Figure 1 Hidden penis
So, how does yours measure up? Probably just fine. Most men have some concerns about their size and often sell themselves short. The average size of an erect penis is not as big as most men fear, and there are slight variations by nationality.
Although there’s really no need to grab the tape measure for healthy, happy sex, it’s often a source of relief to understand how well you actually stack up.
Why do men have so much concern about their penis dimension (as the late, great Frank Zappa called it)? It’s a natural human instinct to compare, whether you’re a man or a woman. Our brains like to differentiate and rank and organize. If we can see it, we try to compare it. This is bigger than that. We compare ourselves with others. Who’s taller? Who’s thinner? Who has more hair? We can’t help it, and every day we check our look in the mirror and then steal sidelong glances at everyone else. But there’s one little problem. There’s one part that we guys can see on ourselves that we can almost never see on someone else—the penis! Unless you happen to be a urologist like me, you really have a very limited understanding of the pageantry of the penis in all its various shapes and sizes. In fact, most likely you’ve caught some quick glances in a locker room or at a urinal or, if you are so inclined, had a more up-close and personal evaluation with a modest number of other penises, but your sample size of real-world penises is small. And if you think pornography is reflective of the real world, then you might as well think that the NBA is reflective of pickup basketball. Those guys are professionals and they have certain physical advantages that set them apart. So guys often wonder, and sometimes worry, and occasionally obsess—and almost always for no good reason. The truth is that the vast majority of men have a penis that is normal in length, width, and shape, but they just don’t have any context in which to realize it.
If you check yourself and then check another dude’s dangle, yours may look shorter for the simple reason that you may have an obstructed view of your own property, thanks to your gut. There may be a hill or perhaps a mountain blocking your view, and unless you manscape, there will be some bushes. From your point of view, you probably are shorting yourself by at least an inch—and that’s valuable real estate! As you get older, the pounds add up and gravity pulls the gut ever downward, like a glacier, inevitably swallowing up your mastodon.
Some men’s bodies are naturally configured to hide their penis. They may deposit excess fat around the base of the penis, making the shaft appear shorter. These men aren’t truly shortchanged because their erections are normally long, thick, and hard and the fat at the base yields to the force of the thrust.
Also, some men have a webbed scrotum that attaches partway up the shaft, making the remaining shaft look shorter.
Figure 1 Hidden penis
Figure 2 Webbed scrotum
Surveys have been conducted over the years to determine normal penis size. And this quest for average has even gone international, comparing size by country. These surveys are generally the result of doctors who care about these sorts of questions, measuring whomever walks in the door—with his permission, of course. Measuring the penis is no small undertaking. It’s hard to get your test subject to get it up in a sterile exam room with a white-coated, middle-aged scientist menacingly wielding a ruler. Plus it’s one thing to worry if you are small, but it’s another to have to actually measure up for real. So, for many studies, penis length is measured by stretching the penis while it is flaccid and measuring from the base of the penis or the pubic bone to the very tip of the head of the penis.1 There is some variability in what this measurement means since there is more or less abdominal fat above the penis from one guy to another. The more fat, the less that’s showing and the shorter the measurement. Circumference, or girth, is measured with an erect penis, usually at the midshaft.
After a certain number of measurements, these doctors have stretched enough penises to claim that they have clinically meaningful results. But there are limits to what can be concluded. Height has been shown to weakly correlate with penis size in some well-done studies. Bigger men tend to be bigger, but it’s not an absolute by any means. Other very weak correlations were seen with shoe size and even with the size of the pointer finger or the ratio of the size of the pointer finger to the size of the ring finger.2, 3, 4, 5, 6
What all this means is that to properly compare different nationalities or races, you have to make sure that everyone in the study is the same height and weight and wears the same size shoes and gloves—sort of like doing a study on the Rockettes, except the Rockettes don’t have penises. What you really have to do is have enough people from each country that the different body types of men are the same in each group, and that takes a lot more pud pulling than has been done so far. Unfortunately, some researchers have published papers promoting well-known racial stereotypes about different races and penis sizes, claiming that blacks had bigger penises than whites, who had bigger penises than Asians.7 But when you really take a good look at the naked data, there’s not a whole lot there. Many studies and Web sites that promote racial differences use unscientific means to collect their information and even ignore information that contradicts the findings they are trying to prove.
The best evaluation so far has been conducted by David Veale and his colleagues at King’s College London. They did a study of all the other studies that were actually scientifically sound, and the results are in. The average size of a man’s penis when soft is about 9 centimeters, give or take 1.5 centimeters when stretched. The average size when erect is a little over 13 centimeters, give or take about 2 centimeters. The average soft circumference is a little over 9 centimeters, give or take about a centimeter, and the average erect girth is about 11 centimeters, give or take about a centimeter.8 So there you have it: the whole world in the palm of your hand.
The Internet has become a research tool of sorts, and anonymous studies of penis length have been conducted. Interestingly, when men self-report their penis sizes, the results are about 1 centimeter bigger. Give them an inch and they’ll take a centimeter.9
The average penis size is between 5.1 and 5.6 inches.
Figure 3 Average penis size
Men will often come to see doctors such as myself, concerned that their penis is too small. In the vast majority of cases, the man’s penis is totally normal in size. These average guys suffer from small penis syndrome.10 Yes, that’s an actual medical term, and it’s a well-known affliction. Fortunately, when these men are educated with the kind of information you are reading now, they realize they are okay and they get on with worrying about all the other little things in life. Some men aren’t so easily straightened out. These men are obsessive and suffer from what is known as body dysmorphic disorder.11 These men are really hung up on how hung they are, and it’s an irrational concern. It’s thought to be a similar disorder of perception as seen with anorexia, in which people always think they are too fat. And yes, there are men whose penis is smaller than average, just as there are men whose chins are smaller than average or whose ears are smaller than average or whose noses are smaller than average. The penis is considered smaller than average when it is 2 standard deviations below average. A standard deviation is a measure of how spread out everyone’s measurements really are, so unless you are more than twice as different from the average size, you are still average.12 In fact, at most about 2 percent of men have a penis that is considered smaller than normal, and these men are not necessarily coming in with a complaint. This would amount to a soft penis measuring under 6 centimeters and a stretched penis smaller than 9.5 centimeters. There is a more severe condition in which the man’s penis does not grow properly from birth on, known as micro penis. Here the man’s penis is 2½ standard deviations below average.13 This is a soft penis less than 5.2 centimeters and a stretched penis less than 8.5 centimeters long. Even these men typically have satisfying, loving sexual relationships. As long as your body is healthy and functioning, there is no good reason to stress over dimensions you don’t control. Yes, you can gain or lose weight, but your shoe size remains the same. Your hands don’t get bigger or smaller, and your penis doesn’t change either—aside from being less hidden by fat, of course. Take your natural body, keep it as healthy as you can, and enjoy it, and just as importantly, bring someone else enjoyment. That’s the most important bar to measure up to.
So what accounts for the differences that do exist? We are born with a set of instructions built into every cell of our bodies that determines most of the way we turn out—eye color, hair color, and penis size. But inherited genes are not the whole story by any means. There are other things that influence how our body parts grow. Nutrition plays a role. The better our nutrition, the more those genes can do their thing since nutrition provides the building blocks that the genes utilize. Can nutrition affect penis size? The answer is potentially yes—if humans are like rats—and I know some who are. Researchers have determined that rats fed excess cholesterol have shrinkage in their penises due to effects on epigenes. Epigenes are like volume controls on the ends of the genes making them more or less pronounced. Maybe too many foot-longs will cost you an inch.14
But wait—there’s more. The most powerful influence over the growth and development of the penis comes from hormones such as testosterone. Chapter 20, The Making and Unmaking of a Penis, explains in detail how the penis forms from the early embryo through puberty, and how imbalances in those hormones can cause the penis to be underdeveloped or to grow too much (yes, too much).
When it comes to penis size, there’s a lot less difference in the bedroom than in the locker room. This phenomenon is well characterized by the phrase “growers versus showers.” With some men, what you see is mainly what you get, and with others, it’s just a sneak preview. The reason for this size surprise is based in how the tissue of the penis is formed at the molecular level. The cylinders of the penis that fill up with blood are made out of a special weave of collagen and elastin. Collagen makes the penis tough and durable—like the Kevlar in body armor—and elastin is like the elastic in your underwear waistband. Woven together, this combination makes the penis stretchy but strong. Growers have more elastin and less collagen and showers have less elastin and more collagen. Growers are smaller at rest and larger at play. Growers are just as big erect as showers, proving the old adage “Don’t judge a book by its cover”—that is, if it’s a softcover. Growers are also more sensitive to climate change—that is, shrinkage in the cold. Most men who are distraught with their penis size are growers and are often more concerned about how they appear in the locker room than in the bedroom. If a man is really anxious about the appearance of his penis, the anxiety itself can make it worse because anxiety releases adrenaline, which makes the blood vessels in the penis contract, shrinking the penis even more.
Sadly, almost half of all men think they are smaller than normal when in fact they are not. Women are a bit more objective, and more than 85 percent of women size up their partners as completely normal.15 But do women really want an 8-inch penis? No, they don’t. According to studies, they actually want penises that are about average. In fact, the average vagina is 9.6 centimeters, give or take 1.5 centimeters,16 and 2.8 to 3.6 centimeters wide.17
Women who were surveyed preferred girth over length when they had a preference.18 You know what women do like to be large? The heart. That’s right, most women rank personal connection over penis size as important to sexual satisfaction.
Almost half of men who seek medical attention for the size of their penis admit that they feel small based on what they see in pornography.19, 20, 21
The average porn star is close to 8 inches when erect, but remember, studies report the average man is actually about 5.2 inches erect, with 90 percent of men measuring from 4 inches to 6.3 inches.
So what gives? Is this data just a conspiracy of poorly endowed scientists trying to justify their junk? No. The porno penis is not typical. It’s an exception. But that doesn’t mean that it’s exceptional. Pornography is not all it’s cracked up to be, so to speak. There are many pitfalls both to the viewer and the performer. Chapter 6, Sex, Lies, and Videotape: The Hard Facts about Pornography, penetrates deeply into this topic.