A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

Double Dick Dude: A Novel. You may have come across the Reddit AMA thread in which a man with two fully functioning penises answers prurient questions about his anatomy. I spent several hours yesterday reading the thread; today it's so popular it's crashed, so here's a summary of some of the questions.

My favourite part of the Q&A is when some Redditor sighs, "OMG you're so attractive!" and he replies, "LOL, I could look like Gollum from LOTR for all you know!"

There has already been some speculation that this is fake. But even if it is, so what? I'd be impressed by the detail the hoaxer has put into thinking through what life would be like – physically, sexually, socially – for someone with two dicks. The thread is full of information about DDD's family and childhood, his teenage years and sexual history. When people 'make stuff up' in books they are called 'novelists' and are praised for their imaginations.

Fears that #doubledickdude is a hoax. So what? If it were a novel it'd be lauded as a picaresque magic realist satire of phallocentrism.
— Mel Campbell (@incrediblemelk) January 3, 2014

Now I've become obsessed with the idea of which novelist would write Double Dick Dude: A Novel. It would have to be some American novelist who fancies himself to be the definitive chronicler of the human condition but is basically just a chronicler of the American, white, middle-class, intellectual, male condition.

Phillip Roth would infuse the story with Freudian neurosis. Jeffrey Eugenides has empathy and also form (having written Middlesex), but Chuck Palahniuk has the weirdo cynicism and taste for the abject. Bret Easton Ellis would turn DDD into a degenerate superhero. Jonathan Franzen would emasculate him, making DDD fret that his girlfriend would leave him for a 'normal' man… but what is normal, anyway? Aren't we all freaks of nature in our own way?

Can you imagine if Christos Tsiolkas wrote it? Basically there would just be lots of drug-taking and endless uses of the dicks to pound various innocent schoolboys or old Greek men. Perhaps both at once. Let's not dwell on the horrors that would ensue if Martin Amis wrote it.

I sort of am tempted to write it myself as a critique of the dick-swinging culture of contemporary literature. How wonderful if the Double Dick Dude did turn out to be a hoax and the perpetrator turned out to be a woman.