Male Penis Size Irrelevant In Study

Does Size Really Matter? Ask Evolution…


Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Human males have larger penises, in length, girth, absolute size and proportion to body size when compared with the penises of all other ape species. How did this happen? According to evolutionary psychologist, Carole Jahme, women are to blame, or to be congratulated. Because of women's preferences in selection of males, 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 impregnating the woman of your choice, your line will go down the proverbial toilet.…

Human penises followed the same selective pressures, as we see with typically male contests in which penis size serves to establish the perception of fertility and sexual athleticism in a bid to attract women and intimidate other men. Likewise, since human sperm compete to fertilize eggs, a larger set of testicles and higher sperm production help fertilize more eggs and produce more offspring who inherit the sexual characteristics of their parents.

So what about the often heard male question regarding whether he’s adequately endowed to attract women’s attention? If sexual selection can explain why humans have the genitals they do today, could it provide at least a couple of clues there? Well, as a matter of fact, it can. While for many young men the idea of adequate size comes from watching adult entertainment, porn is really a bad source of information. It portrays a narrow slice of the population based on very subjective criteria. Instead, we can look at the distribution of penis sizes as measured by condom maker Ansell, which shows that nearly 25% of males have a penis which measures between 5.5 and 6 inches. After the 6 inch mark, there’s a rapid drop-off in sizes and males endowed with 7 or more inches make up only 5% of the population compared to the 70% of males with a length between 5.5 and 7 inches.

What does that tell us? If women preferred very large penises, we would expect to see either a more even distribution of male endowments between 5.5 and 9 inches (the largest size recorded by the survey, found in just under 0.1% of the group), or a skew towards the larger end of the scale. This indicates that the preferred size for human females is in the 5.5 to 7 inch range, primarily between 5.5. and 6.5 inches. Seven inches and over is more of an oddity, the likes of which we tend to see in porn.

On a side note, it might be interesting to look back after a number of generations to note if penis sizes increased in any meaningful way thanks to the influence of pop culture. The consensus would be that constraints on the male anatomy will stay in place for quite a while since there’s more to sex than just a certain penis size. A male at the top 1% of the size distribution chart might actually cause a lot more pain than pleasure. 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 a potential mate, and the size distribution demonstrates that quite well.