By Sharanya Gopinathan
Writer Ashley Simon, illustrator Allison Gore and web designer Isla Murray have come together to give us the present we both need and deserve. It’s a “children’s book for grown-ass adults” called Where Does Your Penis Belong?
Apparently, Simon was so disgusted after the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and the fact that some people reacted to the news by announcing that women should really know better than to turn up alone to men’s hotel rooms, that she decided to create this simple primer to explain where to keep your penis in different situations.
She took care to address locations in which men seem to have particular difficulty grasping the concept, like in the office and the train, and the book is simple and repetitive enough to really help men understand where their penises do and don’t belong.
The book feels like the novelisation of David Schwimmer’s anti-sexual harassment PSAs from back in April. You remember the ones, where Schwimmer took on the most obvious instances of sexual harassment in the world (a boss going in for a kiss whilst pretending to admire his employee’s earrings or an actor pulling his penis out during a costume fitting) in order to teach the world what sexual harassment looks like. A lot of folks defended the films saying that they taught much-needed lessons to men who didn’t know these were obvious instances of harassment, so I suppose this book is directed at the same target audience.
The creators, Simon, Gore and Murray, said that the process of creating the book was extremely therapeutic, and that they basically used comedy to purge themselves of all the horror and dismay they felt during the Weinstein scandal.