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.
