The Part That Stood In For The Whole
I have worked on a great many penises. This is not a boast and it is not a joke. It is simply a fact of the work, and I note it plainly because the plain noting of it is already unusual, and that unusualness is itself the observation I want to begin with.
The male genital is the most discussed and least accurately described part of the male body in the popular culture I have been alive in. It is everywhere as subject and almost nowhere as fact. What exists in abundance is the mythology, the anxiety, the marketing, the surgery, and the data that turns out, on examination, to be something much more modest than it has been represented as.
The most widely cited figures on penis size in the popular imagination derive, in large part, from the Masters and Johnson research of the mid-twentieth century. What most people who cite those figures do not mention is that the population being measured was a North American college population who self-reported. Self-reporting, in the context of a measurement that carries intense social meaning for the person doing the measuring, is not a neutral act.
A man measuring himself has reasons—social, psychological, entirely understandable—to round up. The college population of mid-century America was not a random sample of human males. It was a specific demographic, at a specific age, from a specific cultural context, measuring a specific anatomical feature and reporting the result to researchers. The figure that entered the popular imagination from this process, and against which men have been measuring themselves ever since, was not a fact about human male anatomy. It was a number generated by a method that anyone thinking carefully about the method would immediately recognise as unreliable.
What I read about subsequent, more methodologically rigorous research suggests consistently lower averages than the self-reported figures produced. A 2020 review of studies measuring erect penile length across multiple countries found an average of approximately 5.1 to 5.5 inches, with considerable variation and no evidence that the size differences between populations are as dramatic as popular mythology suggests. Flaccid length, which is what most men see most of the time and what is most often the basis for comparison in communal settings—the locker room, the changing room—correlates poorly with erect length. The body that appears modest in repose may be quite different in other conditions. This is widely known. It does not seem to have significantly reduced the anxiety.
My own experience over thirty years is limited data for the obvious reasons: the men who came to me were not a random sample of male humanity. They were men who had sought out a specific kind of work, in a specific city, during a specific period. What I can say is that the range I encountered was substantial, and that the majority of the men I worked with were, when I tried to form an impression across the whole range of encounters, somewhere in the lower-to-middle part of the distribution that the careful research describes. I did not measure. I noticed. And what I noticed is that the variation was real and the anxiety about variation was also real, and that the two had almost no consistent relationship to each other.
This is the thing I want to try to describe precisely, because it seems to me important. The anxiety about the size of the penis, in the men I encountered, was not reliably a response to actual size. Some of the men who expressed the most concern about inadequacy were men who had no grounds for concern that I could identify from where I was working. And some of the men who were anatomically at or below the middle of whatever distribution we are describing arrived without the anxiety, or with it in a much milder form, and seemed to have arrived at a relationship with their own bodies that did not require the specific measurement to be at a particular point.
What the marketing has understood—and the marketing is not stupid, it is paying close attention to a real anxiety even when it is providing a fictitious remedy—is that the anxiety is available to be activated in a very large number of men regardless of their actual anatomy. The product does not need to work. The product needs to name the anxiety and promise relief from it, and the promise is sufficient because the anxiety has been there, waiting, for long enough that any naming of it produces a response.
I have read about the surgical options that have become available: the injection of fat harvested from elsewhere in the body into the penile shaft, which requires regular re-injection because the tissue is gradually absorbed. The procedure carries real risks, produces results that are measured in millimetres, and requires indefinite maintenance. Men are undergoing this. Not in vast numbers, but in increasing numbers. They are doing so in response to an anxiety that the data does not support and a standard that does not exist as a measurable fact about human male anatomy.
The thing I find most interesting in all of this is not the surgery or the marketing but this question: has the idea of nudity become merely the idea of the size of a penis? And connected to it: to what extent has the long cultural focus on the genitals as the specifically obscene part of the male body changed how the whole male body is perceived?
I have been tracing the history of the male body’s management through clothing, law, art, religion, and colonial imposition. One of the things that history consistently shows is that the genitals—specifically the male genitals—have been the site of the most acute regulatory anxiety. It was the genitals in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement that Pope Paul IV ordered covered. It was the genitals that naturist magazines photographed in strategic poses and then airbrushed. It was the genital region that the external skirt over the bathing trunks was designed to conceal even through its own concealment. The management of the male body has consistently focused on the penis as the critical site—the thing that most requires covering, most threatens decency, most concentrates the anxiety.
What this sustained focus has produced, over the centuries, is a situation in which the penis has become, in the cultural imagination, the representative of the whole male body. Not just its most managed part but its most significant part. The part that stands in for the whole. The part that carries the weight of the male body’s meaning.
When a man arrives in a room with anxiety about his penis size, he is not usually carrying anxiety about an isolated anatomical feature. He is carrying anxiety about his adequacy as a male body. The penis has become the site at which the whole assessment is conducted. Whether the body is sufficient, whether it meets the standard, whether it will produce the expected response in another person—these questions, which could be asked of the whole body, have been concentrated in one measurement. The measuring tape applied to the flaccid penis is measuring something that the measuring tape is entirely inadequate to measure.
I want to say something that is genuinely difficult to say without it sounding like a motivational poster, and I want to say it as plainly as I can because it is what I observed rather than what I believe as a position. The men who gave the most pleasure, and who seemed to receive the most pleasure, in the range of encounters that were visible to me over three decades, were not reliably the men with the largest penises.
This is not a discovery or an insight. It is an observation that most people with comparable experience would confirm. The correlation between size and satisfaction, in the data that exists and in my own impressionistic experience, is weak to nonexistent. The anatomy that has been elevated to the position of primary determinant of male sexual adequacy is not the anatomy that primarily determines sexual experience.
What determines sexual experience—in my observation, without any claim to generality—has more to do with the quality of attention a man brings to what is happening, with his capacity to be present in his own body while being present with another person, with the willingness to be interested in the other person’s experience as something other than a mirror for his own performance. These are not measurable in millimetres. They are not visible in a flaccid penis in a changing room. They are not the thing the marketing is selling.
The slang phrase “it’s not the size of the ship but the motion of the ocean” has been around long enough to have become a cliché, and clichés usually contain something that experience has confirmed often enough to become common currency. What I can add to the cliché from my own experience is that the men who were most preoccupied with the ship were often the men paying least attention to the ocean. The attention had been captured by the measurement, and the measurement had consumed the resource that the experience required.
I find myself returning to the question of what the cultural focus on the genitals as the obscene site has done to the way the male body is perceived overall. My tentative answer, held as impression rather than conclusion, is that it has produced a kind of synecdoche—the part standing in for the whole, the genital representing the entire body in both the regulatory imagination and in the anxious male imagination that has absorbed that regulation. The male body has been reduced, in these imaginations, to its most managed part. Which means the male body is understood, in both the culture that fears it and the man who inhabits it, primarily as a genital with a body attached rather than a body with a genital included.
I watched this reduction in the room. Men arrived and the first gesture of covering was always toward the same place—the hands, even briefly, moving to the lower front of the body. Not the chest, not the face, not the abdomen. The genitals, every time. As if the whole body were incidental and this one region were the matter at hand. As if the question of the whole body’s being there could be resolved into the question of whether this one feature was acceptable.
The feature is not the person. The measurement is not the experience. The part that has been made to represent the whole is, in my observation, the part that least needs the representation.
What needs the attention is the rest. The whole body, present in a room, doing what bodies do, requiring nothing more elaborate than the willingness to be in it and to be interested in what being in it, with another person, actually produces.
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