And lo there was peace in the comments section. The response to a news story that penises grown in laboratories will soon be tested on men sparked the most harmonious comment thread I've ever seen.
Researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., are in the process of assessing lab-grown penises for "safety, function and durability" – and well they should. These are obviously excellent qualities for a penis to possess.
The same team of scientists successfully engineered penises for rabbits in 2008 and, if you're testing a petri-dish penis, a rabbit's is a good place to start.
I bet they had a field day! A literal field day! A rabbit not working to further medical science will put his penis through the paces. Give that rabbit a moral imperative, and I'm sure he's inexhaustible. Kicking the tires (don't) of a new penis, what sensible animal would not ask: "Is it bunny-tested?"
These scientists clearly know what they're doing and, beyond the hope their work brings to men with congenital abnormalities or aggressive cancer or men who've suffered traumatic injury, they have given me hope for humanity.
We agree on something – one thing – but we agree. The joy I witnessed in that comment section proves people can be united by their primal desire to add penises to things.
It's what we do. It's what we've always done. Putting penises on things is what paleolithic man did in the caves. It's what thousands of children are doing on dusty car windows on streets all over the world right now. There's a woman in San Francisco who uses a GPS and the Nike+ app to draw a penis during her daily run because, throughout our history, given a medium, it's penises we produce.
A fundamental law of video games is that, if players are able to create and share content, they'll mostly add penises to the game. Given the opportunity, players will industriously give all the characters in your game artfully modelled and textured penises. They'll then garb themselves in penis-adorned cloaks and march through your game's newly bepenised world. They will go down those penis-signed roads, by the penis spires of your town and then, carrying their penis banners high, they will troop off to the dense penis forest where dwell the one-eyed serpents that swing from the turgid branches of the penis trees.
To be fair, they may also add breasts. Some of the breasts will then get penises.
Fighting in your game will cease for a time, first for long, hard labour of penis creation, then for the collapse into giggling that follows these efforts.
A similar cessation of hostility and a similar shared merriment occurred on that historically uncontentious test-tube (man, I hope they grow them in tubes!) penis-story comment section.
Beyond one person asking why scientists are not growing lab-vaginas, there was no dissent and, once that commenter had been assured that they're in development and have been for some time, harmony was restored.
No economist opined that giving people licences to print penises will cause the value of the penis to plummet. That the demand is inexhaustible was taken as given.
About half the commenters expressed hope of growing a second penis. No one explained in all-caps what Ron Paul would think, or complained about how much this miracle would cost the taxpayer. A commenter did not vote everyone else down and then demand to know why millennials did not just sell their penises to cover tuition costs, as he had done back in the day when no one expected their genitals to just be handed to them.
The vote in favour of growing penises (in only four to six weeks, about as long as it takes to brine a pickle!) was unanimous.
I regret that, until now (were it possible to solve the problem of climate change by erecting a large penis at each poll, we'd have crossed that one off our list ages ago), we've never found a way to harness humanity's shared passion for adding penises to things for some greater good.
Perhaps now we can at least expend the energy we've put into penis creation in other ways. There's a sense this week that our thousands of years of adding penises to things have culminated in magnificent success – in our graffiti being writ in flesh and that this breakthrough was humanity's endgame:
"Sharpies down, everyone," mankind said. "Science has got this one."