Skip navigation! Story from Health Trends. The penis carries a lot of baggage. In pop culture, it's often depicted as comical how many comedies are powered by male nudity gags? Perhaps it's causing its owner grief in some way — by failing to perform sexually, for example — and is a spectacle for onlookers to ridicule. Rarely is it presented as just another body part — sometimes sexual, yes, but also functional in other ways, and most of the time just there, one among many parts of a body that belongs to a person with a mind that is not, in fact, controlled by genitals.