Brett Favre’s Sexting and the Struggle to See What’s In Front of One’s Penis

I dreamed that I was a waiter at my ex-girlfriend’s wedding last night. She was unmovably skeptical about marriage when I knew her, and as far as I know she’s not engaged now. But still, there I was in an ivied courtyard wearing a flimsy nylon tuxedo walking through the rented party tables. I liked it. I overslept and, for one the first times since I was a kid, I had the same dream again as I slipped below the red bleating of my alarm clock.

After more than a century of psychoanalysis, we think we know a lot about dreams. The first impulse is always to ask what it meant. Dreams are most typically described as things that drift in and out of our possession. They’re had in the same way that “drinks” are had, the passive use of the word connoting a boundary beyond which our descriptive abilities fail. It becomes harder, anyway, to talk about these things because their value is not literal, the appreciation of them is based on an interpretation. Exchanging news with an old friend or picking up the thread of a long-running debate is easy to recount, but the way those mundane things can affect us is something that inspires indirectness. It needs to be externalized, placed beneath the pane of the past tense, something had, and now gone.

I got my first naked cell phone picture from a woman this year. It came from a friend who I’d IM’d one night and caught her in the middle of taking naked pictures of herself to send to someone else. I asked for a BCC, and was so indulged. The day after I realized that I’d never sent anyone naked pictures of myself. This unexpected exposure seemed to be a one-way exchange, an acquisitive exercise in daring. So I pulled down my pants and took a few photographs of my penis with my cell phone and, for a few minutes, thought about sending them back to my friend.

I decided not to. Naked photos of a woman’s body are socially seductive. It’s become a thought-crushing cliche. Women are beautiful, curvy, graceful–the smooth conduits to ecstasy. Men are hairy oafs with purple and green veins on their sex organs. That’s the social myth that must be scaled in order to make a sex object of a man’s anatomy. I was reminded of this reading a story about Brett Favre, the fuzz-faced Rocky Balboa of the NFL, allegedly sending cell phone pictures of his penis to Jenn Sterger, a model and former sideline reporter for the New York Jets.

Nudity has become something representational in American culture. The image of a specific area of one’s anatomy is never literal. It points towards an experience that is still hard to discuss in open company because of its vague and numberless variations. Like dreams and drinks, sex is easiest to describe as if it were a visitation form something outside us–it’s something had or gotten. Sex is almost never a verb. The only comfortable way we have of addressing ourselves as the authors, architects, and athletes of this formless exchange is diminutive and vulgar: fuck. Where there’s no elegant and seductive way to say it in words, we’ve used images to capture the confluence of the transcendent, anatomical, and emotional aspects of this universal id–and these images tend to flatter the male fantasy of women. What might flatter the female fantasy of men has been much more weakly documented.

The allegations against Brett Favre are ridiculous, but they’re also comic. I can imagine a press conference called to rebut the accusations climaxing with Favre pulling his pants down and allowing a side by side comparisons to be made of his penis and the picture of the  penis alleged to be his. That would be an apt way to encapsulate the absurdity of the whole story, and a fine way to show how much we leave unexamined when we take vague representation of a thing to have more meaning than the thing it literally represents.

The alleged story is painfully sad, a man in his mid-forties trapped in the social circumlocution of junior high school–seeing someone whose body mass index and symmetry evokes some special feeling inside, which he interprets as an omen of romantic traction. Instead of challenging this irrational response by spending some time talking to her, he clinches up, realizing rejection would risk total destruction of his special feeling. Instead he marshals his friends and their mutual acquaintances to send carefully casual word that he’d like to spend some more time with her. When no response comes, he begins to wonder if his messaging has left too much open to interpretation, and so he gets her number through any means but asking her directly, and leaves a voicemail. Let’s hang out sometime, how about tonight–in my hotel room. Would love to see you.

Mysteriously, she ignores the obvious special feeling, not inside him, but in the air between the two–a force of the universe that should be equally obvious to her, though for some obstinate reason she won’t acknowledge it’s there. So he calls again, fumbling his words like someone trying to avoid a welling confession–and still nothing. Maybe even these phone calls have been too vague a gesture and so he comes on the idea–a familiar play, according to two former subjects of his special feeling–of sending a picture of his special feeling wand to her as a grand gesture of directness.

And so the sad punchline of a man’s penis flopping over in his hand in the garish light of some hotel room arrives, the elusive portrait of all the hopeful beauty of sex reduced to the most anti-climactic revelation of the wrinkled and veiny dongle through which it’s experienced. It’s a sub-literate gesture, a rough hieroglyphic offered in an alphabetic society.

What it lacks in social grace it makes up for in honesty. Seduction has become a much more subtle and sophisticated practice, but it’s often just as indirect and deluded as Favre’s alleged waggle. What once was the sad practice of a man finding ways to tell a special someone that his penis liked her, has now become a game of wit and manipulation. Seduction is a soft science where a sharper mind can find the formula, read the cues of vulnerability, and sway the desired for his or her own benefit. Though it’s not often said, dishonesty through selective editing remains the overbearing rule of thumb.

Telling someone about your most embarrassing or vulnerable qualities too soon will give the negative evidence to interpret. The less condemnable you make yourself seem, the higher the chances of seducing that special person whom your genitals would like to make friends with. This is the trough of the single person, wading through the thick chum of other people’s self-flattering dishonesty. It’s understandable that someone might encounter this bizarre society of players, ethical sluts, co-dependents, and emotional mutes and fail to adopt to its slippery interpretive language and, instead, just expose their genitalia and hope for the best.

The most romantic thing I can imagine about marriage is that it’s the end of all that dishonesty, a departure from the need to inflate one’s self as a distracting sleight of hand for the existential needs of one’s lower parts. I was the best man in a friend’s wedding over the summer, a man I met on a jungle gym when I was five year’s old. His wife’s Maid of Honor said that she knew she wanted to marry him because he made her a better person. That sentiment is at the heart of sexual impulse as well, the brief, weightless fantasy that you might be angelic, omniscient, a firing nerve ending connected to a universal nervous system of interconnected feelings.

In marriage one accepts the challenge of finding that in the most ego-sacrificing relationship–someone you agree to see stripped of romantic aspiration and seductive sleight of hand, and now live with as a fixed and diminishing quantity, not because it makes you feel good about yourself, but because it gives to another person the stability, affection, and unquestioning solidarity that we all deserve. This is the heart of the contradiction between the physical realities sex and its emotional swellings. I imagine sex in marriage is like reading Proust on the toilet. A stinky rapture that departs with a flush.

I don’t know why I dreamed of my ex-girlfriend, and there are dozens of ways to interpret the emotional contortions that put me as a waiter in her wedding. It’s so seductive to read into all of those possibilities, but it wastes energy I think. Things always portend less than we think, and focusing on the possible seeming in a thing–sex or a dream or a date for drinks –impoverishes its real worth. These things don’t need the symbology and long-cast shadows. Stripped of psychoanalysis, they’re still enlivening gifts that point towards the possibility of embracing another person without ego and expectation because it makes you a better person.

I’m still a lousy enough person to have found it easier to return to the bullshit dream of being a waiter in some proximate fantasy world rather than facing an awkward, painful real world conversation with my ex-girlfriend (what a stupid title for a person). I’d hate the way I  would surely sound in that conversation, stammering and inarticulate–talking in circles around the sad fact that we couldn’t separate our special feelings from the real human beings when things started to get symbolic. Now all I have is that stupid feeling and it seems like an awfully dull thing to have tried to save at the expense of a real person. It’s less embarrassing than showing you a cell phone picture of my dick, I imagine, but don’t think I’m a better person because I’ve learned to avert that embarrassment. It comes at a cost.

Images via Cliff1066 and tuppus