We were in the pub when apropos of nothing Andrew announced that he had a small penis.

If I were a better, kinder, nicer person I would have resorted to comforting clichés: size doesn’t matter or dynamite comes in small packages. Instead I launched straight into journalist mode and starting asking questions: did he mean smaller than average, or were we talking micro-penis?
“That’s a bit harsh,” he protested, looking upset.
A micro-penis is a medical term, I explained, not a malicious insult. The average penis is 5 to 5.5 inches when erect, whereas the micro-penis clocks in at 3 inches or less. Like red diamonds, micro-penises are unusual and rare – less than one percent of men have them.
Enrique Iglesias may have one. During a concert, the Spanish singer declared that he had “the smallest penis in the world”, complaining he could never find condoms that fit. When a condom company offered him $1 million to advertise their petite prophylactics, Iglesias withdrew his comments, claiming he’d been joking.
You can’t really blame Iglesias for being circumspect, if indeed he was telling the truth. The actor and heartthrob Montgomery Clift was reputedly under-endowed, receiving the unflattering nickname “Princess Tinymeat” as a result.
Earlier this year, a bar in Brooklyn held a “smallest penis pageant.” The event was well attended but just six men took part, three of them wore masks, and none of them used their real names. The winner, who called himself The Delivery Man, noted that, “We’re all made in different shapes and sizes, but the media puts pressure on people to look a certain way. Most people do not look that way.”
That’s true enough. Most guys do not have colossal cocks, and yet the cultural obsession with penis size is definitely a male one. I am not claiming that women don’t care at all – we do, but only to a certain extent (more about that later) – but it is more than a little disconcerting that so many men seem to be fixated on their dicks.
Research recently published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine found that 30 percent of men were discontented with their penis, 35 percent were happy and the rest fell somewhere in between. However, none of this was related to the objective measured size itself. Like all forms of body dissatisfaction, it was perception, not reality, that determined a man’s emotional response to his penis.
Andrew had taken exception to something that had appeared in the news section of this column a while back – a list of penis sizes around Europe. The Irish had not done very well in this comparison, coming in second last apparently, with an average size of 5 inches. Hungarians came top of the list, claiming to be packing
6.5 inches.
As I explained to Andrew these figures came from self-reporting surveys, which are not particularly reliable. People measure differently; round up or down; fudge the details; confuse centimetres with inches; or guess – the same way women are infamous for getting their bra size wrong.
You can hardly blame the average Joe for being concerned with penis size, when certain people who are highly educated and should know better consider big penises to be manlier than small ones.
In 2011, the US government came under fire for funding a study measuring gay men’s penises. The researchers theorised that size correlated to whether or not a man was a ‘top’, a ‘bottom’ or versatile, the presumption being that if you have a small dick you are more likely to be the ‘woman’ during anal sex. This is a very heterosexist way of looking at gay sex, and the size of your penis does not determine how much of a man you are.
It seems odd to me that people would think this. Consider this, dear male readers: if, heaven’s forbid, you had a horrible castrating accident tomorrow, would you suddenly become a woman? No, of course not – because gender identity doesn’t have a one-t0-one correlation with your genitals.
A few years back the singer Moby claimed he wanted to produce porn featuring ‘smaller sized’ male stars. “My porn flick would exclusively feature men with normal-to-titchy-sized penises in order to make viewers feel better,” he said.
Considering that the majority of professional porn is made for straight male viewers, it does seem odd that larger dicks are the norm for stars, and that camera angles and all sorts of trickery, such as close cropped pubes are used to make male stars appear even better endowed.
I can’t help but suspect that even in straight porn, big dicks are featured for men’s enjoyment, not women’s. The humungous dick is a sexual fantasy, but for the most part it is more of a male fantasy than a female one. Even the slang “size queen” refers to gay men who have sex exclusively with larger-than-average men and is not a term generally used for women.
Is penis size important to women? It depends. Research suggests that it matters up to a point, but that after a certain size, bigger is not necessarily better. A 2012 study found that women who experience frequent vaginal orgasms are much more likely to prefer men who are well endowed, while women who generally climax through clitoral stimulation are not that fussed about penetrative sex or penis size.
For most women, average is absolutely fine – it’s the outliers that cause problems. What’s more, too big is just as much, if not more, of an issue than a little too little.
My friend’s ex-boyfriend was, shall we say, generously gifted in the trouser department. “Like a deli salami,” was how she described him. This meant that certain positions were difficult, and some impossible, as they were more likely to cause her to cry out in pain than pleasure.
One night he suggested anal.
“Ha, ha, ha,” she laughed mirthlessly. “No.”
“Can we talk about this?” he asked.
“Ha, ha, ha,” she laughed again. “No.”
“I loved him,” she told us later, “but not as much as I loved not suffering from incontinence.” Which is a fair point, you have to admit.
Frankly I wished I’d never written up the damn survey results, because since then I’ve been hounded (hounded!) by men wanting to discuss their penis size with me.
It is as if I have been collecting my own self-reporting survey, and judging from the braggarts and big mouths, it appears that most of the men I know are either a) larger than average, or b) notorious liars.
I suspect I know which, but I may just start carrying a measuring tape and latex gloves in my handbag. After all, I am happy to do my bit for science.