does size really matter? just ask evolution…

Evolution and surveys by scientists and condom manufacturers could answer every heterosexual man's age-old question...

All fans of Letterkenny, the Canadian show about living in the eponymous small town in the middle of nowhere and it’s quirky residents — not to be confused with the other Canadian show about living in the eponymous small town in the middle of nowhere — know that “Ma’ Hutchins” is the greatest sitcom cold open of all time. But close to the awkward comic brilliance of turning a low brow gag into high art may be a cold open featuring the male half of Letterkenny’s famous swinger couple barging into a public access TV studio to proudly and excitedly announce to townships across Ontario that he has “a five-point-one-five-inch-penis!” Cue the brutal jokes you expected.

After having his manhood mocked and belittled, literally, called “peasant” while being compared to candy bars, McMurray, the character in question, was left on the verge of tears instead of getting to celebrate his moment of personal triumph. And yet, this bit and its attendant jokes do highlight something important. Boys often grow up with very skewed ideas of masculinity, and learn about sex from porn that gives teenage boys a complex. As they grow up, they often end up worried that they’re inadequate under the belt and therefore, in constant danger of losing partners to better endowed, and thus manlier, men, a worry countless women meet with frustrated groans.

On top of that, the average human penis is still the biggest in length, girth, size, and in proportion to the body when put up against that of any other ape species. Enormous gorillas that could tear a human in half with little effort measure two inches or so when standing at full attention. Chimpanzees and bonobos max out at roughly two thirds of McMurray’s “pedestrian effort” that researchers say is perfectly average. So, why are men so obsessed with their penis size, and why does so much media targeted at men emphasize that bigger and more is always better, even when heterosexual women are shaking their heads and wincing in abject terror?

when evolution is about wants, not needs

Well, if evolutionary psychologist Carole Jahme is right, then the blame rests with you, ladies. Thanks to your preferences in mates, the human penis grew in size to become more flexible, losing the small bone of its evolutionary relatives. There weren’t many advantages to this change in physiology other than pleasing the female eye, among other things, but that’s all that matters from an evolutionary standpoint since without a shot at reproduction, your line will go extinct. Just like peacocks advertise their fan-like tails to show off their virility and success in avoiding predators, our ancestors may have advertised our penises for similar reasons when nude.

In that light, the function of a dick pic is very similar to male lions with lush, dark, thick manes to attract more females, and the absurd, titanic antlers of the now extinct Irish Elk, used to attract potential mates and intimidate rivals. Human penises followed the same selective pressures, as we see with typically male contests in which penis sizes served to establish the perception of fertility and sexual athleticism in a bid to attract women and intimidate other men. Likewise, since human sperm competes to fertilize eggs, a larger set of testicles and higher sperm production should’ve resulted in more offspring who inherited the sexual characteristics of their parents.

Armed with all that information, we can come back to the perpetual male question of whether the man asking it is adequately endowed to attract any woman’s attention. If sexual selection explains why humans have the genitals they do today, implying that at some point, larger sizes meant more chances and higher status in the mating pool, this insecurity makes sense. Not only is it hardwired, it’s constantly exacerbated even in an age of space exploration, AI, and pizza-making robots by explicit media custom made to do just that. Our prudish treatment of the topic, oscillating between juvenile and disparaging tut-tutting, helps even less.

how to know if you’re kenough

So, what is adequate? If science can give us an educated guess why we care about it in the first place, can it also give us a reasonable answer? Actually, it can, thanks to a little math and deduction. While for many men the idea of adequate size comes from adult entertainment, porn is a terrible source of information here because it’s fantasy that portrays a narrow slice of the population, based on subjective criteria, using a lot of creative camera tricks. Instead, they should consult the distribution of penis sizes measured by condom maker Ansell, which needed objective data to create products that would properly fit their customers.

According to their data, 70% of males have a penis length between 5.5 and 7 inches, with nearly a quarter of males measuring between 5.5 and 6 inches. After the 6 inch mark, there’s a rapid drop-off in sizes, so men endowed with 7 or more inches you’d typically see in porn make up just 5% of the population. What does all that tell us? If women preferred very large penises, we’d expect to see a more even distribution of endowments between 5.5 and 9 inches (the largest size recorded by the survey, just under 0.1% of subjects), or a skew towards the larger end of the scale. By contrast, this bell curve hints that the preferred size is between 5.5 and 6.5 inches.

On a side note, it might be interesting to look back after a number of generations to note if penis sizes will increase in any meaningful way thanks to the influence of pop culture. My guess would be that constraints on the male anatomy will stay in place for quite a while since there’s more to sex than just size. A male at the top 1% of the size distribution chart might actually cause a lot more pain than anything else. After all, in this case of sexual selection it’s about what women want, not necessarily what males think will intimidate the competition and make a statement to potential mates, and the size distribution shows that quite well.

note: A version of this post was originally published on 05.12.2010 on the old blog. It was extensively updated with more details, illustration from a Thai contraceptive ad.