What's a Better Word for "Dong"?

What attracts me to it, other than serendipity, is the purity of its awfulness… coupled with its naked, flailing whorish ambition to seduce. It is working so very hard, and so very transparently, to solicit readerly enthusiasm that one can only love it for how earnest it is in its hapless badness.

- Wyatt Mason, "Gilded Loins" post on Sentences, 19 November 2008

In a moment of cabin-fever delirium, my boyfriend and I decided to write a romance novel. The idea is so awful that it just might work. Apparently, about 50% of all paperbacks sold are romance novels, and many mediocre writers have dove into this genre in hopes of making a meager buck or two. There is an idea to pitch together a Victorian era woman with an exotically lineaged man, but seeing how most of the readers are women, and they are the ones fantasizing about the male protagonist, I need to make this male character more enticing than, say, a random Chinese man in turn-of-the-century Shanghai, whose life I am well adept at recreating. Apparently.

But I am a big fan of Wyatt Mason's, and if I end up writing this and getting it published, I hope to elicit equally acerbic criticism for a work that is at least much more honest than most of the other stuff out there.

If not, at least I would have had the chance to look up from my notes and asked Ian, "Hey, what's a better word for 'dong'?"