‘Are you interested in penises, darling?’ I asked my husband. ‘Not really, dear. Wrong end of the market for me. I did once do the week after Christmas in a pox clinic when I was young. Busy and dull. Why do you ask?’
The reason I asked was that I had become unconscionably irritated by a tired old joke resorted to with ever-increasing frequency by journalists, often in headlines. It is to write ‘Size does matter’ or some variant in an article that is not about sexual performance.
Oddly enough, the Guardian, which one might think would be sensitive to silly sexist sniggering, is given to this sort of thing. It even creeps in when the subject is intended to be non-sexist, as when a weekend article last year was introduced thus: ‘SIZE MATTERS: For more than a decade, Shelley Bovey has championed the cause of fat women….’
The subject certainly does not have to be human. ‘When size does matter: Google’s superiority is under threat, writes Chris Sherman’ it said in the Guardian. Phnaah, phnaah! The same paper’s Jobs and Money section advises, ‘DIY guide to Isas: Size matters’.
It is a weird presumption that the reader might be more ready to peruse the article if she thinks for a moment that it is really about penises, even if she has turned to the business section.
A short report in the Sun on numbers in the Scottish Parliament was published last year under the heading ‘McConnell: Size matters’. The Scotsman the other day put a headline ‘Size matters when it comes to lollipops’ on a report about the concerns of the Scottish Parliament, such as its absurd ‘Scottish Statutory Instrument 2002 No. 549: Road Traffic [The School Crossing Patrol Sign (Scotland) Regulations 2002]’.
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