Novel, confession, memoir, and itinerant investigation of the male stripper universe as a form of virile prostitution whose object, source of income, and lumpen prestige is women’s desire, The Size of My World is much larger than the size of any dick, lizard, sausage, flute, salami, love-club, milk-dispenser, paint roller, or “the thing that hangs,” among other names that parade here to designate that central organ of the system. In this world, the hard cock reigns.

A network of voices sustains a narrator who is straight and heterosexist, misogynistic and savagely sensual, flaunting his pleasure from beginning to end in a joyful, guiltless mode, ready to surrender to a Fellini-esque orgy of thousands of women for his pagan sacrifice. It also offers self-help tips for sustaining that will to erection that is a will to power: training routines to improve tone, calculations of caloric intake, Apollonian drugs to boost growth and reduce fat, androgenic chemicals supposedly able to induce the animal character within the human personality.

And it crosses into sociological observations about strippers as sex workers who dream of fame even though they are destined for marginality. This world of relations traversed by lies, simulation, and staged artifices of seduction—where competitive young men prostitute themselves by exhibiting and rubbing in their clients’ faces the physical, gestural, and discursive attributes of masculinity—also has its customers. But these circulate in a homosexual chapter that heightens even more the exploitative side of the sensitive relation between bodies dominated by the fantasy—and the fear—of being fucked.

In the middle of the rising heat, the secret voice of a romantic in the closet can be heard: a nostalgic of love who knows himself to be a loser but still keeps his mast held high, insisting that one must always shave so the forest doesn’t hide the tree.

—Osvaldo Baigorria