Opinion | What I Know About Famous Men’s Penises

I am still recovering from the revelation that a woman harassed by the serial predator Roger Ailes before his death described his manhood as looking like “raw hamburger.”

But let’s not forget the time the Arkansas state employee Paula Jones signed an affidavit in which she testified to the size, circumference and unique angle of Bill Clinton’s penis, described by The Independent as “rather like a finger bent at the joint.” Mr. Clinton, as we know, rose in the polls, as pundits dug for dirt on Ms. Jones.

Or when Donald Trump, once called “the short-fingered vulgarian,” assured America during a Republican primary debate that there was “no problem, I guarantee” with his sexual equipment, after Marco Rubio had, like an adolescent, intimated that there was. Mr. Trump’s assertion, however, was quickly undermined by the porn star Stormy Daniels, who described his member as “like the mushroom character in Mario Kart.”

Those of us who live in Australia may have been spared some of the worst of Anthony Weiner, but we have our own tribulations. For example, one of our own M.P.s, Peter Dowling, sexted a lover a bizarre photograph of his penis resting in a glass of red wine (the accompanying text message read, helpfully, “He wanted a glass of wine”), earning him the sobriquet “the Australian Anthony Weiner.” Another Australian M.P. committed the unforgivable crime of tarnishing the word “g’day” when he texted his “sugar baby” the words, “I pull you close, run my strong hands down your back, softly kiss your neck and whisper G’day mate,” but — and let us be grateful for small mercies — at least his description stopped there.

But I digress.

There is actually some historical precedent for presidents bragging about their penises. Lyndon Johnson, for instance, called his phallus “Jumbo.” In an article in The New York Review of Books, the journalist Marshall Frady wrote: “If a colleague came into a Capitol bathroom as he was finishing at the urinal there, he would sometimes swing around still holding his member, which he liked to call ‘Jumbo,’ hooting once, ‘Have you ever seen anything as big as this?’ and shaking it in almost a brandishing manner as he began discoursing about some pending legislation.”