I’m worried that not enough people are aware that Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, bestselling classic and source material for beloved films The Godfather, parts I and II, features a significant subplot about a woman named Lucy Mancini, who is friendly with the Corleone family and whose biggest problem is her roomy vagina.
A lot of people think I’m joking, when I tell them that. I’m not joking. There are a significant number of pages given to Lucy’s vagina problem. As someone on Twitter pointed out, “this is sort of like if a fifth of The Great Gatsby was about how one of the party guests had one leg that was shorter than the other.”
Think, for a moment, about how close we all came to living in a world where universally-acclaimed masculinist classic The Godfather devoted a half-hour of screen time to a minor character’s vagina surgery. (She is in the movie, albeit briefly; she’s the bridesmaid Sonny is seen having sex with during his sister’s wedding; in the book she’s devastated after his death because she’s convinced he is the only man in the world with a penis large enough for her terrible, enormous vagina.)
This world:
what
THAT IS NOT BEST MEDICAL PRACTICES
this really happened in the book you know
hand to God, go check the book right now if you don’t believe me
this has NOTHING TO DO with the main plotline of The Godfather and never does, if you’re wondering
“IF IT WEREN’T UNETHICAL”
REAL
TIGHT
WALLS
this book was a BEST SELLER, the movie based upon it is HIGHLY RESPECTED
This is also how Saving Private Ryan ends. “Earn this.”
In lieu of flowers, please make donations in Mallory’s memory to some sort of charity for snatch repair.
Tags: books, the godfather, things that really happened, vaginas
I saw you talk about this on twitter, but all these excerpts laid out one after another, like this…
(a woman would never get away with dedicated a fifth of her book to the male characters penis enlargement, concetrating on female opinions of it, and it having nothing to do with the book)
HER BIGGEST LIFE PROBLEM IS HER CAVERNOUS VAGINA
“I told her you were my special boy, so she’s going to give you some real, hard girth”
Excuse me, I have a book to write!
I KNEW I had a huge, hard novel in me.
I JUST SLOGGED THROUGH THIS SHITTY BOOK AND ALL I GOT WAS A SUBPLOT ABOUT A GIANT VAGINA
(seriously though I’m italian and everyone goes on and on about omg what a seminal piece of work and I was like “really do I have to read another book about italian organized crime like my people do nothing else”, and then I read it and it was thousands of pages of giant vaginas and 750 different relatives and slutshaming and gross descriptions of Sonny’s fleshy lips)
Well, they did say “seminal”, right?
If the author had known about fisting, this would have been a much different (better) subplot.
I’d to propose to you right now for this comment.
Or that the clitoris exists! Sex doesn’t have to involve any penetration at all!
SO TRUE. I mean, I figured she viewed her own vagina as unsatisfactory, or else…. why all of this. But if it was just the MEN who couldn’t deal, yeah. Some clitoris education definitely should have happened.
I think if the author knew about that, you’d have a subplot about a woman with an oversized clitoris. It’s not like it would make you magically non-mysogynistic (although I guess it would involve a baseline level of awareness).
This is IN THE BOOK which I read when I was an impressionable teen. And since I had never even known that this could possibly be a thing, I just figured that Puzo made it all up.
Also plastic surgery there to make MEN happy? Really? NOPE
Yes EXACTLY about reading it when I was an impressionable teen. And it really does take up an ENORMOUS amount of space in the book, for absolutely no reason. Baffling.
And it really does take up an ENORMOUS amount of space in the book
I’m really glad I didn’t read this as an impressionable teen, because I was neurotic as hell and probably would have been like “OH MY GOD, I didn’t even know I was supposed to be worrying about this!”
I was about to scroll back through your Twitter timeline, past the enormous number of Dad stories, to find the crack about Saving Private Ryan. Thanks for saving me the trouble!
Also I listen to Greg Proops’ “The Smartest Man in the World” podcast a lot (guys you all have to listen to this he is the greatest misandrist and talks about social justice issues all the time and slams the fuck out of those who rightfully deserve it) and I remember him saying sarcastically how the greatest line in all of literature is from this book, and it is “She wept gratefully as he entered her”.
SHE WEPT GRATEFULLY
AS HE ENTERED HER
::vomits all over him, as he enters her::
This just makes me think of turkey vultures, employing their own vomit as a defense mechanism.
That would be “[Sonny’s penis] pulsated in [Lucy’s] hand like an animal and almost weeping with grateful ecstasy she pointed it into her own wet, turgid flesh.”
The same scene gives us the indelible phrase “crawly flood of semen.”
The XTRA LARGE vagina from the Godfather merited a section in one of my women’s studies texts. So… Go Academy!
Once upon a time, I stayed with friends who had just moved into a new apartment (and yes, they are saints to let a friend visit them so soon after a move) and when I burned through both of my paperbacks in the first days of my visit, I discovered that the only non-technical book they had unpacked was The Godfather. So I started reading it.
Yeeeah, and the next day, I made a point of stopping at a bookstore so I didn’t have to read The Sizable Vagina Tales anymore.
I can’t help but be glad that my brain, in an effort to protect me from the memory, had completely forgotten about it until Mallory’s tweets.
I have a feeling I read this book, but I honestly can’t remember any part of it. Especially not this, repressed memories are real.
I had actually /completely/ forgotten about this. Ugh.
Probably because this is one of the few books-made-into-movies where the movie is actually better than the books, and that’s entirely due to having had to cut out all the extraneous crap EXACTLY LIKE THIS SUBPLOT
Puzzled my way through a synopsis. All I can conclude is that Puzo set out to write a novella about a woman with a comparatively large vagina, and he idly added a little Mafia business to her back story to explain how she came to be a woman of independent means living in Vegas, and then the whole thing kind of got away from him.
“A comparatively large vagina” COMPARATIVELY. THANK YOU.
Yes, “comparatively”. Normal human woman < polar bear < dairy cow < Clydesdale horse < Lucy < hippopotamus < elephant < blue whale.
what were all you people even doing with your free periods in middle school if not reading this in the library, come on. I think I may even have heard about it from my mother before I read it myself, although I reckon she used some euphemisms (or DID she?? I think she was explaining why she never watched the movie.)
I actually barely even remember the surgery business cause I was so struck by the earlier part where the lady with the world’s biggest vagina meets the gentleman with the worlds biggest wang and then they done sex against the wall I think. I think it would have more of a tragicomic feel to it if she had the box-smallening operation first and then met the man with the enormous affair second, when it was too late. sort of a O. Henry situation you know.
sort of a O. Henry situation you know.
The Gift of the Snatchi
Holy crap…can’t…stop…laughing…tears…everything. Better than Steve Martin’s shinbones and cuticles.
Gift of the Vagi
“the lady with the world’s biggest vagina meets the gentleman with the worlds biggest wang and then they done sex against the wall I think”
poetry, I’m crying
There is a real live wonderful and deserving charity for snatch repair though! The Fistula Foundation treats women who have been torn open from difficult childbirth and shoddy obstetrics. The resulting injury is gruesome, can cause incontinence, social ostracization, plus bad infection and brutal pain. Getting snatch repair really saves these women’s lives! It’s http://www.fistulafoundation.org, in loving memory of Mallory 😉
Yes. Yes to this. I’ve donated to this. It’s real. It’s good. It’s necessary. Ladies in other countries get told by their husbands and families they’re not worth anything anymore, that they’re no good, and they smell bad, and to touch nothing and no one. Because they were internally damaged by hours and hours of labor they were lucky they didn’t die from. They can’t leave their houses, sometimes for years. Their children shun them. The whole picture of the situation is just too much to bear. I’ll spare further details. Except donate to this foundation. They return dignity to women, in a real way. The smile train or whoever does harelip surgery for kids. Kids are adorable. But who is looking out for these hidden, shunned women? The doctor who founded this charity is looking out for them.
I saw an amazing documentary about this on PBS a few years ago. The strength and determination and courage of these women is intense.
I was moved by all the stories, but one particularly hit hard. There was a young teenager who’d been married off to a much older man. He abused her, and she ran back to her old home, and her father beat her up and sent her back to her husband. Then she got pregnant, at like age twelve or thirteen, had a terrifying labor, the baby died, and her bladder was essentially crushed. She found out or was sent (I forget which) to the clinic for reconstructive surgery. The people at the clinic then sent her home, or tried to. She kept returning to the clinic, saying it was the only safe place for her; her husband and father only beat and mistreated her. She told them that as many times as they (the clinic staff) sent her back, she’d return. She said she’d wash the dishes, scrub the floors, anything to keep her place there.
Finally, they caved and found her employment at an orphanage, FAR AWAY FROM HER HORRIBLE FATHER AND HUSBAND, and she bonded with a toddler, basically becoming his mother. “For the first time in my life, I’m happy,” she said.
When I was in grad school my roommate read The Godfather. She was so disgusted with some of this subplot, she would read it aloud to me so that she wasn’t the only one grossed out. Now whenever I think of The Godfather, I think of Sonny’s wife saying her insides felt like “overcooked macaroni” after being with Sonny so long. Thanks roomie!
For some reason, I was remembering that subplot the other day and getting angry all over again (I have no idea what triggered that. My brain is apparently fond of non-sequitors). Isn’t there a part, during the surgery, where the surgeon asks him something like “so, does this size work for you?” I read that book when I was twenty, and that’s the part that stayed with me: my burning desire to have a fictional doctor lose his medical license on the grounds of sleaziness.
This is my favourite book and I read it pretty often but I always skip the entire vegas portion
“I curette ’em like you scrape a frying pan”
ugh you don’t SCRAPE a frying pan, what does he mean like with a fork or something? don’t do that! he must be as bad an abortionist as he is a fry cook. thank god this was before non-stick coatings were invented. he would have ruined so many.
Maybe like deglazing?
Nope, terrible image. No deglazing w/ placenta. n/m
I didn’t know my uterus could cringe, but there you go.
I was already a mite squeamish about curettage so I would be mostly concerned that this guy never cook me breakfast. I guess cast iron is hardy enough it wouldn’t do damage but you know that sound it makes when you scrape it, skreek skreek, nobody likes that.
some doctor, this guy. bet he used his anesthesia needle for putting syrup on his pancakes and whatnot.
This is like some Tom Robbins type shit right here
“So that’s why you kept refusing me all these months? You dope.”
Damn rape culture showing its creepy head in the middle of all the unintentional hilarity.
“if you were not interested in me, the only possible reason is that you were embarrassed about your giant vagina”
“The book was better than the movie.”
The excising of this entire subplot is why I always point to The Godfather as the only film I know of that is an indisputable improvement over its source material.
Puzo was such a terrible writer. There’s a line in that book where he refers to wine as “that grapey liquid.” This is a running joke in my parents’ house.
He really is a terrible writer. Didn’t he write like a gazillion more Godfather books too? Ugh.
I have never forgotten Lucy Mancini and I often remark on her to my partner. Love the movie (have never seen part II or III), thought the book was weird and mediocre and fixated on Lucy’s vagina.
Ugh, yes. My brother read all his Mobster books in high school. I’ve always looked at them as the dude-equivalent of VC Andrews novels.
I read The Godfather on a disaster of a plane ride (should have taken eight hours. It took 36. Fuck you Delta.), and it was mercifully absorbing enough when I was folded into an airline seat on the tarmac of the Cincinatti Airport, but even then I was rolling my eyes. Pages and pages devoted to Sonny’s massive cock, that did not serve to move the plot forward at all!
However, that Coppola was able to make that movie from such awful source material is (imo) pretty indisputable proof of his genius.
the dude-equivalent of VC Andrews novels
YES thank you for this.
“that grapey liquid, the one that’s not grape juice though but is also made out of grapes, you know what I’m talking about”
Yes I think I do. http://www.americansweets.co.uk/ekmps/shops/state…
meanwhile this whole book is like that RAPEY liquid amirite
I’m just replying here to correct myself. The actual quote is:
“She lifted the grapey, dark red juice to her parched mouth and drank.” It’s Lucy Mancini doing the drinking. After sex. WTF Mario? http://books.google.com/books?id=WHalw9A5h_cC&…
My favorite part is: “When they went up to their suite — they were living together now — ”
Like maybe the author just realized he had forgotten to set up that detail in advance, and was somehow legally prohibited from GOING BACK AND EDITING his damn book. What the hell, was Puzo writing this while being chased by bears?
A bear army.
If I could give this 1000 thumbs up, I would, it is so perfect.
I love nothing more than a good in-joke. And weird dudes being chased by bears, I guess?
This is great. It’s like forgetting an important part of a joke and getting to the punchline and being like wait! I forgot to tell you – the bartender was a bear the whole time!
A WHOLE NEW THIIIIIIIING
A MAGIC PLACE I NEVER KNEEWWWWW
Which is, of course, his being a doctor, the precise medical term.
It’s too bad the clitoris wasn’t discovered until the 1990s. If only there had been a way to achieve orgasm aside from penis-in-vagina!
Such a shame that all the important inventions of Jon Snow were lost in that fire that Sean Connery couldn’t stop.
They have an office near my house, and every time I read the sign, I involuntarily clench. They do do excellent and important work, though. Vaginal fistula is a horrific condition, that you should never, ever google.
(this is a reply to the plug for The Fistula Foundation)
Personally, this might be high among the list of most important Toast articles for me.
BRB, going to start writing my essay on Lucy Mancini’s giant vagina giving birth to the future of the Corleone family. Lots of symbolism. So many oranges.
Forgive me for this, but someone is going to say it at some point and it might as well be me.
So cutting out this subplot didn’t leave a giant plot hole in the movie?
Surprisingly, plugging that plot hole was as easy as scraping a pan.
Nope. Cutting out a piece just made it tighter–snappier.
No no no, the giant hole is what they left out.
But if not for the giant vagina, how else could you possibly introduce a doctor into the story to fix Michael’s face and Johnny Fontane’s vocal cords? It is impossible. The best way to find a doctor for ENT issues is to locate one who is very interested in gigantic vaginas.
I think we’re all missing the point here. Puzo obviously had a very small penis. Obviously.
I always assumed he was a secret size queen.
He was building a new snatch as easily as a carpenter nails together two-by-four studs
After reading the Ur-Dad thread, that sentence just has entirely too much Dad in it for my liking.
And here I am thinking, “You don’t nail studs together! You screw things TO the studs! With screws!” This indignation brought to you by my dad.
Although, ok, occasionally you could need to put two studs together for extra strength, like in corners and door frames and what not. BUT STILL.
I recently saw Godfather and Godfather 2 on the big screen at the Alamo Drafthouse (love you, Drafthouse! Never change!) and all I could think when I left was, “shit, he really just took the plot outline and the character names and made art out of it.”
I also remembered how beautiful the Robert De Niro section of that movie is. When he’s climbing across the roofs while the religious festival goes on at street level? So beautiful.
ALSO: I stole my parents’ copy of The Godfather and read it when I was about 13. First I was taken aback by the crazy wallbanging Sonny/Lucy sex, then sent into a complete spiral of confusion for the entire Giant Box Dilemma. What a book!
D:
This is all I have, really.
I remember reading this book as a teen and thinking 1) WTF about the giant vagina and the creepiest “surgeon” on earth and 2) they read this and saw high-art film in it?
The Godfather Pt. 1 is a roiling mafia thriller that’s just really well-paced and tells a simple but effective story about fathers and sons and corruption and whatever. Pt. 2 is where it got real ambitious, and also entirely too long to watch.
And then there’s Pt. 3
Did “The Godfather” start out as a one page dirty joke that got out hand?
How on earth did I read this book and forget this? Because I have read it, and have no memory of this subplot whatsoever. Surely that’s not right.
I’d forgotten too until I read this! I think my brain just deleted it because it was so bizarre, embarrassing and in terms of plot and tone is unrelated to the rest of the book. And Mallory’s right – it goes on forever!
God Mario Puzo rode the coattails of Coppola’s talent. (and the talent of DeNiro, Pacino, Brando, Keaton, Duvall, and Gordon Willis – that was a talented cast and crew)
Supposedly Lucy was meant to be the mother of Andy garcia’s character in godfather 3.
I get so much second-hand embarrassment from authors who just splash their blatant Freudian issues around like that.
I watched the movie with my dad as a teenager. I’d read the book some time before and all I could remember then, and now, were the bits about Lucy.
My dad felt the need to warn me about the scene with Sonny – “The movie’s, uh, gonna get a little racy.”
NO IT DIDN”T DAD. NOT COMPARED TO WHAT WAS IN MY HEAD.
Now I want a snatch built from 2x4s.
Splintery!
I read t his book when I was 15 (before I saw the movie) and I was terrified of having a huge vagina and needing vagina surgery and never satisfying a man because of the gaping maw that was my vagina.
Yes, me too! Especially since Lucy was plump, and so was I. Thought the two things were connected. I was so relieved when the first boy I slept with told me I was tight “down there.” Jesus!
Can’t believe I’m the first one to link to Storm Large’s “Eight Miles Wide”! (Warning: Hilarious and very sticky ear-worm.)
“My vagina is 8 miles wide
Absolutely everyone can come inside
If you’re ever frightened just run and hide
My vagina is 8 miles wide”
http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/35308221078588…
And yes, I also (a) read The Godfather 53,000 times in middle school, (b) passed it around among all the other giggly middle schoolers, with the dirty and violent passages dog-eared (I actually used it with a student who had trouble reading and who I was supposed to be helping — it sure did get him interested in reading!), and (c) thought for years afterwards that Ginormous Vagina-itis was actually a real thing, and was terrified that I would have it.
Crap. I think I put in the wrong link for “Eight Miles Wide.” Meant to link to the YouTube video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5U-YT-mRmI
“She is in the movie, albeit briefly”
I am now thinking about how actors prepare for roles, however minor.
Ahhhh pelvic floor dysfunction is a real thing you can be born with or develop and this is NOT how it works. BTW, haven’t read the book (NOT GOING TO NOW)–do we ever find out what “THE OFFICIAL JOURNALS” thought of his medical 2×4 mastery?
Don’t forget the part where, in the meantime, he says she can give him a blowjob and explains that it’s not a “fairy” thing because all the cowboys in the Old West whorehouses used to ask for it.
I would be remiss not to mention that Vikram Chandra's superlative Mumbai-based gangster/manners/post 9/11 freakout novel Sacred Games has a vaginal surgery subplot which is modern, pointed, critical, and feminist, in a book whose breadth and humanism really make The Godfather look like it's glorifying a bunch of dynastic sociopaths.
I kinda blocked this from my memory. But the book is rather mediocre. The movie was wise to leave out all this crap (and reduced Johnny Fontane’s role).