From an early age one hears the complaint, sometimes disguised, about being under-endowed. According to the American sexologist Barry McCarthy, two out of three men think their penis is too small. He attributes their worries about the length of their penises to various factors.
In the first place little boys see their father’s penis for the first time when they are at an impressionable age. Second, in changing rooms one usually sees another person’s penis from the front: the other person’s penis appears to be bigger because a man can only see his own penis from above. Seen from above, however, there is what visual artists call ‘foreshortening’. The penis seems smaller than it really is. Third, flaccid penises can differ widely in length, while in erect ones on the other hand there is never that much difference. And fourth, men don’t know much about the subject in general, because they don’t like talking openly about these kinds of intimate matters.
The problem of penis length is as old as the hills: in eighteenth- century Normandy it was for that reason customary for midwives to keep the umbilical cords of male babies relatively long. If the cord was pulled too tight in tying it and was therefore cut off too short, the member would be pulled inside.
In 1899 the German doctor Loeb carried out research with fifty men between eighteen and 53: the length of the visible part of the flaccid penis varied from 8 to 11 cm (average 9.4 cm) and the circumference from 8 to over 10 cm. It emerged from the Kinsey Report that only a quarter of men have an erect penis of ‘average’ size. But extremes are rare: 5 per cent of men have an erection of less than 9 cm and only і per cent can boast a massive erection of over 20 cm.
Doctor Jacobus x was the pseudonym of a surgeon in the French army who devoted years of his life to examining and measuring hundreds of sex organs of men and women from all over the world. Comparative research was his passion. In 1935 he published the results of his work, which showed that black Africans had the longest penises, varying when flaccid from і2 to і5 cm, and erect from і9 to 29 cm. Jacobus observes that penis size is always commensurate with vagina size in the same race. ‘Hindustani women, whose men have slim, short penises, will have difficulty in accommodating the average European,’ wrote the army doctor, ‘and in their eyes the huge penis of a black African would be an instrument of torture.’
Jacobus appears to be saying that nature ensures that people of the same race seek each other out. From this perspective mixing of the races is unnatural. Nowadays we would frown at such views but in the 1930s such notions were not uncommon.
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However, Piesol’s manual of anatomy (1907) already states that in comparison with other organs penis size is not connected with physical development. You cannot tell the length of a man’s penis from his nose, as some mothers-in-law occasionally maintain. There is, though, according to the scientists Siminoski and Bain, a statistically significant correlation between a man’s shoe size and the length of his penis.
A particular form of small penis is the penis palmatus. In this case the penis is not in fact too small, but appears to be so because the penis and the skin of the scrotum have as it were grown together to form a kind of web. It is usually sufficient to cut the web across and reattach it lengthways.
Occasionally even politicians become involved with stiff penises. In 1993 a debate developed in the European Parliament on penis length. A Dutch Green mp asked the Commission to put an end to ‘the squabbling about eu norms for condoms’. What was the problem? There had to be European norms for everything under the sun. The British argued for a compromise on the length and diameter of the European penis. In their view an average erect length of 17 cm and 5.6 cm diameter was a gross underestimate. The average British penis, they maintained, was considerably larger. The Dutch mep asked the Commission if it did not agree that, in view of obvious sensitivities that existed regarding the establishment of the average length of the sexual organ, it would be sensible simply to allow each country to maintain its own average, or in any case to debate it at a level below the European one. She saw a European charter for the condom as an alternative possibility. Member states could then argue for exceptions to the statistically estimated average. ‘And if the gentlemen simply can’t crack the problem, perhaps the male member itself should be standardized, I’m curious to know what the regulation wonks in Brussels would come up with,’ concluded the mep.
The psychologist Erick Janssen was commissioned by the Amsterdam condom store The Golden Fleece to investigate the circumference of the erect penis. If a condom is too tight, it can lead to complaints, ranging from ‘doesn’t fit’ to ‘chokes everything off’, while a condom that is too loose can of course slide off prematurely. He found that the average diameter of the fully erect penis was approximately 121 mm, with a relatively large spread, from 90 to 161 mm. It also emerged that in a quarter of the test subjects the circumference of the erect penis was less than 110 mm, in three-quarters less than 130 mm and in 90 per cent less than 140 mm. In 10 per cent the circumference of the erect penis was over 140 mm. The researcher’s conclusion was that good consumer advice on condoms should always contain information on penis thicknesses in relation to various sizes of condom.
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In ancient Tantric texts the length of the penis is measured from the perineum, that is, from beneath the testicles. Measured in this way penises of up to 30 cm are quite normal. Perhaps we Westerners are selling ourselves short, and perhaps it feels ‘fuller and more whole’ if you include the testicles as well.