Russia's man losing his manhood?

This was an amusing little article. With Russia's so-called election coming up, it looks like Vladimir Putin is running against...well, a less manly version of himself.

Putin is more or less guaranteed to win the presidential election March 4, but a new puppet show satire has him as two different versions: One of his usual domineering, self-assured and authoritative self, (i.e., below) and one of him without his "trouser snake addendum" as Louise Rennison puts it in her books featuring Georgia Nicholson. (A fantastic read, by the way.)

Ooooh how manly, with the fishing reel
casually sticking out from his upper thigh like that.
Photo from opendemocracy.net.

According to Reuters, the play is based on a short story about an official whose nose decides to wander off on its own. In this version, Putin loses his genitalia and becomes a weak, impotent "anti-Putin" until he can rediscover what's missing.

"There is a constant dialogue between the authoritarian Putin, the tyrant, who has a constant erection, and the more democratic (anti-Putin), who shows no aggression, no eroticism, and has no penis,"said Alexander Donskoy, founder of the museum, in the Reuters article.

Kudos to the Moscow Erotic Museum of Art for deciding to take this one step further, and on the eve of the election, no less.

I hope Putin sees this as a satire and not a serious attack  against his persona, otherwise the producers of the show could (and probably would) be in some serious trouble. After all, freedom of the press is still questionable in Russia. And if he doesn't, then it looks like he has some ego problems about his manhood.