Saw this floating about

[conuly]

It's a Savage Love advice column, the person writing in wants to know if his penis could've shrunk since adolescence. (Answer: Probably not.)

What interests me is not all the discussion of penis measuring and how it might vary (though that is interesting as well) but the fact that the man writing in apparently thinks that "six and a half inches" is "pretty average".

It is not. An erect penis that length is well above average.

I'm not sure who's been telling people that six inches is somehow average, but it seems like the sort of fake statistic that's bound to make some people feel insecure, so now you know.

Comments

[miss_s_b]

I suspect that this is one of those things we can blame people getting their sex education from porn on: that's pretty small for porn.

I should say that I have no objection to porn per se, but when it's the only source of information people have and they don't realise how unrealistic it is, that's a problem...

[jack]

Although I doubt most people are very good at estimating by sight either, I'd guess they have a weird idea what to expect penises to look like from porn, but that they think "six inches" because they've heard it, not seen it.

[miss_s_b]

Yes, that's a fair point

[moon_custafer]

Yeah, I’ve seen height and weight estimates so far off that I’ve come to the conclusion that most people can’t estimate either with any accuracy, and fall back on what they’ve heard in descriptions, which means that depending on the community you can have people who insist six feet is average height for men, or people who say things like “he was the biggest guy I’ve ever seen, why he must have been six feet tall and two hundred pounds!” Or guys who say they wouldn’t date a fat woman, but define “fat” as anything over 115 lbs. And they also want her to have C-cup breasts.

[cosmolinguist]

I have a partner with a significantly above-average penis who also insists it's very average. And I have another whose is on the smaller side of average but he calls it things like miniscule and truly is very unhappy with it. It's fucking heartbreaking.

[miss_s_b]

The Arse Who Recently Dumped Me spent several months thinking I was "just being nice" before getting the tape measure out and being pleasantly surprised.

In hindsight that says a lot about how effectively we were communicating...

[cosmolinguist]

My comments on this topic are probably more appropriate for the next time we're drinking Czerwiks wine than they are for someone else's blog, so I'll stick with "<3" for now. :)

[miss_s_b]

* snuggle *

[hudebnik]

I seem to recall seeing "6-7 inches is average" in Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask), my main source on the subject when I was in my teens. (My mother gave it to me for my 13th birthday.) Can't put my hands on the book right now, but that might be where the letter-writer got it.

[conuly]

Argh!

[melannen]

...your mother gave you that when you were thirteen as your sex ed??? aaargh!

I'm pretty sure I picked '~7 inches' up from there at about that age too, but I read it in secret after finding it in the attic, because I knew it would be full of stuff the actual 'sex Ed for teens' book I had wouldn't cover. There's some... weird shit in there. Especially for a young teen.

[hudebnik]

It was certainly more fact-based than what I would get from other thirteen-year-olds, and less embarrassing than asking my mother, and more willing to discuss controversial subjects than an official Sex Ed class in school (where IIRC all questions about sex had to be submitted in writing a day in advance). It discussed oral sex, and even mutual oral sex, as normal and rewarding activities (I hadn't really thought about oral before). It mentioned homosexuality, perhaps not as a reasonable and normal way to do things but not as a gross un-Godly perversion either. I don't remember whether it mentioned transsexuality at all. But for the 1970's, it was pretty good.

[jessie_c]

Thus the joke:
Q: Why are women so terribly bad at parallel parking?

A: Because all their lives they've been told that this (hold fingers a tiny distance apart) is 6 inches.

[conuly]

LOL

[delight]

This was also the first thing I thought of.

[siderea]

Locally, the variant version is:

Q: Why can't Wellesley women parallel park?

A: Because MIT men keep telling them this [gesture] is 6 inches.

Which invites the response:

Q: Why do MIT engineers so over-build their bridges?

A: Because Wellesley women keep telling them this [gestures at self] is 100lbs.

[tielan]

*snerks*

[cosmolinguist]

Richard Herring is sometimes a comedian I dislike enormously but he did a project years ago called Talking Cock, which has a book associated with it as well as recordings of the stand-up version he did. It is very funny but it's also full of lots of interesting facts and a lot of them have to do with things like these misconceptions penis-havers (it's old and assumes that penis-havers are men, though :() have about them.

[negothick]

Did anyone suggest that his belly may have grown since adolescence, making anything south of there look. . . smaller?

[conuly]

Indeed, that was suggested as the most likely reason he thinks he's shrunk, combined with the fact that he probably didn't measure himself (either time) under rigorous conditions.

[negothick]

Sorry that I didn't read the advice column, but pleased that I could apparently have been writing it.

[larryhammer]

That 6 inches is the average is pervasive. I've seen it in erotic fiction and about-your-bodies non-fiction, constantly and consistently. I had no idea it's wrong.

[conuly]

It's closer to not-wrong if the penis is erect, which I assume is the case in most erotic fiction. It's still longer than average, but only but, like, half an inch. (6.5 inches is in the 95th %tile, though.)

[hudebnik]

Wait: I assumed we were talking about "erect" all along. Why would anybody care about the size of a non-erect penis? And I have the impression (this may also be from Everything You Ever Wanted To Know...) that the size of non-erect penises is much more variable than the size of erect penises, both from person to person and with environmental conditions (swimming in cold water springs to mind....)

[larryhammer]

The relative sizes of non-erect to erect penises does indeed vary widely. Some swell considerably, others are nearly full size when flaccid and simply stiffen.

[conuly]

Who knows why anybody would care about it? Why do they care about the size of their erect penis either?

[hudebnik]

Well, evolutionarily an erect penis has a specific job to do. If it's too small to impregnate a Person With Vagina, or large enough to injure a Person With Vagina, you don't reproduce. So size definitely matters to that extent.

Beyond that, it's a combination of myths and personal preferences. If my sex partner likes a specific size, it's in my interest to be that size. Somebody somewhere (probably a Person With Large Penis) decided that most People With Vaginas think larger is always better, and that theory spread regardless of factual evidence.

By contrast, a flaccid penis is subject to very little evolutionary selection pressure, as long as it doesn't impede locomotion.

[grammarwoman]

...It makes me wonder what people in metric-based number systems thinks is average length for a penis, like 15 cm? Because 6 inches is such a nice, average number in general, that it seems like a safe assumption to generalize for sizing.

[conuly]

That's a great question I never intend to google.

[pebblerocker]

Probably depends highly on the country and culture, but even after 50 years, certain things can resist metrication. People's heights and baby weights, because of what people are still used to, and yeah, this one - though I'm guessing media influence from the US is a bigger reason than actual facility with estimating and measuring dicks.

[kareina]

The width of my palms are both exactly 3 inches wide, so if I wrap my hands around a narrow object, one atop the other they will cover exactly six inches of length of said object. While I haven't had a large enough sample set for doing a good statistical analysis, I can anecdotally report that most of the erect penises I have held in both hands are, in fact pretty close to six inches in length, give or take about 1 cm. Therefore I have always assumed that the rumours of an "average" length for that body part was fairly accurate.

Oddly enough, I don't feel compelled to go looking to expand the sample set just to see if holding more of them will change that overall impression.

[conuly]

The average erect penis is something like 5.5 inches. The quoted man thought that six and a half inches was average, which it is not.

Edit: Also, we don't know if he measured himself, either time, erect. 6.5 inches is QUITE LARGE if the penis is NOT erect.

[greghousesgf]

I couldn't help laughing at "Don’t compare yourself to athletes, models, and actors. You’ll develop an unhealthy and unrealistic image of what is normal and how you should look." If somebody said that to women how many industries would collapse?

[siderea]

None, because doing so has never changed anything yet.

[tielan]

If I'd had coffee in my mouth reading this post and the comments, I'd have spat it.

FTR, I have seen exactly nil erect penises in RL - and I think the last un-erect penis I saw in RL was when I was maybe 12 and walked in on a same-age friend having a shower because he didn't lock the bathroom door - and I do not count porn, nude photos, hen's night playing cards, or romance novel descriptions as either accurate or representative of the general population.

[archangelbeth]

Long ago, I discovered http://www.erectionphotos.com/ (NOT SAFE FOR WORK BEYOND THE INITIAL LANDING PAGE, obviously. But very informative when seeking descriptions for smutty fanfic. Ahem.) Anyway, http://www.erectionphotos.com/ER-Research/length.htm corroborates that other site (and has a lot of pictures of various sizes, angles, and bends; it is very educational!).

[conuly]

Not so obvious - I would've assumed that the main page was NSFW too.

[archangelbeth]

Hee! True. It came from an era when landing pages for NSFW was the default, not the exception, and that's when I first found it, so...

[kutsuwamushi]

Weirdly, I know that six inches is above average but I still have this idea that it's like ...unmarked. What I mean is "six inches" seems to be a kind of go-to in written porn. It's above average but not implausibly so; it's flattering but not in a "he was hung like a horse" kind of way.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Well, I dunno. Both my husbands were well over six inches, and several of my lovers; don't think I encountered more than a couple of penises under about three and a half, so.... purely anecdotal and unscientific, I'd estimate the average is about 5 inches. And that's just fine, because the thing all these guys don't realize is that huge dongs hurt; nobody wants her cervix pounded to a pulp.

[conuly]

The average, erect, is just over 5 inches, like 5 and a quarter or 5 and a half. 6 inches isn't too far off average, but 6.5, like this guy claims, is in the 95th percentile. It's not average, it's statistically huge.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

It's like that old joke about how 95% of people think they're better-than-average drivers.

Focus on penis size is a 'red flag'. "Why exactly do you care so much about how big your dick is?" What'll you bet the truth is more about dominance and misogyny than about pleasure.