This is particularly obvious when boys hit puberty. At my school, the showers were communal and using them after playing sport was meant to be compulsory. Plenty of boys would wet their heads under a tap in the toilets, throw their clothes on over the islands of mud drying on their legs and slip off home. Some would wear swimming trunks in the showers. One was so proud and insecure that he confessed to getting his penis semi-erect before showering to impress everyone. The real alpha males were untroubled by such things. They would disrobe, strut into the showers, come out, envelope themselves in a cloud of Lynx and head out to meet girls.

This machismo can have a profound effect. A man interviewed by New York magazine last year talked about how having a micropenis had made him feel in relation to this: “I’m a pathetic little nothing, really; that’s what it’s made me feel like. I was raised around all these macho uncles and teachers who expected men to be men, and we all know what that really means.”

Variations on this scenario can be found in adult life at the gym but also in urinals. Some guys would rather lock themselves up in a stall than have another man eye them up. And while women like to go to the ladies’ together, men always go alone. Other sources of anxiety are easy to find. Men watch porn stars hung like horses and despair of ever being able to attract a woman. They can become obsessed with phallic symbols such as bats, knives and guns. Of more emotional significance are early sexual encounters, which can be fraught with penis-related anxiety.