by Tom Hickman
Matters of size
How big is big? How small is small? What is average? Where do you fit in? Sixteen hundred years ago, when Vatsyayana compiled the Kama Sutra, the world’s oldest sex manual, drawing on texts that were already up to 800 years old, he classified men according to the size of their erect lingam (penis). Hares were equivalent to the width of six fingers, bulls to eight and stallions to twelve, spans of between 4.5 inches and 9 inches, or 6 and 12, depending on the size of the hand – a detail that Vatsyayana omitted, though most Asians being small-boned, have small hands.
Such imprecision was not for the Victorians. They were not the first to attempt scientific scrutiny of human sexuality, but they were the first to attempt it on a statistical and empirical basis, driven by expanding knowledge and the new discipline of psychoanalysis. Not unnaturally, the penis, and the size of the penis, principally erect, was central to this study. Dr Robert Letou Dickinson spent a lifetime making hundreds of drawings from life showing penises in repose and arousal (which he published as the Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy only in 1949, when he was eighty-eight). One erection he included was 13.5 inches in length and 6.25 in circumference, the largest ever medically verified. In recent years a New York clubber, Jonah Falcon, has shown enough journalists that his is the equal in both dimensions for there to be little doubt, medically verified or not.
Erotic fiction abounds with penises of such stature. In Fanny Hill, the most widely known erotic novel in English (which John Cleland wrote 250 years ago, to get him out of debtors’ prison), the eponymous heroine encounters organs ‘not less than my wrist and at least three of my handfuls long’; ‘a maypole of so enormous standard that, had proportions been observed, it must have belonged to a young giant’; and, most impressively, one whose ‘enormous head seemed, in hue and size, not unlike a common sheep’s heart: then, you might have rolled dice along the broad back of the body of it’. But the vast majority of those appended to men are lesser things. After the Second World War, Alfred Kinsey conducted 1,800 exhaustive interviews with men and amassed penile data on a total of 3,500 before stating in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, that the average erect penis was 6.2 inches, with ‘most individuals’ in the 4.8 to 8.5 inch range and only ‘extreme cases that are both longer and shorter’. In fact, the shortest erection Kinsey encountered was 1 inch, and the longest 10.5 inches. The erection with the least circumference was 2.25 inches, the greatest, over 8, the average 4.75.
Kinsey was a professor of zoology at Indiana University, with a worldwide reputation for his study of gall wasps. It was only after the university set up a course on sexuality in matrimony and asked him to teach it that he turned to the investigation of sex and eventually founded his famous institute. One female student was made so enthusiastic by his slides and graphic descriptions that she wrote, ‘To me, the behavior of the penis was already awe-inspiring; now it seems even more wonderful.’ Another female student was evidently less enthusiastic. When one day Kinsey broke off from a lecture and asked her which human organ was capable of the greatest expansion, she flushed. ‘Professor Kinsey, you have no right to ask me that question,’ she said. Kinsey replied, ‘I was thinking of the eye – the iris of the eye. And you, young lady, are in for a great disappointment.’
Despite Kinsey’s voluminous data-gathering, there was still no accurate information about the physiology of sex, until the husband and wife team of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, following in his wake, conducted eleven years of empirical research. Kinsey, for the most part, had extrapolated his findings from questionnaires. In the more permissive 1960s, Masters and Johnson attached electrodes to some seven hundred men and women and filmed and monitored them engaged in sexual activity. But while they basically confirmed Kinsey’s findings about the dimensions of the penis, Masters and Johnson also made men with smaller penises – smaller, that is, when flaccid – feel good about themselves, because they noted something that Kinsey did not record: that the smaller the organ the greater the proportional increase during erection.
The average flaccid penis, Masters and Johnson said, was between 3 and 5 inches. In their research they compared a group of men at the lower end of this range with a group of those at the higher, and while the latter on erection had increased slightly less than 3 inches (one 4.5-er added only 2 inches), the former nearly doubled (one 3-incher added 3.33 inches). One participant who when flaccid showed no penile shaft whatsoever – the kind of penis that Fanny Hill described as ‘scarce showing its tip above the sprout of hairy curls that clothed those parts, as you may have seen a wren peep his head out of the grass’ – ‘grew to normal proportions’. Masters and Johnson’s important conclusion was that erection is ‘the great equaliser’; unaroused penises vary considerably, but there is a tendency for things to even out somewhat when they go to red alert.
There is, to put this another way, no correlation between sizes of flaccid and erect penises, just as there is no correlation between the erection and the bodily frame, which Masters and Johnson also demonstrated, and none between the erection and the size of the hands, feet or nose, as others have demonstrated, although popular myth continues to maintain otherwise, sometimes in inverse proportion. It’s true that the Hox gene, which controls initial growth of the genitals of male (and female) foetuses, also controls that of the hands and feet, but the size and shape of hands, feet and genitals are ultimately determined by many genes. A big-framed man can have a big nose, big feet and hands like a bare-knuckle bruiser and still possess a small penis. There’s a weak correlation between penis erectile length and girth, but men are nearly as likely to have a (relatively) thin penis as a (relatively) bulky one and any combination of length and girth, with the qualification that the penis of exceptional length is rarely of exceptional circumference. At the risk of stating the obvious, genital size, like all genetic traits, is hereditary, if not necessarily so. There is every biological reason for believing the father of actor Ewan McGregor who, after his son’s impressive appendage was lingeringly displayed in the film The Pillow Book, sent him a fax reading: ‘Glad to see you have inherited one of my major attributes.’
Racial assortments
Kinsey collected his data exclusively from among white Americans. That he didn’t include black males was governed by the socio-political climate of his time: post-war America was still a racially segregated country. Had he incorporated African American data he certainly would not have been able to draw racial comparisons from it that might have allowed some interpretation of black ascendancy. Even a quarter of a century later Beth Day, writing Sexual Life between Blacks and Whites, was nervous about addressing the issue. Only noting that studies of comparative genital size were few and inconclusive, she went no further than to cite Masters and Johnson’s finding about larger penises tending to increase less on erection, concluding: ‘Considering this apparent equalisation, the major difference, then, in genital size between black males as a group and white males as a group is psychological.’
The negroid/caucasoid question has arisen throughout time. In the second century BC Galen, physician to three Roman emperors and until the Enlightenment the standard medical authority, wrote that the black man ‘has a long penis and great merriment’. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans arriving on the African continent were struck by the natives’ ‘large Propagators’, which the French army surgeon and anthropologist Jacob Sutor was convinced were caused by circumcision, the foreskin being, he thought, a kind of compression cap. In 1708 the English surgeon Charles White wrote, ‘That the PENIS [his capitalisation] of an African is larger than that of a European has I believe been shewn in every anatomical school in London. Preparations of them are preserved in most anatomical museums, and I have one in mine.’ Richard Jobson, treasure-hunting along the Gambia River in West Africa, wrote that the Mandingo tribesmen were ‘furnisht with members so big as to be burdensome to them’. Others recorded ‘terrific machines’ of as much as 12 inc
hes in length, the kind of measurement that at the beginning of the twentieth century made the homosexual British consular official Sir Roger Casement tremble with excitement while in Peru. Casement (who converted to Irish nationalism and was hanged for treason in 1916), wrote in his Black Diaries, suppressed until 1956: ‘saw the young Peruvian Negro soldier leaving barracks with erection under white knickers – it was halfway to knees! Fully one foot long.’
Evidence of a more clinical nature was published in 1935 by the authoritative L’Ethnologie du Sens Genitale, but it wasn’t until thirty years after Kinsley ducked the issue of the negroid penis (as did Latou Dickinson in 1949, in his Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy, which contained hundreds of drawings of penises but not one of them black) that the institute Kinsey founded, which was and remains the leading authority in its field, felt able to release material on the black/white issue. This – which coincidentally downgraded the non-black erection from 6.2 inches to 6.1 – indicated that the average black counterpart was longer (6.4) and thicker (4.9 against 4.8), and that almost twice as many blacks (13.6 per cent) as whites (7.5 per cent) pushed beyond the 7-inch barrier. But the institute’s basic conclusion, which wasn’t exactly a surprise, could hardly be termed definitive: while by this time (1979) it had 10,000 men on its database, only 400 of them were black. Understandably, the institute emphasised that comparisons required caution. A decade later, however, and under no politically correct restraint when contributing an article entitled ‘Race Difference in Sexual Behavior: Testing an Evolutionary Hypothesis’ to the Journal Research in Personality, academics John Philippe Rushton and A.F. Bogaert, having averaged ethnographic data from all available sources, concluded that the erections of caucasians were 5.5 to 6 inches in length and 4.7 inches in circumference and of blacks 6.25 to 8 inches (6.2 inches in circumference) – while those of ‘orientals’ were 4 to 5.5 inches (3.9 inches in circumference). Data from among mixed-blood males in the French West Indies indicated that penis size increased proportionate to the amount of black blood.
For a decade, Rushton and Bogaert’s extrapolations were definitive enough for everybody until the Internet made more detailed research possible and two significant on-line surveys were launched in the 1990s – one by the makers of Durex condoms (whose interest was condom fit and the incidence of slippage and breakage), the other, the Definitive Penis Survey (which despite its frisky title was acknowledged by Durex as a serious research source), by medical researcher Richard Edwards. Both anticipated analysing the information they gathered by ethnicity. Neither was able: too few of the 3,000-plus participants each website attracted were non-white. The Definitive Penis Survey, however, offered ‘tentative’ conclusions. Extraordinarily, one was that average white erections are longer (6.5 inches) than black (6.1 inches). Offsetting that, however, was the observation that where Kinsey’s all-white data indicated that three men in a hundred have an erection less than 5 inches, the number of black males in this category is statistically immeasurable although, undoubtedly, they exist: the law of averages cannot be gainsaid.
‘The dozen or so jungle bunnies I have trafficked with were perfectly ordinary in that department . . . in fact, two were hung like chipmunks’, comments Gore Vidal’s vitriolic – and racist – transsexual protagonist in Myra Breckinridge, though to suggest that in a random sample of a dozen black males none would be bigger than average and two would be smaller is statistically nonsensical. Of course, many black males are statistically average and the British TV chef Ainsley Harriott is one who was happy to say so. A decade or so ago, after he’d done a Full Monty strip for the Children in Need charity, a journalist observed that he was not exactly Lynford Christie in the lunchbox department (see Part 2, ‘Accessorise – or Aggrandise?’). To which Harriott retorted amiably: ‘I’m not twenty-eight with a six-pack. I’m forty-one with two kids. But I like to think my chest isn’t that bad.’
What is not disputed in any major survey is that the black penis is observably more visible in the flaccid state than the white – the Kinsey Institute gives figures of 4.3 inches long and 3.7 inches round, against 3.8 and 3.1. A theory about this relative inequality is that, while the penises of men from colder climates spend more time drawn closer to the body’s heat, penises of men in warm climates simply hang – ‘as long as whips’, thinks Harry Angstrom, the eponymous hero of John Updike’s quartet of Rabbit novels (the black penis gaining disproportionately from the simile). The hot–cold theory appears to be borne out by a research project that equates African American males more closely with the statistical American norm than with males from the Caribbean. Against it, however, is that Asians who come from warm climates are not beneficiaries of it.
Statistics show that the penises of those from the Far East, South East Asia and the Indian subcontinent are smaller than the world median; and according to available data and much anecdotal evidence, a large Asian penis is exceptional. Investigating Asian penis size, an Asian Los Angeles writer, L.T. Goto, found a Japanese American who hoisted a 7-inch erection, something so ethnically rare that it had gained him ‘instant notoriety after dating someone in the Los Angeles Asian American community’. The Definitive Penis Survey (which appears to have been moribund since 2002) had difficulty attracting Asian interest, rather indicating that Asians have better things to do than measure their appendages. The one ethnographic observation that the Durex survey has allowed itself to make is that the erect penises of males in the Far East are up to 20 mm (just over 0.75 of an inch) less in both length and girth than whites – although other survey material substantively indicates that this is a little generous to Indo-Chinese.3
Where most people are prepared to see racial variations in penis size as just another racial diversity, there are some who deny that such variations exist, on racist grounds. The topic was given fierce airing in the mid-1990s with the publication of Rushton’s Race, Evolution and Behavior. In this work of speculative biology, Rushton, a professor at the University of Western Ontario and a Guggenheim Fellow with two doctorates from the University of London, used over sixty variables in a comparative study of Asians, whites and blacks. By all of these, including brain size and intelligence, he deduced that the three groups always rank in that order. It was not this that got him vilified: it was his conclusion that there is a correlation between the size of the organs of generation and cogitation – that Asians have small genitals and high intelligence, that blacks are their opposite and, as by every other comparative measure, that whites occupy the middle ground. Most critics decided that Rushton had been sidetracked by an aberration, concluding that the socio-biological value of a big brain and a small penis is no clearer than that of the alternative arrangement, however popular, given a choice, that would be among at least some males everywhere – including, you can be sure, many Asians.
In the decades since his death, Kinsey’s institute has continued to amass and correlate penile information extrapolated from many sources, including other research in which it engages (most recently the psycho-physiological sexual response in men) and the work of urologists involved in the relatively new area of augmentation phalloplasty (see Part 3, ‘Desperately seeking solutions’). It has backed away from the question of ethnicity. The institute website, sensibly one might think, does not give a single figure for the average worldwide erection, preferring to declare that this is between 5 and 7 inches, with a circumference of 4 to 6 inches – the founding father’s findings have not been invalidated by black highs and Asian lows.
Size Matters?
The importance of penis size is sowed early in the male mind. When a very small boy comes face-to-face (perhaps literally) with the adult penis, he is disbelieving: it cannot be that his own small tag of flesh bears any relation to something that appears to have more in common with the Gruffalo. Does such an encounter, wondered Alexander Waugh (Fathers and Sons), ‘puncture or augment the sexual confidence of young males?’ When he caught his young son standing on a bucket outside the window to catch a glimp
se of his ‘zones privés’ Waugh composed a verse that he made his son memorise, reading in part:
For he is but a craven fool
Who muses ’pon his father’s tool,
Or creeps and peeps and tries to spy
What lies within poor Papa’s fly.
But a boy needs to know. And whether he finds out by accident or design, when he establishes that one day his, too, will look like this, he can hardly wait, like Portnoy, who wants to exchange his ‘fingertip of a penis’ for something the equal of his father’s ‘schlong’, which
brings to mind the fire hoses coiled along the corridors at school. Schlong: the word somehow catches exactly the brutishness, the meatishness, that I admire so, the sheer mindless, weighty and unselfconscious dangle of that living piece of hose. (Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth)
The worry that his penis will not make the transformation into the alpha version is excruciating to most males in early, hormonally concussed pubescence, a state neatly caught in this confessional piece by a contributor to Cosmopolitan magazine:
The year was 1984. I was 12. One day, a few of my fellow 12-year-olds and I were in the changing room when an older and shall-remain-nameless rugby player strolled in. He stripped and was walking to the shower when he noticed several pubescent boys staring at him, flushed and slack-jawed, upon which he turned in our direction and announced: ‘What’s the matter, boys? You never seen 18 inches of swaying death before?’ Let’s just say, there’s not a woman alive who can make me feel that small.
