Of all the things Russians have to be mad about these days—a generation of men sacrificed for a genocidal conquest in Ukraine, war-hardened ex-convicts roaming the streets, residents freezing in the Moscow region amid heating failures as Vladimir Putin jets off to the other side of the country to inspect cucumbers—the Kremlin has found a new boogeyman for the people and refused to release its grip: penises.
Somehow, to the country’s ruling elite, they’ve become an affront to modern-day Russianhood. Someone, somewhere, just can’t stand them.
On Thursday, a court in Russia’s Krasnodar region announced it had sent a man to prison (for a year and a half!) for posting a photo featuring Putin and a picture of a penis wrapped in the ultra-patriotic Ribbon of Saint George on social media. The ribbon, which has traditionally been used to commemorate veterans of World War II, has more recently gained momentum as a pro-war symbol associated with Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
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Vladimir Yarotsky was found by the court to have inflicted “moral suffering” on those who lost loved ones in World War II and to have “desecrated a symbol of military glory,” as if his ribbon-wrapped member was somehow more of a blow to the Russian military’s reputation than convicted murderers being honored as war heroes and troops torturing women and children in Ukraine.
War crimes are fine, apparently. But not the penis. Anything but the penis.
The punishment is worse, it seems, for those who pull out their manhood for entertainment purposes. Vacio, a Russian rapper who offended the country’s ruling elite by donning a sock on his penis at a celebrity-studded party in a private Moscow club last month, now faces likely death on the battlefield in Ukraine after being snatched up by the military.
The well-connected Telegram channel Shot announced Thursday that Vacio, real name Nikolai Vavilov, will be joining the military during its spring call-up, ostensibly to “atone for his guilt” following the penis stunt and, according to a source, prove that he’s a “real man” who is definitely not gay.
Singer Maxim Tesli, the final figure in this penis freakout trifecta, faces the same fate as Vacio after decorating his genitals with a sock during a show at a St. Petersburg club over the weekend. While hysterical Russian lawmakers demanded he be sent off to prison—for what pro-Kremlin activists claimed was also a flamboyant nod to gayness, now considered “extremism” in the notoriously homophobic country—the singer had only spent one night in jail before being hit with a military summons.
Has the Kremlin simply run out of ex-cons to use as cannon fodder and now turned to utilizing those it believes it can convincingly portray as gay? Is Vladimir Putin hatching a new plan to make a cornerstone of his next sham presidential campaign something scary and penis-related?
The Russian leader has, after all, traditionally gone to cringeworthy lengths to flaunt the importance of “Manhood” with a capital M. What changed? Did exposed penises start to feel too closely aligned with the West? The symbol of some new George Soros-related conspiracy? A CIA recruiting tactic? Did he take part in a secret showing of Barbie in his bunker and suddenly recoil upon realizing that he and the toy Ken share a certain unfortunate anatomical peculiarity?
Did he find a new insecurity in a study published last year showing that Ukrainian penises are considerably larger than Russian ones?
Or maybe the penis phobia is simply an extension of the country’s new death cult. Maybe it’s more simple: a way to tell the male population that if they’ve got time to laugh and wave their dick around they might as well be losing that and other body parts on the frontline in Ukraine.
