You may have picked up this week’s Weekly Dig, and seen the crotch-shot that came in apparent answer to a cover of a couple weeks back featuring a bikini-clad female buttocks. There was a letter to the editor after that one bemoaning the dearth of covers featuring “dude ass, or some close-up dick bulge.” And it was a legitimate complaint, and The Dig recognized it, issuing “an open call for man-bulge art.” What you see on this week’s cover is apparently what made the cut:

No offense to photographer Jeff Galusha, who has spent a lot of time, apparently, perfecting his art, but, as my good friend Joey Smithers (of The Joey Smithers Effect–and don’t pretend like you don’t know who he is, either) said, over beers last night, “that’s not a bulge, it’s a camel toe.” (By the way, he would like to thank The Dig for having the courage to say what has become glaringly obvious: the penis is the new pussy.)

There followed a lively discussion amongst all those present about whether the cover adequately addressed the original grievance, if at all, and what exactly should be considered a “bulge” in the first place. Personally, I think a distinction must be made between bulge, droop, and sag. I don’t think I have to illustrate the difference for you to see pretty plainly that The Dig cover is more a droop at best, possibly a sag, but really not a proper bulge. Nice try, guys, but no cigar.

Truth is, in the end, this Dig cover satisfies no one. It is overly ironic, and one thing I can say about irony with absolute confidence is that it doesn’t mix well with sex. Irony ends where sex begins. There is no such thing as an ironic sex organ. That’s why we cover them up. Irony can mask or reveal real intentions. So can underwear. But they are not the same.

We are in an interesting cultural moment. I mean, think back 35 years ago (ouch!) when the Stones came out with Sticky Fingers:

Pretty scandalous at the time. But by fifteen years later we had Marky Mark prancing around in his tidy-whities, grabbing his bulge (and it was a proper bulge) in prime-time TV ads for Calvin Klein.

So, what’s happened here? How did we get to where a droop or a sag could pass as a bulge on the cover of an alternative free weekly like The Dig? Here’s the problem in a nutshell: if they put a proper bulge on their cover, they’d be too mainstream, and it would be too confusingly earnest. The problem here is how to make the man-bulge, which has become downright iconic, teasingly ironic?

The funny thing about the original request for “dick-bulges” on the Dig’s letter page is that it was a reaction to what might seem to some an unironic cover featuring, as I mentioned, a female buttocks. But what makes that sort of cover fit The Dig is that it actually slyly parodies trash, but only for those who “get it.” If you’re not in on the joke, they’re just female buttocks, I guess.

Body parts are hard to parody, is the thing. Unless portrayed grotesquely or recognizably grotesque in themselves, a bum is a bum is a bum. Breasts are breasts. Semiotically speaking. You may have a preference as to shape, size, whatever, but it’s hard to make any kind of ironic statement with them.

Man-tools are easier than breasts or buttocks, though, because each has varying states, and because the tumescent state has been so relentlessly idealized and iconized (though in slightly sublimated form) in our culture. Nowadays instruments of domination and monuments to power are assumed to take the form of the phallus.

The bulge, in short, is the status quo. The phallic nature of our monuments was outed long ago. This is in fact why obelisks have fallen from fashion, and part of what was so profound about Mia Lin’s gash-in-the-earth design for the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial (although due to that talent for sublimating many who have tried to replicate “The Wall” in small-town monuments to the war have lost the significance of the monument being below street level, and have focused instead, as the popular nickname for the monument suggests, on the wall itself).

Fittingly, you will note that unlike the early seventies Sticky Fingers bulge, the post Mia Lin, mid-nineties, Marky-Mark version is antiseptic and amorphous:

Like the old Jane Russell bras, those CK boxer-briefs don’t reveal so much as acknowledge what cannot be denied. They offer a way to standardize an idealized bulge, promising to give your bulge that same neutral, pleasing form. In the guise of hyper-sexuality (a pumped-up, thugged-up Marky-Mark), Calvin Klein was actually offering our liberal-permissive culture a new-school version of Victorian sexual restraint. Perfect for the decade of Ken Starr.

So anyway, not only would a real bulge not do for a Dig cover, but a noticibly limp droop or a sag wouldn’t go far enough, either. It would clearly take small, sad, droopy bits in loose-crotched, pink man-panties to get the right message across.

It’s not like I’m jonesin’ for eye-candy. My point here is not that The Dig should be anything it’s not. I think it’s interesting how truly girded in on all sides artistic culture gets at times, is all. Not that artistic culture is always as interesting as what constrains the artists themselves.

As for eye-candy, I went to the MFA the other day with an out-of-town friend, and we ventured into some galleries I hadn’t explored. And there, right before my startled but delighted eyes, was a gang of priapic dwarves!

And who can resist priapic dwarves? Seriously. You gotta love the ancient Greeks and Romans. I’ll take a gang of angry, horse-hung dwarves over Marky-Mark any day!

In fact, why not put one of those little guys on your cover, Dig? I mean, Christ, you could still put them in pink man-panties if you wanted.