The Dick Quotient: The Phallic-Shaped Exponent That Distorts Our World

Draft, April 2024

Like a phallic exponent of positivity, there is a dick quotient in every equation. The presence of the dick adds value beyond the original input, it kicks a thing up the number line.

It works like this:  

Dick does half the job, it looks complete.  

Dick completes a shoddy job,  it looks superlative. 

Dick says something stupid, it sounds brilliant.  

Dick says something patently untrue, clearly he knows what he is talking about. 

Dick says something a woman just said, it is heard for the first time and praised. 

Dick wastes time and resources with ineptitude and incompetence, dick is acknowledged as an essential and celebrated team member. And promoted. 

When something is done with a dick quotient, it cannot go into negative territory. The dick can do no wrong.

The dick quotient is so powerful, it even works with non-action.  All he has to do is stand there and his potential is multiplied, vibrating with possibility.   He has a dick, of course he can take care of anything.  He has a dick, of course he’s beyond capable.  We don’t need to see any evidence, we just know we can relax now because the dick is here. 

While it typically works to accelerate reality, the dick quotient also has a soporific effect. It lulls the critical mind to sleep, it pushes away anything that suggests the dick isn’t perfectly wonderful. The dick is here to save us, the provider and protector, how dare we question his abilities!

When the evidence does surface that the work dick produces is average or below, the dick quotient throws a calming cloak over it - the cognitive dissonance is so strong it cannot be allowed.  He’s got a dick, of course he does excellent work! Just look at all of the other things the dick can do! 

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Women do twice the work and get half the credit when Dick is around.

Example One: 

Many years ago I was on the board of an organization run by women of my mother’s generation. I was on a committee charged with organizing a large event, something I had plenty of experience with. In the first meetings, there were several agreed-upon problems, to which I suggested several simple, practical solutions. These were basic things around event timing, crowd flow, and logistics.  The meetings rolled on, and I began to notice that the same questions were still being asked about the same set of problems,  and that my suggestions were not being discussed as options — it was as if my contributions did not exist.  This was new for me.  I was used to ideas being taken seriously, being a competent contributor, and getting work done. 

I’m not saying my ideas were the best, but they were certainly worth consideration. I couldn’t recall another situation where good ideas were so thoroughly ignored, leaving the group stuck in a circle of amnesia and dysfunction.  It was like being trapped in a room and saying, “Look, there’s a door, it has a doorknob, we can open it”  while the rest of the group walks into the walls wondering how to get out. 

As the event got closer and the women were all aflutter, a man who was on the committee the year before was asked to come to a meeting.  When he spoke to the issues of timing and flow, he offered many of the same common sense solutions I had been talking about for weeks — and the ladies responded like someone had just turned on the light and thrown open the door. Big eyes, big smiles, Oh isn’t that wonderful! Dick, we are so lucky to have you! Thank goodness, we feel so much better!  

I watched their faces and body language and everything became clear in an instant. He made the near-exact recommendations I was making and I saw the women relax and be soothed in a way that only a man could do.   At each meeting for weeks afterward, someone would cluck about how wonderful Dick was and everyone would nod and coo while I wanted to throw the table over but instead took notes like a stunned anthropologist. Dick quotient. 

The stakes in this situation were really small.  Speaking up to let them know it seemed my contributions were 'not being respected’ would have derailed all of the progress with a crash of nervous energy.  Besides, watching the dynamic unfold in its natural state was way more interesting.  

This is the daily reality for women everywhere — passed over, discredited, undermined, shut down, silenced - and I had never been smacked with it quite like this. I had lived my professional life in environments where this dynamic was either absent or greatly diminished. I was fascinated, and that this sprang from a group of older women really put a nice top-spin on it. 

A few decades later, I have seen this unfortunate dick quotient play out many times and I no longer have the sense of fascination or tolerance.  Nearly every time, but not always, it is women undermining, ignoring, or discrediting other women while going limp and starry-eyed in the presence of a man. 

I work in tech-related fields. I have decades of experience and wisdom and the silver streaks and lined face to prove it, but we all know what that means.  Whatever the older woman has to say is multiplied by negative x. Where the dick quotient gives an automatic boost and jolt of credibility, the negative x shoots us deep into a territory where the numbers are no longer rational or real.  

As older women, our experience works against us like a silent undercurrent with a steady drag, it feels like swimming upstream with precise, powerful strokes but staying in place or even slipping backwards along the number line. 

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Example Two: 

I am the Business Manager of a thriving small business and run everything related to marketing, sales, AR, product development, strategy, etc. This is my statement to my female boss and business owner: 

I’ve been here for seven years and the list of things I do is epic. I am profoundly competent and efficient and the value that I provide to this company is considerable.  The new dick been here for three weeks and he’s getting paid more than me.  He has no applicable experience. He has no skills to bring. He is in training.  

Her response:  It’s just so nice to have a dude around, he’s fixed the lock, so great.   

Fine, pay him to fix the lock, but he should not be working here 30 hours a week and getting paid more than me. Our cash flow cannot handle this, our cushion will be depleted, please stop.  

Oh it’s so nice to have him around, he’s learning how to do all sorts of useful things.  

I see the things he does and it is shit. Worse than shit, it has ruined the potential for those things and it is a total loss. 

Oh he’s learning, did I tell you he fixed the lock? He helped us clean and reorganize things! 

After draining our cushion and wiping out our year-end bonuses, he was eventually quit/fired.  Not only was he incompetent, he was psychologically unstable, manipulative, and a liar.  His shoulders were broad, he was tall and handsome with a lovely smile and eyes, and his difficulties seemed more like disabilities. 

I felt sorry for him, but not the kind of sorry that makes other women want to take care of and rescue him. I suspected he had gone through most of his life being expected to fulfill the role of the fantasy male, dick quotient supreme, with a litany of disappointing outcomes. Which then distorted his personality. It seemed like a heavy, invisible burden.  

This was an example where the dick quotient traps the men in territory they do not deserve just as surely as it hobbles the women around them.  Worse for the men, they don’t know it is happening.  The patriarchal preference for men is in the air we breathe and the ocean in which we swim, the hierarchy is woven into our primal stands and it is nearly impossible to see when you are squarely in the center of its benefits.  

The pathway without obstacle, the door swinging open without credentials,  the gracious welcome front-loaded with assumptions — it's hard to comprehend that it is not this way for everyone, for it is simply the way of their world since birth.   

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There are many more examples, compendiums of micro-aggressions, dynamic shifters, and gender differentials, all springing from the phallic-shaped exponent riding like a super-script above every equation. Women do it to each other and men do it to women in millions of ways both minor and major, both annoying and life-altering, every day in every organization. Non-profits, small businesses, corporations. I don’t have the will to list out the examples I have experienced and those I have supported friends through. We should all be thoroughly sick of hearing about it, it’s all so predictable, boring.

However —  it is important to talk out loud when it happens.  For me, the rage chemicals that course through my system feel powerfully optimistic (I will burn this shit DOWN!  I quit!  Onward! ) yet toxically thwarted and despondent. Hot tears threaten to sear right through the defenses.  What we need in these moments is to lift our eyes and lock into someone who knows — validation, it is all so obvious, you don’t need to explain, yes child, we see what just happened there.  Like a grounding rod for a strike of white hot lightning, to be seen and understood allows us to discharge the rage safely into the earth so we can shake it off and move on with our day. Just like we always do. 

Oh, the shrill complaining woman.  Always dissatisfied, so bossy and demanding, just relax already.  Be a good girl and fall in line and let the dicks rule the world like they always have.  Did you see what dick did the other day? It’s just so great to have him around. 

Pre-Flow

A little bucket of monthly brew tips over and spills into my veins. A swirl of three substances called hormones mix and pour through my body, course along every pathway, and twinge both body and mind.  Everything begins to tweak, reality shifts a degree off-center, balance is thrown. Premenstrual syndrome has begun.  

There has been a dilation in the senses and the world is streaming in. There’s a wobble, an extra charge in the network, a surplus of sensation. More data, more feelings, depth in every direction, and this overload of power needs a clear path to move through. It’s on a mission, fierce and determined, and it’s pissed. 

On the day the hormones begin to swirl, it’s like a pair of cloudy shit-stained lenses has descended in front of my eyes — every person looks ugly, everything smells bad, and it's everywhere I turn.  It's in my house, at work, in the grocery store, especially in the parking lots, and even my friends seem all wrong.  I know the brew is coming on strong when the children’s call of my name — Mom — sends a thrum of fury through my body.  I put down the sponge, take a deep breath and say, Please, can someone pick me up and take me away for a few days? A quiet place where the senses can rest? I’m not fit to be around the humans right now.

Forget your favorite jeans, you don’t even fit into your lover’s arms anymore, it’s all elbows and knees. Where once there was music now it’s only noise.  Your body has taken on a strange dimension, padded, clumsy, graced with a muffin top and lopsided bra spillage. 

While the hormones cascade and the body prepares to bleed, the world becomes all corners and edges.  A wide and glorious berth is how the world usually feels, life is like an open swish, and the chosen path feels supported from below.  But not on these days. The world is obtuse and everything is an extreme irritant, nothing feels worth it. As things slip from my hands and shatter, as the coffee spills onto my lap and seeps into my crotch, as I walk right into the doorjamb for the third time that day, a core of despair rises.  

Tragedies break you apart, shoot right to the heart and rend it.  Injustices light a fire under your ass that demands action now. PMS feels like a force that is here to right the wrongs and correct the misguided.  When my idle thoughts become an unbidden list of every single thing that so-and-so is doing wrong, I know I’m in deep. I didn’t ask for it, but there it is, a ten-page litany of grievances on a repeating loop in my head, gaining force with each repetition.

The wells of self-pity open to their darkest depths. Hope becomes a pinhole in the sky.  Catastrophe is on the verge. At best, everything is an irritant, at worst it’s a nuclear meltdown that demands immediate, emergency action. Like when your husband drank the iced coffee you had looked forward to all afternoon —  you stand in front of the open refrigerator blinking while alarms of rage clang through your head and grip your chest, code red, code red.  For this, he must die. 

We are crushed by the chemicals of ceaselessly cycling fertility, and in turn, we will now crush everything that enters our path. 

This is what the earth mama’s say — when we are out of touch with our center, with our goddess awesome, when we are not fitting rightly into our potential, this is when the menstrual experience delivers its most potent dose. If our life is already out of whack, the blood brings the super whack and makes certain we break down into tears of reckoning at least once. 

If we are living through some grief, some confusion, a deeper question, PMS will elevate this sensation to another level and amplify it until it cannot be ignored.  

If we can tolerate passive-aggressive husbands, entitled lazy children and farting dogs most of the time, this bridge to peace weakens and collapses into a river that is raging.   Zero to sixty in a heartbeat, mamma bear is angry and is ready to kick some ass the next time someone isn't nice.  

The buffer is gone, the chemicals have sheered it clean off. There is no mediating grace. The oil that keeps the engine smooth and running cool has drained out of the system, and now it’s all friction. Friction that threatens to melt the metal and destroy the machine. 

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An excerpt from Written While Bleeding.

Egg Dropping Lunacy

Self-awareness doesn’t affect it, anticipation doesn’t smooth it out — each month the fertility cycle spins on without control or influence, grabbing the wheel too drunk to drive, careening towards the cliffs and swerving past trees, a white-knuckled wild ride enthralled with the power of tri-hormone fuel.

It feels like I'm being used. Like I'm a conduit, the vehicle. The heavy brew flows down through me, but it is not me.  It's like a possession by an outer power, the strong arm of something reaching through from beyond, shifting the gears, laying on the lead foot, cranking the tunes to a terrible song.

Why must this happen? Where is the plan that included this as good idea, so good it must be repeated every 28 days?  Where is the biological imperative in this, what purpose is served by this syndrome of deeply personal breakdown? Where is the evolutionary benefit of clouded thinking and compromised functioning? 

Or — is this simply crystal clear thinking that is no longer able to tolerate compromise?  Or — is this a force designed to right the wrongs, snap us all into shape, a pull no punches full force correction on everything that needs a swift smack back into alignment?

Some say the power of monthly dilation is divine, a sacred impulse, a gift.

Well, I don’t think so.  I think it’s a mistake.  A huge evolutionary mistake.  We are the only mammals who drop an egg every month.  Most animals have the sense to time ovulation when the conditions are right, when there is enough food, a reliable mate, safety.  Ovulation is spread out across a seasonally sensible rhythm, and fertility is suppressed when conditions are bad.  

Not humans.  Those eggs pop out of ripening follicles with military time, left, right, left, right, ovary, ovary.  Not enough food, too bad, here it comes.  The stress of moving or traveling seems to encourage the little things, so does tragedy and loss. The cycle of human fertility has no decency, periods show up even in the worst possible moments.  In fact, you can count on it. Big trip to the tropics on the calendar? A wedding? The blood bath adjusts itself to arrive on the worst possible day, when bathrooms are public and dirty, outfits are tight and unforgiving, and the rush of excitement and emotion is fueled with a trio of chemical accelerants. 

At the very least, you think evolution would have employed the most basic trigger for ovulation suppression, but no.  Women who are trapped in the snare of an abuser, who’s very life is being threatened by the man trying to impregnate her.  Even then, in this extreme, life threatening situation, the eggs drop, passing the genes of the monster along while tightening the noose around the mothers neck. 

The blood. You can capture it in precious cups and pour in your gardens.  You can paint your thighs and your canvas, and photograph the art of bright red stains.  Hang the blotted sheets for all to see and celebrate the mysteries of the moon as she reflects our waxing and waning waistlines. 

But I’m sticking with my theory that this is an error, an unfortunate hiccup in an otherwise perfect world.  

Take a look around, consult a few graphs, the population of the humans here on earth has outpaced what is reasonable or sustainable.  Our overactive ovaries and ceaselessly dropping eggs have cracked a fragile balance, there’s too many of us now.  Pull the shades on the shop please, shut it down, leave us in peace, enough with the rollercoaster hormone egg dropping machine, enough. 

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An excerpt from Written WhileBleeding

One Way To Go Grey

If anyone is ready to go grey, if anyone is able to watch the glimmers of light appear throughout her hair and celebrate the shift,  I thought it would be me.  I really did. I’ve been preparing, anticipating, and strategizing for decades. I’m pro-aging, I’m a Vermonter surrounded by bad-ass earth mommas in silver and white, I’m the person who began saying “I’m pretty much 50” soon after her 45th birthday.  I like the way “fifty” sounds, and I announce it with pride.  While our culture stridently fights all signs, I say bring it on — when everyone zigs, I zag, and that means walking confidently and proudly into age. 

So, naturally, I planned to go grey with ease.  But there’s been a snag.  

Instead of luminous, silvery strands framing my face, I got limp hay the color of mouse turds.  My deep chestnut hair, which used to light up with copper bolts in the sunshine, has turned to dirty dishwater.  My hair hasn’t turned grey, or white, or pewter, it’s been drained of color. Remember those cotton string mops that you used to glimpse in the closets of your elementary school, or the one you used to push in your first job at the ice cream shop?  That’s what’s we are talking about, shades of old, used mop. 

And I’ve had to admit that I’m not ready for this. I find this development completely unacceptable.   Not cool.  This light-sucking hue does terrible things to a face.  A face that is morphing and changing in small subtle ways that are all adding up to “old” — the lines, the spots, the thinning, the sagging, it’s all happening just as it should, and there is no stopping it, but I don’t exactly want to put an accelerant on it.

Maybe it’s the “undertones” in the skin that are the real kicker for me — I’ve got yellows and pinks, and lots of freckles and age spots from my Floridian childhood.  My skin turned brown over long summers in the swimming pool, no such thing as sunscreen in the 1970’s, and Panama Jack was standing tall as an oily sentry beside the beach chairs in the 80’s. I have the green eyes and thin mottled skin that holds onto the damage done by burns and deep browns only to bloom into a variety of spots in later decades, the types of spots that keep the dermatologist employed. Maybe if I had smooth olive skin, or rich brown skin, anything but spotted pink — maybe then shades of limp dust rag would actually harmonize and flow and work the grey maned magic that I’ve admired on others. 

But what I’ve got is a goddam mess.  And when I let it grow out, when the $6 box of dye begins to wash out and fade across my entire crown, I try to let it be.  I’ve done this enough times to know what happens.  My mood takes a little downturn.  I don’t smile in the mirror.  All my clothes look frumpy.  I slouch more.  I don’t flirt with strangers.  I don’t feel sexy.  I kinda want to hide, like a toad. And I realize I’m already hidden — grey hair is a cloak of invisibility, surrounding the middle-aged and older women and ushering her aside for the brighter, bolder ones. 

To my utter fascination, and relief, the moment the new box of dye sets in, the whole mood lifts.  I look in the mirror and think There you are! My clothes fit again, I smile at the cute one across the room, everything is as it should be.   I did not expect this, not at all.  As much as I thought the cultural prejudices were purged from my being, it’s evident they are still at play and more powerful than I thought. But mostly, it’s that I look like shit with a crown of streaked battleship grey.   Keeping a darker, colorful frame around my face feels better because I look better. There’s little to be done about the wrinkles and the spots and the thinning of eyelashes and so much more — but the hair is the one thing I can do that has an instant effect. For 10 minutes and $6, I can feel like me again. 

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An excerpt from Five By Fifty

Vagatile Atrofunction

Let’s talk about atrophy.  It’s a word that typically describes a limb, not of a tree, but of your body, such as an arm or a leg.  A limb that once moved, flexed, and functioned, but now hangs stiffly, drained of life and usefulness, still hanging from your body but doomed to be dragged around as a shriveled reminder of the life you use to have. An atrophied limb is one that has withered because it was unused or neglected, such as an arm in cast for too long, legs that have been bed or chair ridden -  all of the life force has withdrawn, leaving you with a dangling piece of meat.  Atrophy is a word close to death, the next step down is called rigor mortis. It’s a piece of death tacked on to your still-living body.  In short, it is a word that belongs no where near a vagina.

But that’s just what I saw the other day, sitting in the car mechanics waiting room, leafing through a glossy magazine constructed just for my demographic, the middle aged middle class female. There on a two page spread were the words writ large — they are now selling a cure for Vaginal Atrophy, a terrible turn of events I didn’t even know was possible.  A healthy, beautiful woman with streaks of grey and elegant lines looked out from the page, serious, sexy and desirable, looking right at me to say, Yes, your crotch is going to atrophy, and I’m here to help you.  

My first response was to drop the magazine as if it had burned me, drop it to the ground and watch it flare into a pile of ashes, fanning the flames higher and higher with back issues of Car and Driver.  The second response was to look around at the polite and patient folks in the waiting area, all middle aged and beyond, show them the ad and say, Can you believe this crap, do you see what they are trying to do to us, scare us into buying more pills?  I didn’t do either of those things, but I did tell my friend about what I had seen, asking “Guess what I learned today?”  When I said the words Atrophy and Vagina in the same sentence she had the perfect response:   “Oh nonononononono ….No. Don’t be saying those words around me, you keep that shit over there, way over there.” 

First off, sure, the internal muscles of the vaginal canal move, they move like a kelp forest moves in the deepest ocean currents, but there is no comparison to a limb.  The muscles in that region are round, designed to gently draw in the life force, and then get out of the way when it’s time for the life to come back out.  Round muscles, otherwise known as sphincters,  do their work when they are relaxed - the mouth, your entire digestive system, especially the exit portal, the cervix and the uterus  — all huge round muscle systems whose purpose is to gently hold and easily release.  These systems are placid and serene, waving in the currents with movements so minute they hardly measure.  

I know there are women out there who do their kegel exercises with a Zumba-like enthusiasm, training their bands of kelp in mini-dance routines that can apparently do miraculous things. A friend once confided that she had seen the video of a woman picking up an object, perhaps a baseball, with her you-know-what. This is an image just as horrifying as atrophy, but I’m sure if we have any choice in the matter we’ll all be clenching, flexing and counting with our cha-cha’s at the next stoplight and through the next commercial, in the hopes of having anything but atrophy in our underpants. 

So apparently some people are able to exercise a robust set of round muscles in their private parts, and others suffer a dwindling ability to move at all.  My point here is that while there are muscles and subtle movements in that region, atrophy is the wrong word on every level, a word chosen for dramatic effect, a word chosen to get my attention and to put a fear of the future deep in my soul.  A word chosen to drive me into the doctors office and beg for a cure to make it all go away.

The woman in the magazine ad is clearly so full of life, she’s a hot item, yet she’s got a dry, stiffened crotch and can’t get it on in the boudoir. Her labia tinkles like a wind chime every time she walks.  And they have a pill to fix it. 

I can see the pencil-necked medical marketing team at work now, deep into brainstorming and research sessions, searching for the female version of limp dick, looking for the juggernaut that will bring the women into the offices with demands to write that scrip.  And I’m happy they want to help, really, I’m glad to know that there are folks out there whose job it is to keep people grooving long after the fertility shop closes down and certain problems arise. I’m not a fan of big pharma, but I’m a big fan of getting it on, so I can appreciate the effort. But then they had to use a word like atrophy, which frankly showed their manipulative hand way too clearly. 

They don’t know it yet, but they want me on that marketing team.  I’ll help them come up with a more subtle term, one that a kick-ass sexy smart woman can say out loud - anything except a dangling piece of death where the fountain of life used to be. 

But they’ve gone ahead and named it, they got my attention, so what are we supposed to say now  - Um, Hi, I’m really into you, don’t mind the dust in my underpants, it’s just that I’ve got atrophic crotch syndrome. Or, Sorry honey, I’m feeling atrophic tonight, and all I’ve got is cardboard.

And what happens when a guy with Erectile Dysfunction meets a hot chick with Vaginal Atrophy?  He’s limp and she’s stiff, so they’ve pretty much swapped things around from how it use to be. It takes them a little while to get their groove on but eventually they find their way, and they called this new thing they do together the Vagatile Atrophunction.  Vagina+Erectile and Atrophy+Disfunction = Vagatile Atrophunction, which sounds lovely, actually, may we all be so lucky. 

Back to the terrible word, atrophy - remember how it comes to be? Lack of use. So use it ladies, use it and groove it, do the cha-cha and the two-step and train it up to be a vise-grip for your next home improvement project.  Put on some cranking atrophunction tunes, grab your favorite stiff partner, loosen up and get down tonight, all night and every night. 

I learned a lot from that magazine in the waiting room, but the next time I’m at the mechanics I’ll be sticking with the Car and Driver, squeezing and counting to ten while gazing at the pictures, humming a phunky tune and doing my best to keep the ol’ atrophy way, way, way over there. 

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An excerpt from Five By Fifty