Guitars, Spaceships, Rockets: Why Do So Many Kids' Drawings Look Like Penises?
Children’s drawings are adorable. Fridge manufacturers might make bold claims about their products being able to “keep food cold”, but everyone knows fridges only exist as a space to store kids’ drawings. The magnet industry would shut down overnight if children ever stopped putting pen to paper.
The hazard of all this, though, is that a few simple shapes – a couple of lines here and there, maybe a circle or two – will add up to something that, to grown-up eyes, doesn’t quite resemble what the kid set out to draw.
Never mind NSFW. We need a new acronym – NSFF. Not safe for the fridge.
Blame the smut-filled mind of the adult, or the organs themselves for being so dang memorable – but it’s not difficult to end up with a kids’ doodle that looks like a penis... as evidence by this tweet from dad Giles Paley Phillips this week.
Guitars, spaceships and scissors are just a few of the objects drawn that end up looking more than a little phallic. But you can’t say anything, can you?
If an adorable child hands you a picture and says: “Look, I drew a rocket!”, you have to “ooh” and “aah” and put it on the fridge, even if it comes across as a penis accompanied by what seem to be nuts the size of pomegranates.
You can’t exactly frame it – what if you end up forgetting it’s there, and someone important comes round to visit? “How was visiting *that family* today, Your Majesty?” a footman will ask the Queen, the evening after she pops into your house to say hello.
“It was perfectly pleasant,” she’ll reply, regally. “Bit weird that they had those framed pictures of penises though.”
Nobody wants to offend their child by saying their drawing is reminiscent of a set of male sexual organs, of course. But then, delightedly receiving a borderline pornographic sketch just raises the likelihood of getting another one.
It’s hard – not in an erect sense, just in a difficult one.
Not even adults are immune – a perfectly innocent task like trying to draw popular farmyard animal Peppa Pig can easily descend into: “Look, it looks like a small flaccid penis sitting chubbily atop a broad ballsack.”
No other organ is put through this process. We don’t spot accidental depictions of any other body part all over the place, do we?
It’s enough to make you long for completely unambiguous art, beautiful drawings that couldn’t – by any stretch of the imagination – be misinterpreted...