If you were paying attention to the headline-grabbing work of pioneering sexologist Alfred Kinsey in the years after World War Two, you would have learned that the average length of an erect penis is around 6. Because Kinsey and his team were the first to get granular over penis size, and the first to be famous for conducting such titillating research, these figures enjoyed incredible staying power over the subsequent decades.
Thing is, the majority of men who obsess over having a penis they perceive as being too small, are well within the actual average range. Before you dust off your ruler, here's some background on how the figures get wobbly. Incredibly, simply asking a non-representative bunch of guys to just tell you how big their dicks are was still regarded as an acceptable way to gather penis size data throughout the rest of the 20th Century.
In the s, Durex commissioned a rather non-representative survey that saw the average erect length and girth had risen to 6. In , Durex competitor Lifestyles actually had two nurses measure each of hardened volunteers for their study. This was progress of a sort, but again it was mainly US college students being measured so it was not a sample representative of all ethnic backgrounds and ages.
Despite the choice reading material on offer, 25 percent of volunteers were unable to scare up a serviceable boner and, even those who did may have seen their true maximum engorgement impinged by the sheer volume of tequila and Corona-Light sloshing around their sunburned bodies.
The erect length and girth was recorded as 5. In , Debby Herbenick—also of the Kinsey Institute—decided to gather self-reported penis measurement data by incentivising respondents to be more accurate with by offering to match them up with a better fitting condom. She noted an average length of 5. In particular, Herbenick saw that respondents who became aroused via oral sex before measuring tended to be larger that those who bootstrapped a stiff one. While incentivising a more honest measurement was a canny move by Herbenick, the following year, a team of British researchers decided to do away with self-reported measurements altogether and hand the ruler to the professionals.
When the results came in the average penis size was once again, revised downwards. Veale reckoned it at 5. Bearing in mind that the method by which an erection is attained may affect the measurement, do what you need to work up a maximally engorged subject.
Place a transparent plastic ruler on the dorsal upper side surface of the penis. Then press the base of the ruler towards the pubic bone, the pubo-penile junction. Really jam it in there as far as you can. The reading you are going to take is at the very tip of the glans or head.
This gelatinous obstruction is no trifle: the more excess fat a man accumulates, the more the penis is buried, causing it to effectively lose length.
Now girth. Having used standard measuring methodology and in light of recent, non-self reported data, many men who obsessively ruminate on the size of the penis should have a less distorted perspective on how they stack up against the mean and, in so doing, may find them less susceptible to Short Penis Syndrome.
Apr 3 , pm.