The penis: Necessary evil or evolutionary dead end?

Reading the news these past few weeks has been ultra creepy. It's nothing but penises, penises, penises.

It's not exactly like this Bay to Breakers post from sfmike, which you should DEFINITELY NOT CLICK ON AT WORK. Compared to the real news, this is almost quaint and endearing.

No, the news is filled with penises getting their users in serious trouble. You can't swing a dead cat right now without hitting a live penis, and probably an erect one at that.

I could go with a picture of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose penis has put him in actual jail, or Newt Gingrich or Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose penises have made them unelectable laughingstocks, but instead I go with John Ensign, who should have resigned from the Senate a year ago but waited until just recently, when he found out his penis did more than cost him a mint, it will probably mean he will be on trial and several of his Christian pals who helped engineer payoffs to clean up his penis trouble might find themselves on the wrong end of a subpoena as well.

To make matters worse, I got some movies from the library this week that in one way or another re-enforced the idea that penises are more trouble than they are worth for society. In Venus, Peter O'Toole plays an aging actor who lead a reprehensible life and is still a dirty old man.

Quite a stretch for his penis, I'm sure.

All the people who find him a cad are bad people in the film.

Then why did I find myself agreeing with them?

Having seen Thor, which is the latest film directed by Kenneth Branagh, I decided to rent Dead Again, a movie he directed and starred in with his then wife Emma Thompson before he decided Helena Bonham Carter was juicier. The movie doesn't hold up very well. It was kind of impressive at the time how good their American accents were, but since Xena:Warrior Princess, it's not such an amazing feat. There's also a scene with Campbell Scott that makes no sense, a very greasy Andy Garcia and a silly supernatural plot.

Not Ken's best work.

Last and by no means least, I watched Crimes and Misdemeanors, which I would still rank as one of Woody Allen's best. On screen, it's Martin Landau's penis that is the major cause of grief and chaos, but it's hard to ignore that Allen cast then wife Mia Farrow as the object of his character's hopeless affections. More than that, the innocent love he feels for his niece is more than a little creepy now, though none of the creepiness is in the script or the performances.

I want to say that I am not advocating the abolition of the penis. I have owned one for over fifty years and it's gotten me into very little trouble. I'm just saying that if it was an optional extra you got from a doctor instead of standard equipment, today's FDA would never approve it.

Kind of like aspirin.