Compare Your Penis Size Against The Latest Studies

Behold the latest study in the Journal Of Sex Medicine–the mean length and width of penises, by race and ethnicity. Notice the mean for everybody is less than six inches. 

Ahem.

To give a fuller, more rounded picture (not just dick size, but the bodies they’re hanging off) I’ve added height/weight figures from the Centers For Disease Control (CDC):

Size Category	Black Men	White Men	Hispanic Men
Mean Length of Penis (in inches)	5.77	5.58	5.57
Mean circumference (in inches)	4.83	4.82	4.89
Mean Height	5’8”	5’8”	5’6”
Mean Weight	198 lbs.	202 lbs.	191 lbs.
BMI	29.0	29.1	30.0

Let’s discuss the findings in this chart. 

Penile Differences Are Statistically Insignificant

The difference in penile length and circumference between the races is statistically insignificant. This study is relatively consistent with the results of prior surveys.

There Are No Penis Size Differences Between Races

Contrary to popular mythology, African-American men don’t have bigger penises. It’s worth mentioning that you should stop using shoe size or other stand-ins for the cloth ruler. There are no “markers” or clues that tell you whether a man sports a taco or a burrito. The best way to tell if a man is hung isn’t by looking at his hands, feet or nose.  It’s by sleeping with him.

We Are Fat As Fuck

Among males in the U.S., the mean Body Mass Index (BMI) is 29, which is on the high end of the “Overweight” classification. Obesity starts at a BMI of 30. That means, as a country, we’re 1 point away from obesity!  

Think about what that means. In just a few years most of us will be obese!  Is intercourse going to be limited to guys who get trapped in our gravitational pull? How are we going to hang our partners over the railing and pound the dust out of their rugs if we’re too winded to try?

Being overweight can turn you into a sexual camel, where you go great lengths of time without sex.  That’s because high cholesterol causes plaque build-up in your blood vessels, which then slows blood flow to your genitals making it more difficult to get aroused, have an orgasm, or obtain an erection. 

A high BMI can also lower testosterone levels, the “sex drive” hormone, lowering your drive, desire, performance, or all three. 

And worse (to some of us) being overweight may also have an effect on penis size. When skin and fat form around the base of the penis they can hide part of it, making your dick look smaller and, for all practical purposes, less able to get the job done because it’s hiding under a pad of skin.

If you’re flabbergasted (appalled over how much weight you’ve gained) it’s time to do something about it.  Forget about diets; they don’t work. Instead, use proven psychological strategies like habituation to wean yourself off sugar and desensitization to reduce the amount of food you eat without suffering or feeling deprived.  My book, Quit Sugar Like Addicts Quit Drugs, NEED LINK. will show you how.  See the back of the book for a quick synopsis.

There are other books that can help you do this, including Intuitive Eating, The Joy of Half A Cookie, and Mindless Eating.

Size Doesn’t Matter

They say gay men judge potential partners with this formula: Penis size divided by credit score. I don’t subscribe to that stereotype and neither should you. The totality of sexual pleasure has very little to do with size. Reducing men to a hash mark on a ruler is one of those ignorant, hurtful conceits that gets in the way of great sex.

Final Thoughts

I’m confident this series on how to top will help you do it like a porn star, minus the drugs, the wooden dialog, and the bomp-chicka-wow-wow music. My goal is to give you the home bed advantage—that confident feeling from fucking in your own surroundings, armed with brighter ideas and next-level skills.

How To Measure Your Dick

When you look at your own penis you’re looking down. When you see other men in a locker room you’re looking across. 

This gives you an unfair basis of comparison because looking down compresses the visual line while looking across expands it.  The result? False evidence you’re smaller than everyone around you.

But this is quite literally an optical illusion. It’s caused by the different angles you use to make visual comparisons. You can easily stop the illusion with a simple trick: Don’t look down; look in the mirror.  

Once you look at your dick at the same angle you look at other men’s dicks, you come to an inescapable conclusion: You’ve been wrong about the size of your dick. Some experts joke that this simple trick (looking in the mirror) adds an “optical inch” to your prized possession. More to the point, it puts back the optical inch you lose when you look down instead of across.

The Six-Inch Myth

The average penis size is not six inches. The “six-inch myth” got started when Kinsey did his landmark penis size study back in the ’50s. Although there were 2,000 men in his study, it had a fatal flaw—the results were self- reported. Men were asked to go into a room, get themselves hard, and measure themselves. 

Now tell me, would you believe anything coming out of a man’s mouth while he’s holding his dick?

Men always lie about size. It’s why we came up with maps that associate an inch with a mile. Realizing that too many men were going Pinocchio on their penises, urologists developed a new way of measuring the size of the prize: A third party. 

So, now every legitimate penis study includes medical staff doing the measuring and reporting. And guess what happened? The average erect penis size shrank from Kinsey’s 6.2 inches to 5.1- 5.8 inches, depending on the study.

Exactly How Big Are You? Let’s Find Out.

The single best way to manage penis size anxiety is to actually measure Willie so that you can deal with facts rather than myths. There are two widely recognized ways of measuring your dick. The most common is the “You Wish” method popularized by gay hookup apps. It involves looking at your pinky and describing it as a thigh.

Instead of using wish fulfillments as a measuring stick, let’s use the same scientific method urologists use:  

1. Get undressed at room temperature. “Shrinkage” will occur if it’s cold.
2. Use a cloth ruler. Tape measures or straight edge rulers don’t measure curvatures well.
3. Lie on your back and start where the base of your penis meets your stomach. Do NOT start from the back of your balls. Nobody includes the basement when they quote the height of a skyscraper, so don’t include the tip of your ass in quoting yours.
4. Round up to the nearest centimeter, not the nearest foot.
5. Read it and weep. Most men will fall below six inches.

Actually, there’s a much faster and easier way to make the measurements. You don’t even need to get hard to do it. All you have to do is stretch your flaccid flogger and measure it from the penopubic region to the tip. Believe it or not, every major study shows a high correlation between erectile and flaccid/stretched length.

When all is said and done, the majority of us will fall somewhere below six inches. Skip the weepy letters about how awful it is to have an average-sized dick. Studies show that men with bigger penises are not more sexually satisfied than average-sized men.

>>>Check out our How To Bottom and How To Top Guides.

Worried Your Penis Isn’t Big Enough?

Compare Yourself Against The Latest Studies In Penis Size

 

Is your penis big enough to get the job done?

This question perfectly captures a common anxiety among guys who want to top.  It would be understandable if the men asking this question sported a micro-penis (about 1% of the population), but the vast majority of people laboring under this worry are average-sized.

Of course, the average-sized don’t think they’re average-sized. They think they’re hung like beetles.  I have doctors who tell me that some of their most well-endowed patients complain about the size of their dicks!

Why do so many of us suffer from what I call “Dick Dysmorphia” –the belief that our perfectly normal-sized penises are much smaller than they really are? Dick Dysmorphia can make a guy feel like his six-inch dick is closer to six centimeters. It can make you so embarrassed, ashamed or anxious that you’ll avoid sexual activities like topping.

Why does penis size matter so much to so many gay men?  Why is Dick Dysmorphia so prevalent? And even when we perceive the size of our dicks accurately, why do we feel so bad about being average-sized? Let’s take an aerial view and then drill down. 

Bigger Is Better. Or So We Say.

 Men–straight, gay or bi– generally have a “bigger is better” mentality. We gravitate toward bigger cars, bigger houses, bigger guns, bigger wallets, bigger everything. 

I call it Male Math. Size + Size = Status on Stilts.  The emphasis on big dicks and the scorn heaped on anyone who doesn’t measure up can be seen in a joke that’s been around a long while:

Guy #1 in the locker room: “Would you wear shoes if you had no feet?” 

Guy #2: “No.”

Guy #1: “Then why are you wearing underwear?”

The Exaggerations Never End

In porn, every penis is a kidney-wiping, liver-crushing fence post.  Even when adult performers are average-sized, the camera angle can make them look so well-endowed a sign pops up when they lower their underwear: “Buffering.” 

We use the camera’s sleight-of-sausage in our personal lives, too.  Studies show that 80% of gay men send dic pics in dating apps.  Who among us doesn’t trash the pics that make us look average-sized and send the ones that look like we’ve got the trunk of a palm tree hanging off us?

In porn, everyone has a big dick.  In dating apps, everyone has a big dick. In real life?  Almost no one has a big dick.  Condom companies report that only 6% of men need extra-large condoms.

In short, we have a completely unrealistic view of what a normal-sized erect penis looks like. Then we compound the problem by the way we compare ourselves to other men in real life. Next week watch out for our post on how we lose an optical inch by the angle we take when we look down at our dicks.

What Should You Do At The Exact Moment You Can’t Get Hard Enough To Penetrate? 

It’s one thing to fear a loss of erection in the future, but what do you do in the moment? Suppose you’re about to enter your partner and for whatever reason you go soft? 

First, acknowledge what’s happening:  “Yeah, I’m not hard enough.”

Then, acknowledge its universality:  “It happens to everyone.”

Next, understand it isn’t permanent:  “It’s okay it’s only temporary.” 

Acknowledge this to your partner:  “I’m not hard enough right now” and get off him. 

If you went soft because of a distraction, correct it: “Let me take the dog out so he stops barking.”

If you don’t know why you went soft, interrupt the session: “I’ve gotta go to the bathroom, be right back.”

This last point is especially important. Taking a break from the sexual activity removes you from an environment that isn’t serving you. Get a snack, go to the bathroom, put some music on. Taking a break interrupts the current path and resets your body. You’ll be amazed at how a five or 10-minute interruption can clear the deck for your dick. 

Should you attempt to top your partner again? 

No, if you feel like you have to prove something—that’s a recipe for a repeat. Yes, if your unhelpful thoughts are crowded out by an immersion into desire. 

But the bigger answer is that it doesn’t matter. Place the moment against the arc of your entire sex life. Is penetration at this particular moment of your sexual career all that important?

A student went to his meditation teacher and said, “My meditation last night was horrible! I was distracted, my legs ached, and I fell asleep. It was just horrible!” 

“It will pass,” the teacher said matter-of-factly. 

A week later, the student came back to his teacher. “My meditation last night was wonderful! I felt so aware, so peaceful, so alive! It was just terrific!’ 

“It will pass,” the teacher replied matter-of-factly.

You should begin to look at all your sexual experiences with the teacher’s wisdom.  Were you able to penetrate your partner with a satisfying erection?

It’ll pass.

Did you become impotent at a critical moment?

It’ll pass.

Sex Ed Helps With Performance Anxiety

Sometimes guys have performance anxiety because they’ve absorbed wrong information and thus make false assumptions. Here’s a perfect example: Most guys think they should be hard during the entirety of a sexual experience and if they’re not it’s a sign of weakening virility.

Not so.  Erections go up and down throughout a sexual encounter. Sometimes mysteriously. For example, have you ever had a raging hard on, gave your partner head and noticed that although you were turned on during the whole act your penis actually got much softer? This is perfectly normal.  

It’s a good bet you’ve made false assumptions in other areas of your sex life, so read more books. Learn new techniques. Educate yourself. Check out my two favorite sex books—Anal Health & Pleasure by Jack Morin and Hot Monogamy by Patricia Love. 

What about porn? Can you learn anything from it?  Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler once said, “There are two kinds of people who oppose porn. Those who don’t know what they’re talking about and those who don’t know what they’re missing.”

True, but porn doesn’t qualify as sex education. It’s hot but its value is in entertainment, not education. In adult films everyone has a big dick, stays hard for hours and comes like the Trevi Fountain. Taken from that perspective, the only things you’ll get out of porn are eating disorders, body dysmorphia and a stunted sexual palette. Porn helps you get off but it won’t help you get smart.

How To Deal With Performance Anxiety

As Masters and Johnson, the great sexologists put it, “Fear of inadequacy is the greatest known deterrent to effective sexual functioning.” Truer words were never spoken. 

A lot of us think of sex as an act, a performance, with roles we’re expected to play—especially as a top. Much of our anxiety around sex comes from societal expectations of masculinity (you’re always horny, always hard) and watching porn (you’re big as a bridge, never go soft and cum like a waterfall). 

Men typically view sex as goal-oriented, performance-driven, orgasm-centric and erection focused. If any of these cylinders don’t fire they can stir a thick pot of anxiety. For gay men, performance anxiety tends to center around these thoughts:

• You won’t get hard enough 
• Your dick isn’t big enough 
• You will disappoint your partner 
• Your partner will compare you to other guys 
• Your partner will judge you and tell the world 
• You’ll ejaculate too soon 
• You’ll take forever to ejaculate 

These anxieties produce stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, epinephrine and norepinephrine, which produce a heightened state of alert. It’s the opposite of feeling relaxed and calm and in the moment, which is necessary for proper sexual functioning. 

These stress hormones constrict blood vessels, inhibiting blood flow, which makes erections more difficult. They also increase muscular and body tension, and actually desensitize the genitalia. 

How To Deal With Performance Anxiety 

The key to getting hard and staying that way is to immerse yourself in desire to such an extent that it crowds out unhelpful thoughts.  That means identifying your turn-ons, accessing them during lovemaking and asking for what you want and how you want it. All day long we try to rein Willie in. It’s time to let him run the show. 

If you find yourself being derailed by feckless ruminations there are a few things to keep in mind:

Make A Distinction Between What You Can And Can’t Control

Let’s say you were dissatisfied with your last sexual outing because of the quality of your erection.  Maybe it came and went, maybe it never came or maybe it went too soon. 

You don’t have control over this disappointment but you do have the choice not to catastrophize it. You can choose to stop exaggerating the importance of your perceived failure or shrink the importance of what went right. You can choose to appreciate the pleasure you received before or after the perceived failure. 

Keep It In Perspective 

It is what it is. Keep your opinion out of it. Didn’t get hard enough? It means nothing but that in that instant you didn’t get hard enough. Don’t “therefore it.” As in, you didn’t get hard enough, THEREFORE you’re a failure or THEREFORE you’ll never get hard again.

Catch yourself when you descend into polarized thinking–when you explain yourself in extreme terms with no middle ground. For example, if you think this “always happens to me,” stop and say, “Whoa! Hold on, that’s polarized thinking. Am I really prepared to say ‘always?’ What about all those other times everything worked fine?” 

You should walk away intact if you have a negative experience. If a session didn’t, ahem, rise to your expectation the reaction should be, “Oh, well but everything else sure was hot!” 

Don’t turn an attempt at sexual satisfaction into a source of grief. It is what is—a mild disappointment, not an earth-shattering event like a murder or a tsunami. The bigger problem you make it the bigger problem it becomes. 

Set Realistic Expectations

You are a man not a machine. You are fallible. We often disappoint ourselves and others but those disappointments don’t define us. It’s not realistic to think that every sexual experience is going to light the heavens or part the waters. It’s realistic to expect a wide variety of sexual experiences—including some awful ones. 

Studies show that about one-third of men experience some type of “situational impotence” at least once a year. In other words, over the course of their lives almost 100% of men will experience a “failure to launch” (not getting hard enough or staying hard enough for intercourse).

Experiencing sexual difficulties is the price of being human. 

How To Get Harder Than A Roll Of Quarters

Unfortunately, taking the active role in penetration can turn Willie into Will Not. The quality of your erection can suffer from insecurities, performance anxiety, a dislike of condoms, and even simple fatigue (topping is a lot of work!).

Unhelpful thoughts may derail you. Maybe you’re worried about hygiene (what’s that smell!), or where you put the lube, or whether you should use a condom. Or whether or not you can stay hard with a condom, given that maybe last week you didn’t. 

You can also be distracted by your insecurities. Is your penis big enough? Can he see your growing belly from this angle? Is he going to judge you if you’re not Mister Man in bed? 

There are lots of thoughts they can soften the hardest intentions but there’s a secret to heading them off: Concentrate on the things that turn you on and elevate their prominence in your lovemaking.

If vanilla sex gives you a ho-hum hardon but wearing leather sets off five-alarm fires then guess what?  WEAR LEATHER.  

If eye contact turns your flaccid dick into a raging howler monkey don’t screw him from behind. Switch positions and look him in the eyes. 

If having your nipples played turns your floppy disk into stainless steel hard drive, ask your partner to stimulate your nipples.

Are you seeing a pattern here?  Identify your turn-on; move toward it in bed.

Of course, you can’t move towards your turn-ons unless you know what they are.  Most guys are surprisingly untutored in their own desires.  Many don’t know what they want. Others do but are too afraid to express them.  

Some are so fearful of expressing their sexual desires their subconscious blocks them from conscious awareness.  Yet others haven’t given much thought to them.  

What Do You Like In Bed?

Your dick is probably making most of the decisions in your life anyway–why not sit him down for a chat ask him what makes him stand at attention?  Here are just a few questions to prompt some answers:

• Name and rank your favorite body parts.
• Do you like silence or partners that moan and groan?
• What do you like to see your partners wearing in bed (if anything)?
• What positions do you like to see men in?
• What do you want to hear them say?
• What do you secretly like but don’t dare tell your partners?
• How do you like to be touched?
• What kind of kissing turns you on?

Answering these questions is critical to the quality of your erections. If you want to get harder than a fence post you’ve got to know what makes your Man-O-Meter spring a coil.

Communicate What You Want

Being aware of what you like is the first step. Communicating it is the second.  If you’re too shy to specifically request an act, a position or a technique that turns you on, your erections will never reach their full potential. 

There are two levels of communication you should be engaged in: Telling your partner what you want and telling him how you want it. Let’s say nipple play during intercourse is a turn-on for you. It’s not enough to ask him to play with your nipples as you’re thrusting into him. If you don’t tell him how, an expectation of a soft brush against the tip of your nipple might be met with a twisting force that could uproot a tree.

Show Is Better Than Tell

If you’re shyer than a day-old kitten, you don’t have to work up the nerve to ask. Just show him. Bring his hand up and caress them against your nipples in the way you like. He’ll get the message.  

The Role of Cock Worship in Topping

Making your partner feel safe is the first step to great topping.  The next step is to replace anticipatory pain with anticipatory pleasure; a pleasure intricately connected to what’s dangling between your legs.

Let me explain. Most men who bottom do it for two related reasons. Physically, they experience intense feelings unavailable to them in other sex acts. Psychologically, they want to submit to the power of a hard dick in a way they cannot with oral or manual sex.

For guys who like to bottom, oral and manual sex are more about what they can do to a dick. With anal sex, it’s more about what it can do for them. That’s why “dick,” specifically your dick, is the best way to understand your partner’s central motivation for bottoming. 

Your dick is not just an appendage, it is the very symbol of everything he likes about men in general and you in specific.  It’s worth exploring this a bit further because it has a direct impact on how you should approach topping and how good you can get at it.

The question we’re trying to answer here is simple: Why are we, as gay men, whether we prefer topping or bottoming, so attracted to erect penises?  Let us count the ways.

A Hard Dick Is A Powerful Symbol of Something We Love: Masculinity

We are attracted to maleness, strength and virility and nothing personifies these traits more than the erect cock. It’s strong, it’s hard and it commands you to surrender. Few things can put your femininity in stark relief to masculinity more than a hard penis. It is not just the staff of life but the stuff of dreams. Wet dreams. It epitomizes almost every aspect of masculinity: It’s big, thick, hard, strong, muscled, driven, and, it must be said, without conscience.

If you like a man for being a man, then it’s only natural to crave the symbol of his manhood. When you hold your partner’s erect penis you should (hopefully) be in awe of its strength and want to feel its masculine power in every part of your body. 

A Hard Dick Is Proof You’re Desirable

Knowing you can turn your partner on (look at that erection!) is the ultimate sexual compliment; a  statement of your desirability. It’s a sexualized electrical current with a feedback loop—he gets excited so you get excited. He sees your excitement and gets more excited. And soon you’re both sucked into a vortex of desire.

A Hard Dick Is Proof You’re Powerful

You have power over anybody you give an erection to.  After all, that hardon is a response to your presence. YOU are eliciting this response. I don’t know of a more convincing display of power than to completely own a man’s attention, to change his physical, emotional and psychological state. You got him hard? You have him right where you want him. Well done!

A Hard Dick Gives Your Partner The Chance To Submit

It is thrilling to yield to the power of a hard cock, to lose yourself in the adoration of the force, might and power of a man’s hardness. It is exhilarating to feel “owned” by his masculinity. Of showing reverence to Strength.

Submission means that by bending his will to the authority vested in your cock he can experience a form of therapeutic escape, of safety, protection. By glorifying your strength he can disappear into the unavoidable nothingness that comes from relinquishing all power. In this scenario, his butt is a spiritual offering, a way to exalt your command over him.

Anal sex is his chance to willingly succumb to your cock— to give himself over to it, mentally, physically and spiritually. Your cock is his Sun and he orbits around it. 

Damn. Anybody else feel like a biscuit that just got buttered? Whew!

Your Hard Dick Gives Him The Chance To Dominate YOU

Paradoxically, bottoming—the ultimate in surrendering your body to another’s pleasure—is a vehicle to exert dominance. The pleasure of giving sits side by side with the pleasure of taking. Like Frieda Kahlo’s eyebrows, they cannot be separated. With anal sex these pleasures exist simultaneously. 

First, he can control you with his ability to give you a hardon.  Then, he decides how you’re going to feel by offering his butt. Then, he controls how you’re  going to react when he lets you do the things you want to. HE will be responsible for YOU having the most sensational, meaningful experience possible.

A Hard Dick Brings You Emotionally Closer

Both you and your man are at your most vulnerable at the onset of anal sex. For example, he may feel emotionally at risk as he prepares to have your penis penetrate his body. 

You might feel emotionally at risk as you prepare to “know” him in a kind of intimacy you may not be prepared for.  This shared vulnerability increases the potential for connection by easing each other into comfort, rather than withdrawing into separate insecurities.

Given the centrality of Dick in our sexual longing, it stands to reason that the best tops give their partners an experience of everything we just talked about. And it all starts with the subject in the next chapter–foreplay.

How A Top Makes A Bottom’s Anticipatory Pain Go Away

We have to address a looming problem. Unless your partner has a lot of experience with bottoming I can pretty much guarantee he’s dealing with a potential deal-breaker:  “Anticipatory pain.” 

The Ultimate Cock Block

Anticipatory pain is the expectation that your Weapon of Ass Destruction is going to cause him a World Of Pain. This is bad for you because anticipatory pain will seize up his rectal muscles so tight you won’t be able to get inside him even if your dick was shaped like a crowbar.  

The best way to neutralize “anticipatory pain?”  Let’s answer the question by pretending we’re at Six Flags with a friend scared of rides. How would you convince him to get on the gut-wrenching DROP OF DOOM?  Not by validating the belief he’s going to die (“You drew up a will, right?”) And not by agreeing that it’s going to hurt (“You’ll keep vomiting way after you think you’re done”).

No, you convince him to get on the ride by describing what an awesome, thrilling experience he’s going to have.

It’s the same with your bedroom partner. You’ve got to convince him that he’s in for a thrilling ride. You’ve got to get his body to ache for your hard dick to be inside him. 

Ache. 

The first step: Don’t come at him like you’re about to stage a rape. Be in charge in a way that makes you beguiling, not feared. Approach foreplay slowly and warmly. Your goal is to tease, not scare. Show strength, not force. Intensity, not coercion. Assertiveness, not aggression. 

You want to do this for a couple of reasons. First, if you’re too rough, too dominant, or too forceful you’ll come across as dangerous. While I acknowledge that some guys like that, the vast majority of gay men do not want to feel threatened in bed. You will tense their sphincter so tightly it’ll sound like the wind blew an oak door shut.

Aim for appealingly assertive rather than aggressively threatening. The first will get him hot, the latter not.  And always do it with respect.  The more you cross the line into disrespect the more you’re going to turn off a partner who’s having qualms about what bottoming means to his identity as a man. 

The more you act like he’s your bitch, the more you’re going to trigger his fear that bottoming will feminize him and oh dear, there go his rectal walls shutting your dick out of the action. 

Replacing Anticipatory Pain With Something Better

Making your partner feel safe is the first step to great topping.  The next step is to replace anticipatory pain with anticipatory pleasure; a pleasure intricately connected to what’s dangling between your legs.  See, if you can replace his expectation of pain with the expectation of pleasure you’ll win the day.  Next week we’re going to talk about how to do that.