Can you even imagine a time before “Dick in a Box”? The Saturday Night Live digital short is so commonly watched, so commonly loved and so pervasive that life without it seems like another era. Everyone loves “Dick in a Box”. Now, I know there’s nothing like critical analysis to really kill a joke, but the satire of “Dick in a Box” is so dead-on that it’s worth looking at.

I really hate to mix my Freud and my Andy Samberg, but when it’s this blatant I can’t help it: “Dick in a Box” is a penis envy story. The psychoanalysis of the date portrayed in the video would be as follows: two-year-old Maya Rudolph is shocked and disappointed to learn that she does not, in fact, have a penis. She desires a penis (most readily her father’s), but displaces her desire for her father’s penis onto Andy Samberg’s penis. He presents it to her (and in a box, no less!). Problem solved.

The humor in the video comes from the women reacting to their gifts in a totally unrealistic way — no woman actually wants a “Dick in a Box” (Gentlemen, if this is news, I’m sorry). The video conveys how silly this is, and critiques a society that is somehow still hung up on penis envy as a way of explaining gender relations.

I really don’t like penis envy as a concept. Feminist critics of Freud contend that penis envy is seriously problematic because it presents women as lacking, and obsessed by their lack of, something that men have. At best, it’s Freud’s misguided assessment of a sexist, patriarchal society; and at worst, it’s a justification used to enforce that society.

To show the women in the video as thrilled and grateful for their gift of a penis is to reinforce the idea that they felt that they were lacking one all along. Would the video have been materially less funny if it had shown disgusted women rejecting the gift of the penis?

Well...yes, because women who are not happy with a penis that is presented to them are sexually harassed women. I really hate to do this, because I like funny things, and rape just makes anything less funny, but “Dick in a Box” certainly has a subtle rape narrative. Luckily, Maya and Kristen Wiig, cued by Freud, are thrilled by their gift, so they express consent after the fact. But really, the sexual exchange in “Dick in a Box” is scarily one-sided.

The assumption that a woman wants to engage with your penis, or that she should engage with your penis regardless of whether or not she wants to, is the premise on which rape is based. The reason the video can’t show the women rejecting the gift (and Freud), as good feminists would, is that it would paint a picture too close to rape for SNL to handle. In all the lyrical musings on why and how they are giving their girlfriends dicks in boxes, there is never any discussion of whether the women want or will enjoy this gift. Step three, after all, is make her open the box. Why not leave her some sexual autonomy and let her open the box?

Perhaps this part of the video satirizes men’s control, or perceived control, of heterosexual encounters. But I find it hard to imagine that SNL consciously chose to deal with rape in a digital short. I think that, in joking about the worst possible gift a man could give a woman, they stumbled upon the problem of rape lurking in their narrative, and they don’t address its presence at all, because they don’t know how to. And that makes for a problematic satire.

I don’t think “Dick in a Box”, or its popularity, is a bad thing, by any means — we should have creative discourse on gender relations and sexuality. We don’t even need to have “discourse,” because that’s pretentious — we can have funny YouTube videos about penises.

When we laugh about “Dick in a Box,” when we accept it into our culture so completely and pervasively, we accept an incomplete satire that portrays male control of sex without addressing it. Perhaps we should be more critical of how it treats, and fails to treat, sex.