I have a friend who’s seen Shaquille O’Neal’s dick. I only mention this because, apparently, there are a lot of men who would feel mad jealous of my friend since they’d love to know what Shaq’s dick looks like, too. In fact, there’s a whole group of men out there who are obsessed with Shaq’s D-unit.
It’s pretty insane, actually.
How insane? There’s this one dude, Cameron V. Humanity, who started an online petition that demands to see Shaq’s dick. On Facebook, he claims to be a radio personality at NoFucksGivenRadio.com, but according to his Change.org petition, this is no troll. The petition clearly states in bold type: This is not a joke. (Though admittedly, that’s exactly what a troll would say.)
The petition lays out its reasoning like so: “In 2017 we have all of the information we could possibly ask for at the tip of our fingers except for a few key questions. What is the meaning of life? What is the one true religion? How big is Shaq’s penis? I only know how to get one of these three questions answered.”
“Lets [sic] be real,” it continues, “this is something almost every human being as [sic] wondered to themselves and its [sic] time we get out [sic] answer! Please ask The Natural History Museum and Shaq himself to work together to make this information public record!”
While the petition wildly overstates how many people daydream about the size of Shaq’s dick — i.e., I have to imagine that at least a few people on Earth haven’t considered what Shaq is packing — it isn’t exactly wrong. There are many, many more men who do want to know. In pop culture especially, there’s sufficient evidence that plenty of people — primarily white men — are super-curious to know if Shaq has a super-sized dick. People like Bravo’s Andy Cohen.
The showrunner/talk-show host was so interested in the NBA Hall-of-Famer’s dick, he asked Shaq to describe the size of it during an episode of Watch What Happens Live. Believe it or not, Shaq obliged him. The Big Man held-up his size 22 shoe and suggested the length from his groin down to where the shoe stretched alongside his massive thigh was a good indicator.
But that’s nothing. Adam Sandler once straight-up stalked Shaq into a gym shower just to satisfy his curiosity. They were in the same locker room at the time — Sandler, Shaq and Shaq’s presumably enormous dick. Basically, this was Sandler’s best (only?) chance to get a good look at it. He owed it to himself, he figured. He owed it to the less fortunate who would never be in such a position to see Shaq’s gigantic dick with their own eyes. He owed it to Conan O’Brien, on who’s show he told the tale. And so, he ambushed Shaq in the shower just to sneak a peek. It’s a super creepy story. But Sandler relays it to O’Brien like he’s recapping a classic skit from SNL.
It’s a fascination among bodybuilders, too — men who know a thing or two about being gawked at for their larger-than-life dimensions. On bodybuilder forums, for example, you’ll find plenty of men guessing how incredibly huge Shaq’s dick must be. They cite the size of his shoes. They point out the immensity of his fingers and hands. They note Shaq’s long-documented history of favoring small, often Asian, women as partners. They surmise this must be some sort of large dick kink.
If we were to take the, ahem, long view of all of this, it’s that, generally speaking, a lot of white men are consumed by thoughts of the size of black men’s dicks (whether they hang from Shaq or not). I remember when I first started to notice men in bathrooms sizing me up at the urinal: I was a teenager.
One could say that their curiosity is natural given the common stereotype that all black men are packing the goods. Okay, fine. Whatever. The insane part, however — the creepy part, the race-obsessed part — of this fascination with Shaq’s dick is that so many white men feel a need — and a right — to see it. That’s not natural.
And yet, the curiosity extends all the way to the White House. Case in point: Ivanka Trump allegedly told BuzzFeed’s founder Jonah Peretti that she’s always wanted to see a mulatto’s dick. It’s based on a fascination of which side will show in the genes — black or white? Naturally, Ivanka denies she said this. But Peretti stands by his recollection of her words. Meanwhile, her dad, President Trump, also, allegedly, is preoccupied with what black men are gifted with genetically. Playmate Karen McDougal, who claims to have had an ongoing extramarital sexual relationship with Donald Trump, said that one of the reasons she decided to break it off with him is that he insulted her friend by bringing up the appeal of big black dicks. Here’s how Ronan Farrow reported the story in The New Yorker:
On the night of the Miss Universe pageant McDougal attended, McDougal and a friend rode with Trump in his limousine and the friend mentioned a relationship she had had with an African-American man. According to multiple sources, Trump remarked that the friend liked “the big black dick” and began commenting on her attractiveness and breast size.
It’s not hard to imagine that Donald Trump might hold some opinions about Shaq’s “big black dick.” After all, he perfectly exemplifies the racist tendency of white men who feel like it’s their birthright to have their curiosity about black dicks answered.
This is what Adam Sandler, Andy Cohen and whomever started the online petition all have in common with the president. They each treat black men and their notoriously-outsized dicks like venal entertainment. And as a giant among black men, Shaq is treated like the biggest black Moby Dick there is. One to be jokingly feared.
Where does this peculiar fear of black dick come from? The answer is as obvious as a bulge in tight jeans: Slavery. Here’s how Wesley Morris, writing in the New York Times, described it:
“Finding the source of this fear isn’t difficult. You can read the history of the black penis in this country as a matter of eminent domain: If a slave master owned you, he also owned your body. Slaves were livestock, and their duties included propagating the labor pool. Sex wasn’t pleasure; it was work. Pleasure remained the prerogative of white owners and overseers, who put their penises where they pleased among the bodies they owned. Sex, for them, was power expressed through rape. And one side effect of that power was paranoia: Wouldn’t black revenge include rape? Won’t they want to do this to our women?”
Some white men — whether consciously or not — share this inherited sense of ownership of black men’s sexuality. They may not know why exactly, but they believe black men should satisfy white people’s curiosity, on-demand. They expect satisfaction.
The funny thing about all this curiosity about Shaq’s dick is that answers are out there. They’re easy to find, too. If you click on any (of the many) black gossip sites, you’ll find lots of black people saying pretty much the same thing about Shaq’s dick. Or you could check the tell-all memoir of former video vixen Karrine Steffans (aka Superhead). She claims to have slept with nearly every famous black rapper you can think of from the aughts to the early teens, and she described their dicks in full detail. Among those rappers, though, she also says she found the time to fuck Shaq. So, obviously, Steffans describes Shaq’s dick and how it feels to ride it in her book.
Personally, my curiosity — if you can even call it that — was satisfied by what my friend told me. In college, he worked as a ball boy for the Golden State Warriors. And just like Sandler, he had a run-in with a naked Shaq in a locker room. After he’d worked a few seasons as a ball boy, my friend had seen lots of naked NBA players. Over time then, he said he recognized what a normal or average-sized dick is for those above-average sized men. And so, I ask: Is Shaq an above-average sized man?
“It’s one of those things: You don’t want to look at a guy’s johnson in a locker room,” he responds. “That’s like against the Man Rule. I was trying not to see it. Out of respect, I was looking left, right, looking this way and that, just trying not to look at Shaq’s dick. But there it was.”
So, what did my friend think when he and Shaq’s dick were standing there eye-to-penis?
“It was odd,” he explains. “It was like God said, ‘You get all of this, however…’”
Wait, what does he mean by “however”?
Well, if after all this, you’re still dying to know more about Shaq’s dick, I’ll tell you what my friend told me. It relates back to what my friends from the Emerald Island jokingly refer to as “the Irish curse.” That is, how they feel they come from a people who God didn’t grant any favors in the dick department.
I don’t know if that’s true. But it explains what my friend said about Shaq: “Well, his last name is O’Neal.”
Zaron Burnett III
Zaron Burnett is an investigative journalist and longform features writer based in Los Angeles. He covers culture, politics, race, and other perplexing mysteries for MEL.
