfunces. Why were you hesitant?
Speaker 1:I have a few thoughts on this, tammy.
Speaker 1:So in this second season we've really tried to tackle what I would regard and hopefully our listeners regard as the big, important, substantive topics, issues, ideas that might be on the minds of Australian Jewish people, and what I wanted the podcast to be was an opportunity for you and I to both learn things about happening in Israel, as we did in the first season with Draw to Ron, understanding the relationship with Iran and Hezbollah, or even more recently, when we spoke with Peter Savodnik about the political place of American Jews and their relationship to the Democratic Party, for instance, jews and their relationship to the Democratic Party, for instance.
Speaker 1:So I feel like we've covered some pretty substantive meaty ground. So the conversation about penis sizes just didn't seem to quite accord with that. However, something that we had always spoken about from the very genesis of the show was the importance to dismantle myths and stereotypes and misunderstandings about Jewish people in Australia and to help our listeners understand that particular prejudices, like just how unfounded they are and just how much they are a product usually of very old hatreds towards Jewish people. So we did that on a couple of occasions in season one and I feel like there's, you know scope in this second season to do the same.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you told me you'd consider it. You said you needed time to think about it, but you took too long. So I went ahead and greenlit the episode and booked talent for it. But you took too long. So I went ahead and greenlit the episode and booked talent for it. So direct all complaints to me.
Speaker 2:I tried to do the research for today's episode by myself because I thought I need stats on this. I need figures. But many of our listeners might be surprised to learn that I'm not smart or patient enough to go through all the academic journals. So I turned to my journalist friend, marina, who was mentioned frequently in season one. She's the person who did all of the research on my petty crim hot ancestor from Broken Hill and my pickle family in Marrickville mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2:So Marina Kamenev wrote the book Kin, which came out earlier this year. Now the book Kin has around 500 footnotes, that is, marina Kamenev knows how to research and I called her up and I said Marina, can you use that deliciously fermented brain of yours to give me conclusive evidence? Answer the question do Jewish males have smaller schmecks than their Gentile counterparts? And she said sure. So in a few minutes Marina will be jumping on the pod to share her findings with us. So fasten your seatbelts, strap in, strap up, strap on, and welcome to the studio, marina Kamenev, marina thank you so much for joining us here at A Shame to Admit.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. Marina Dash and I have brought you in today well, mostly me, but Dash and I have brought you in today to answer the very highbrow question do Jewish men have small dicks? Before you jump on that topic, I'm interested to know what rumours you had previously heard about Jewish schlong, because don't historians and journalists need to like acknowledge the preconceptions they bring into a research task?
Speaker 4:I guess they do, but you know what? I actually hadn't really heard any rumours about Jewish schlong, aside from the fact that they're circumcised.
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 4:But very little. Okay, no, the schlong's not very little. Very few rumours.
Speaker 2:So, anecdotally, have you seen a lot of Jewish schmeck in your day.
Speaker 4:Have I seen? I've seen a lot of people attached to Jewish schmeck.
Speaker 2:It's a very diplomatic response. Dash is looking at me now I'm trying to decode his look. So, marina, tell me from your research do Jewish men have schmeckles or schlongs?
Speaker 4:Is there a difference between?
Speaker 2:the two. I think. Schmeckle means small and schlong kind of has more of a big connotation.
Speaker 4:Okay. So yeah, the research is a bit more complicated and actually, like the history of the research on race and schlongs and penis size is kind of complicated and a little bit controversial, interesting.
Speaker 2:Dash, he's a historian. He's nodding his head. We thought this was just going to be a pretty lighthearted, fun interview, but what I'm hearing from you is that there's a little bit more to it. Can you riff on that?
Speaker 4:for a bit. There's been research about race and penis size and it's existed sort of for centuries and historically it's more or less written by European men who ridicule some races for having abnormally large penises and mock other races for having an inadequate manhood. There's a US sociologist, alice Walker, who kind of studies this and she was quoted advice saying most research attempting to discern racial differences in penis size relies upon pseudoscience from scholars of race realism, which is kind of, you know, a scientific excuse for racism but not actually science as kind of a scientific excuse for racism but not actually science. So there's this infamous and discredited kind of research by a late Canadian psychologist, john Rushton, and he has a theory that races with the largest penises had the smallest brains and vice versa. He isn't talking about white European men when discussing either of those races.
Speaker 4:But before we get into kind of penis size and penis size rumours, we've got to start with the fact that bigger wasn't always better. I'm quoting a research paper by Thomas R Lainton IV, which is an amazing name, and he's talking about the way that Jewish circumcision was not hot amongst the ancient Greeks and Romans, so they really liked a good long foreskin. Greek aesthetic ideal prized the youthful, athletic male body possessed of a small penis whose glands was amply covered by a long, tapering foreskin or prepuce I think that's how you say that word. Haven't said it out loud so long. Foreskins were all the rage back then and they were sort of quite elegant. And if the head of the penis was exposed, especially on a flaccid penis and this is what I understood from this paper that was kind of vulgar and crass like ankles in the Victorian ages. So larger penises are kind of considered to be a sign of virility. Sometimes today, like at that time, that wasn't quite true. Aristotle said he had this like scientific rationale why the smaller phallus was linked to fertility and he said infertility does in fact happen with men who have a large penis. They are less fertile than those who have a moderately sized one because the semen gets cooled off by being transported to greater distance and cold semen is not generative. So, yeah, it just had to travel so far that it would get cold and die. Big penises weren't so popular back then.
Speaker 4:Right, there were different kind of studies, research, anecdotes emerging around the 15th century, especially when Europeans started to travel to Africa. So there's an article in the Gender and History Journal from 2023 and it's sort of saying almost every European traveller to Africa. But they basically were just fascinated by the fact that people walked around naked. And there was one particular English man by the name of Richard Jobson and he was on an expedition in 1620.
Speaker 4:He sailed up the River Gambia and he described the West African men he encountered as cursed, with large penises furnished with such members as are after a sort of assault bothersome onto them. And this wasn't a veiled compliment, because he genuinely thought it was a curse. He explained three years later I think he wrote a book or something about it that the large penis size of these men I think they were from the mandika tribe was because of the curse of ham. So apparently in the genesis, like noah placed a curse on his grandson, kanan and his descendants, condemning them to be slaves forever, because Canaan's father Ham saw his father Noah naked as he lay drunk after planting a vineyard and drinking too much wine. But this is sort of an aside. But although the Bible didn't make a reference to dark skin of these slaves, in the 15th century they sort of began to associate.
Speaker 4:Noah's curse with dark skin claiming that Africans were descendants of Ham, and I think this was due to Jobson and his veiled compliment about you know these burdensome penises.
Speaker 2:Okay, so sorry. By veiled compliment you mean he's genuinely throwing shade on the fact that they have big schlongs.
Speaker 4:Yeah, he's throwing shade. He said that, owing to the large penis size of Africans, once a woman was pregnant she had to abstain from sex, so the male did not destroy what is conceived.
Speaker 2:So you know cursed.
Speaker 4:Okay, so in the 1650s, john Bulwer he published a book whose name I'm not going to try and pronounce. It's basically about Europeans and non-Europeans who artificially modified their body, tampering with nature. He cited Jobson's accounts and so one of the things he wrote was that what distinguished Africans from Europeans was their great privy member, which surpassed that of Englishmen, and his theory explained that penis size kind of depended on how frequently one had sex. So you know, if you don't use it you lose it. And he spoke about Jews in his book as well.
Speaker 4:And again, I am interpreting 17th century English, which I'm not an expert on and also the font is funny. So he's talking about circumcision. What he's saying is, and although he's referring to circumcision and how circumcision kind of abbreviates the penis, and he's saying and although neither of these kinds of brevity doth accommodate the action of the yard, the shaft, and the action of the yard he describes as extension and ejaculation of the seed, nor does it kind of hinder fertility or prejudice fruitfulness, he does say Jewish women desire copulation with the Christians rather than their own nation.
Speaker 2:What does that all mean? It makes no sense to me.
Speaker 4:So in my head that means that you know, jewish women prefer uncut sausage. Because, I'm not sure if at the time they really cared about whether women enjoyed sex, but you know, I think he thought that the foreskin somehow made men better in bed.
Speaker 2:But he said something about the seed. I didn't quite understand that.
Speaker 4:Oh, so what he was saying was that, like, even though you're messing with the penis, it still functions, so it can extend, become erect and ejaculate, and it doesn't prevent fertility. Like you know, it still works, but sexually it's just a bit rubbish.
Speaker 2:Okay, dash, you've been very quiet, are you okay? I'm fine, Okay.
Speaker 1:Maybe this might be too early to bring into the conversation that a lot of this reminds me of the idea of muscular Judaism. Are you familiar with that, Tammy and Marina?
Speaker 2:No Muscular Judaism.
Speaker 1:So it was a term coined by Max Nordau, who you may remember from your Jewish day school education. Tammy was-.
Speaker 2:I remember nothing. Sorry, Mrs Kahn.
Speaker 1:So Max Nordau was Zionist leader, physician, author and also co-founded the Zionist organization with Theodor Herzl at the end of the 19th century and Nordau at the second Zionist organisation with Theodor Herzl at the end of the 19th century. And Nordau, at the second Zionist Congress in 1898, spoke about the need for the designing of a new Jew, so rejecting the old Jew, the Jew of the diaspora, the sort of the meek, the mild, the bookish, the weak, the emasculated.
Speaker 1:Jew with the new Jew, which would be mentally and physically strong, athletic virile capable of great physical accomplishments and feats.
Speaker 2:Like doing marathons.
Speaker 1:Potentially doing marathons or at that time in Europe you know, weightlifting, bodybuilding, those types of activities were much more seen as conventional expressions of masculinity.
Speaker 2:Marina, was it too soon for Dash to bring this up?
Speaker 4:It's never too soon.
Speaker 1:I'm happy to design new Jewish men, like I'd add, like cooking skills and other qualities, but sure I think what I want to say is that the body obviously becomes a locus for a range of insecurities, fears that people project on to the body. You know, historical experience has shown that Jews have also projected their own insecurities and fears.
Speaker 4:I guess that kind of nebbish stereotype probably exists it does and it might be hard to replace, and I guess during this time people believed that different races and different religions and by people I mean European Christian men, were somehow sort of worse. And you know, they used the body as a locus, as you say, to identify why they were worse. So, and Tammy, I did find why the circumcision was bad. So, sort of lack of foreskin, it caused both immoderate lust and premature ejaculation. Worst of both worlds, really, according to this guy Bulwer.
Speaker 2:Okay, what else did you find so?
Speaker 4:I found Marshall I think his name is Marshall, so he's a first century Roman poet and he was famous for his epigrams and he often derided Jews for their circumcised penises. But this poet described his own penis as sort of noble and well-behaved and small, and described Jews as hyper-sexualized because of their giant penises. Wow.
Speaker 1:So we're also getting competing narratives here and ideas about.
Speaker 4:This full of competing narratives, and this is probably because you know we're looking at penises from the perspective of Greeks and Romans, who valued small penises with like a beautiful long foreskin. And later on, we're looking at, you know, the perspectives of European men. Who knows what they valued at the time? But at you know the perspectives of european men who knows what they valued at the time, but you know they valued themselves. So, um, so dash. Do you know much about philo?
Speaker 1:philo or philo.
Speaker 4:I don't know if it's like philo pastry what like philo semites? No philo, who was a jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, in the Greek province of Egypt.
Speaker 1:No, I don't no, sorry.
Speaker 4:So he kind of made this argument. Historically there's a lot of reasons behind this speech that I won't get into, but he kind of made a bit of a speech about circumcision, asking the Greeks and Romans to stop kind of mocking circumcised penises. He said that it suppresses undue impulses. He was basically trying to rebrand the exposed head of the penis Good on him, yeah, which Greeks and Romans believed signalled a chronic state of sexual anticipation and he was trying to rebrand that into something chaste.
Speaker 2:Bit of spin, bit of spin.
Speaker 4:Bit of spin. So I mean, when we talk about Jewish penises, we're really talking a lot about circumcision, and this is what I'm ashamed to admit. Ooh, ooh. Yeah, so this might be sort of internalised anti-Semitism, but I kind of get the weirdness about Jewish circumcision. Yeah, so this might be sort of internalised anti-Semitism, but I kind of get the weirdness about Jewish circumcision because, like the first Jewish man to be circumcised, I think was Abraham and he was 99 years old, and sort of like liberating a geriatric man of his, like you know, dry-aged turkey neck, it kind of feels like an ominous start to a tradition. Like, if I was the publicist for circumcision I wouldn't go with that.
Speaker 2:Completely fair.
Speaker 1:It does reflect perhaps some kind of anxiety about the certain aspects of rituals or traditions. But as the question about consent has raised, like it's also a question of is it right that we do this to our child without them? You know, saying that it's okay, which ultimately every parent has to work through those questions and come to the right decision for themselves.
Speaker 4:But what's interesting is that I was born in the Soviet Union and when we went through the refugee camps there were a few kind of teenagers getting circumcised at the time because men in the Soviet Union, they weren't circumcised but you could leave on the basis that you were Jewish. And I think Gary Steinkinkart he's got a really great article in the yorker about it. But you know, it was agonizing and I'm not sure if it hurts more when you're a teenager or you just remember it jewish men should be getting it done at 99 years old, like their father abraham and you know, after he got it done, he got his 90 year old wife pregnant it's definitely time for a rebrand.
Speaker 2:Dasha and I are hoping to do a whole nother episode on circumcision we might have to bring you in, perhaps next season so you know, as ambiguous as you know we might be with circumcision, you know who wasn't ambiguous who?
Speaker 4:European Christians. So for English observers, circumcision was un-English, un-christian, uncivilised and perhaps an indicator of deviant male sexuality. So this is from my favourite paper that I had looked at for this Gender and History, and it was written by Noel Gallagher, possibly a silent member of Oasis, but sure. But it's called the Jew's Penis, circumcision and Sexual Pathology in 18th Century England, which Tammy refers to as the medieval period.
Speaker 2:When is the medieval period?
Speaker 4:It ended in 1500, 16th century. So you've got all these kind of threads coming together. You've got anti-Jewish discourse. Anti-semitism was always in the background, as we all know. So the Jews were accused of lustfulness, of feminacy and sexual deviance, and there were persistent myths that Jewish men menstruated. This is according to Noel Gallagher. Noel, for example, their skin emitted a repulsive smell and it kind of helped establish the notion that Jews were physiologically and not just culturally different.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and there's another historian called Tim Hitchcock. Tim Hitchcock says the 18th century saw the development of an obsession with the penis and of an assumption that there was only one thing to do with it, but Jews couldn't do it. So one work was called A Harlot's Progress from 1732 and it's by William Hogarth, who it was kind of like a comic, an 18th century comic book. So it had six images and it was about a woman called Mole Hackabout and she is a young woman who was drawn into prostitution after arriving in London. And the six images follow her tragic demise, ending with her death from venereal disease.
Speaker 4:And in the second image we see Mole as a kept mistress and her keeper is a Jewish man, which sort of hints at her grim future. And we know he's Jewish because he's got this fancy apartment with old testament paintings and his physical appearance which he had bushy black eyebrows and an exaggerated nose, which was common in anti-Jewish satire of the time. So this is the second sort of painting or etching. I don't know what it is, but but it's while Mole and the merchant have tea, a maid hurries another man out of the back and because the man is kind of dishevelled and Mole's boob is hanging out, it suggests that the man is her lover and as he sneaks out he's sort of making fun of the merchant behind his back by gesturing with his fingers, implying that the man's penis is small.
Speaker 2:Okay, because this isn't a visual medium. He's making like his thumb and his forefinger are making like a size of a small penis.
Speaker 4:Yes, okay, so he's freehand. He holds up a thumb and forefinger as though indicating a length of two or three inches. So this is kind of where a few of the small penis kind of tropes emerge. But all these things coming together and it was identified by a historian called santa gilman, like it's the bipolar nature of anti-semitism, so the contradictory nature. So Jewish men were simultaneously attacked for their love of whoring, but also ridiculed for their inability to obtain sexual satisfaction, or provide sexual satisfaction, as Noel Gallagher put it.
Speaker 4:The tropes around circumcision cut both ways. So the idea was that circumcision would curb lust, which is what Philo or Philo hinted at, and Jews were lusty. But there were also medical writers around the 18th century that reasoned the circumcised man would yearn for a sexual satisfaction he could never fully obtain. There was a Dutch physician called Herman Boerhaave I can't say his last name an important figure in modern physiology, who believed that circumcision didn't really stop sexual desire. He described Jews as a lascivious people despite being circumcised, and he actually thought that circumcision encouraged sexual activity because it protected Jewish men from STDs. So other, like promiscuous men were at risk, but the sneaky, lascivious Jews were at less risk, according to this Dutch doctor, of getting venereal disease.
Speaker 2:Wow. So it kind of sounds to me like no matter how they're putting it, it's bad either way.
Speaker 4:Because Jews were considered, you know, bad, and this was a kind of a physiological sort of or physical proof, yeah, evidence for this.
Speaker 2:So Dash, we're halfway through our big little schmeckle episode. How are you coping?
Speaker 1:Look, Tammy, I'm doing okay. All of this stuff is pretty interesting, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel just a little bit awkward talking about it.
Speaker 2:I hear that, yeah, schwanz size is still a very taboo topic, and you know what else is still sadly taboo in 2024? Schlong function. But I have some relief for any listeners out there who are struggling with their penis function right now. The good news is MOSH is here to help.
Speaker 1:Is that the online men's health clinic?
Speaker 2:It is. Mosh is making treatment for things like erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation and enlarged prostates more affordable, more accessible and more normal than ever.
Speaker 1:So MOSH can help with all things downstairs, but what about upstairs?
Speaker 2:MOSH has you covered. There too, you can even find a practitioner for hair loss or mental health treatment.
Speaker 1:And the best thing about it being online is that you don't have to waste time sitting in a waiting room or deal with cranky practice managers or germy toddlers.
Speaker 2:So true, you can see a legit doctor without all the hassle, right from your own living room or toilet, right before your daily poop and scroll.
Speaker 1:Visit getmoshcomau to get started today, or see the link in our show notes.
Speaker 2:Are Jewish mechs as a whole bigger or smaller than the rest of the population?
Speaker 4:In terms of getting good data on penis size. It's actually very hard and it's important. So we need to know information about penis size, just so that we can make condoms. And you know, for men like, having kind of that data does help men with body image issues, you know. So all that stuff is important, but it's really hard to measure a penis. So if you an erect penis, like, what do you do? If it's curved, what happens if the foreskin is long? Should measurements be taken from the top or the bottom? How deep do they go into the pubic fat or below the scrotum lines? And you know, if you, you can, for example, induce erection in a lab, but those conditions are different and there's, of course, like a natural bias in finding volunteers who want to participate in these studies. What do you mean? I mean? Well, I mean the people who are going to participate in a study may be proud of their size, for example.
Speaker 2:Okay, so they're more inclined to go to the study if they think they have a big schlong.
Speaker 4:There's just so many reasons and you can't.
Speaker 4:You sort of you need consistent data, otherwise you're sort of comparing, you know know, apples and oranges or pickles and bananas in this case.
Speaker 4:One thing that researchers came up with in the 1940s was they concluded that measurement of neither the flaccid nor the erect penis could be reliably reproduced, and especially because in some cases it was self-reported, so you're not getting good research. So they created a new approach where they measured the flaccid but stretched penis and I guess, although this is statistically validated and this was from a Slate article by Kent Sepkovitz, it's sort of a different conundrum because, as he writes, the maximally stretched flaccid penis just does not exist in nature outside the doctor's office no one's really seen one who cares how long the average one is. None of this data is helpful and Alice Walker, who I quoted earlier from from Vice, said that there's just a limited amount of high quality research and while some experts they suggest there might be slight differences in penis size averages across racial lines, it's uncertain and the small differences, that sort of um, they're likely to be negligible and often misunderstood and of course there are harmful stereotypes about penis size which can lead to objectification and desexualization.
Speaker 4:So, there seemed to be like a solid study on penis size in 2015. The Guardian summarized it it involved 15, men. They basically found the average erect penis length is 13.12 centimeters in length. But it aims to reassure men that most men fall, you know, within the normal range. It found no significant link between penis size and race or foot size. They acknowledge the potential bias and self-selection of participants, but, yeah, that's kind of a decent piece of data. Now, the one that is often quoted. The piece of data is sort of the spreadsheet from World Data and on the website it says no other topic on the website has been asked for more often than the average size of male genitalia. This international comparison now gives some basic data about the mean sizes per country, but in that spreadsheet, like a lot of that data is actually not great. So for starters, they quote the racist studies that I mentioned earlier.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And so when we get to Israel it says the data is self-reported and it's quoting K Sepp Kovitz, who's actually the journalist of the Slate article and didn't write the study. But I did find the original research and it wasn't self-reported. So it was in the Journal of Impotence Research and it kind of aimed to predict erect penis size by measuring it in a flaccid and erect and stretched state. So they measured the men I believe impotent men when their penis was flaccid and then when it was gently stretched and when it was fully erect and they injected a drug called prostaglandin to induce an erection and it found that the ratio of flaccid to stretched length can kind of predict the erect size. In the study it found that the average erect penis length in 50 jewish caucasian males was 13.6 centimetres, which is pretty much bang on average, like a little bit bigger than average. What did we say? Average was 13.12, so a little bit bigger according to that small study. How many men? I think she was 55.
Speaker 2:55 from Israel, from Israelrael so they said caucasian uh, okay, I think white jewish men.
Speaker 4:Maybe they meant ashkenazi, I don't know. Do you want me to look in the study?
Speaker 1:no, I'm just just saying flagging that there could be differences between ashkenazi and safari jews no, I was just thinking there's going to be Sephardi men.
Speaker 2:See, I was not included in this. Yeah, we might call some Broigus On the topic of Broigus. So Marina did send me this spreadsheet and I had a look at it and I was kind of hoping that I could solve the issues in the Middle East by going to each country in the Middle East and Israel and showing how all the penis sizes are the same and then, like providing that evidence to the powers that be, send it to Bibi Netanyahu, send it to Sinhua, say look this like dick comp you've got going on at the moment like we need to just's no need.
Speaker 1:No need to feel insecure. You're both. You're both as small or as big as each other we're all the same, we're all brothers yeah, I mean, how would?
Speaker 2:you send that info. How would I get that information to sinwa? I don't know. Apparently I'm jewish and I run the world, so you'll figure it out, I'll figure it out. So what I will say is, marina, and I do have access to a spreadsheet with different countries and their average penis lengths. But, marina, you said there was only, like you know, 35 participants in those studies.
Speaker 4:There aren't huge numbers no, I mean, some have big, bigger, um larger numbers of participants. Okay, but I wouldn't trust that spreadsheet. It's not accurate they got it wrong, like they wrote that this study was self-reported, when actually these poor men were stretched and you know injected and it really wasn't self-reported. But yeah, like I wouldn't base your travel decisions on the spreadsheet.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about popular culture and how these, this myth, has infiltrated popular culture.
Speaker 4:So yeah, look, I just have like that wonderful quote by Rudy Giuliani.
Speaker 2:That's relevant, because isn't there a case going on right now?
Speaker 4:The transcripts are part of a lawsuit against Rudy Giuliani by a woman who accuses a former mayor of rape and sexual abuse. What he said in the transcript was the way natural selection works. Jewish men have small cocks because they can't use them after they get married, whereas the Italian men use them all their lives, so they get bigger. It's not that different to, is it, richard Jacobson, who kind of said that you know the West Africans had larger penises because they used them more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was one of those. Could have been old dick. Yeah, I do hear people still make those remarks. I just feel like I need to say to all the Jewish men, or even, if you're not Jewish, all the men listening to this if you personally have a stretched penis that is smaller than the average, I just have a message for you, and the message is in song. This is a special treat for you, Marina and Dash, because this is the big little Schmeckle episode. And what is a special big little episode without a closing song? Schmecks? I've seen a few, but then again too few to mention. I did what I had to do, sometimes for love or just for attention, if I'm being really honest, For attention, if I'm being really honest. They came in different shapes and different girths, A kiddo's platter and so I can say with authority size does not matter.
Speaker 2:Stay with me. He's basically a moil. This is the moment Dash starts thinking. I'm pretty sure Sinatra had a secret Jewish grandparent. Final verse I promise Dash, I know you've got a meeting to get to Shlongs Small and proud long and loud, quiet and sensual. Make sure you keep them clean and like off our screens. Always consensual the world is a garden of Eden filled with schvanz and pats and schmeckle, and where the apples grow so does the pickle.
Speaker 2:Bravo, bravo, the talent, the talent do you guys ever just get goosebumps sometimes because you just like create something so amazing and you just know you're about to give the world just such a precious gift?
Speaker 4:I've never experienced that.
Speaker 1:But I can understand why you got goosebumps, Tammy.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I understand why you did Okay. I'm yet to have that moment one day.
Speaker 2:I couldn't watch Josh's reaction throughout that, so, marina, was he laughing?
Speaker 4:He was just like.
Speaker 1:I was smiling, I was enjoying it. He was smiling, yeah.
Speaker 4:Like he didn't look disappointed.
Speaker 2:Okay, he was potentially in shock.
Speaker 4:No, he didn't look deep in thought.
Speaker 1:You've done a great job, marina. Thank you for taking us on that sort of multi-history, that multi-century tour of penis sizes and, in particular, the way that Jewish penis sizes have been interpreted, and bringing it up to the 21st century and helping us to understand the myths and the misinformation surrounding it all. If we had a kind of an Ashamed to Admit trophy or something that we could gift you, I would arrange for that to be delivered to you, but I think we'll just have to have you back on again next season for another opportunity to dismantle some myths.
Speaker 2:But the trophy would definitely be phallic.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I've never won a trophy. I've never won anything. I would really, I would really love a trophy. I've never won anything. I would really, I would really love that trophy.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for coming in, Marina.
Speaker 4:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:That was our interview with Marina Kamenev Dash. What do you reckon? Did you learn anything new?
Speaker 1:It did strike me as really interesting the way that it continues over the courses of centuries, the way that all sorts of wild myths are perpetrated about Jewish people that can go in either extreme right.
Speaker 1:So Jewish men have small penises in ages and contexts when it's seen to be a good thing to have a big penis. Likewise, in a time and a context where it seemed to be good to have a small penis, jewish men have overly large penises. It reminds me of in the early 20th century, during the rise of the Nazis that you know, jews were seen as both the financiers, the capitalists, the landowners, the money grabbers, but on the other hand, they're also the communists and the Bolsheviks. There are so many wild interpretations and so many accusations that can be contradictory, used to suit the particular- Agenda.
Speaker 1:Agenda of the time and the age. So I mean, I wouldn't have thought that penises would also be a way to further propagate ideas about hatred about Jewish people, but that's at least what I took away from Marina's deep dive. So, folks, that's it for episode 17 of A Shame to Admit, with Tammy Sussman and me, Dash Lawrence. This is a TTI podcast.
Speaker 2:Today's episode was mixed and edited by Nick King, with theme music by Donovan Jenks at the top and throughout, and this remix by Sigit Anwar.
Speaker 1:Our sponsor for today's show was Mosh Visit getmoshcomau. Links to any TJI adjacent articles to the issues that we discussed today are in the show notes.
Speaker 2:If you like the podcast, leave a positive review, forward it to your friends or become a sponsor.
Speaker 1:And if you found the content of today's episode appalling, please direct your kvetch to Tammy via the contact form on the Jewish Independent website or email her ashamed at thejewishindependentcomau.
Speaker 2:As always, thank you for your support and look out for us at the Walkleys. We're definitely winning one with today's episode, or at least a nomination Dash. Nothing to say there.
Speaker 3:There it is.
Speaker 1:There we go. What is?
Speaker 3:a man. What has he got If not himself? What is a man? What has he got If not himself? Yeah, then he has not to say the things he truly feels, and not the words Of one who kneels the record shows. I took the blow, missoula. Together we did it, and did it my way.