Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Summary: Based on the disconnect between a woman’s response to men’s concern this is a meditation on how men use our own criteria for determining the significance of penis size to women.

In response to… quite a few other comments on an advice post at Em & Lo titled “My Boyfriend Has a Small Penis,” where the correspondent complained her new boyfriend’s penis was 5-6 inches long a commenter named SP said

Guys, really, 5″ isn’t a small penis! It’s average; no woman in her right mind would look at you and feel short changed.  I can’t believe more than 1% of all women out there would think 5″ is too small. I had no idea so many of you [guys] feel this much pain about this issue. That was tough to read, especially since I know your dick size doesn’t matter! Don’t believe the hype!

Read the comment in context here.

No wonder Em & Lo made it that week’s Comment of the Week. I say good call.

As I read through the comments it’s actually clear that while penis size really does matters but it doesn’t matter much. To women.

It seems to matter quite a lot to men, who evidently can’t shake the notion that it matters, a lot, to women. Yes, it actually does matter to at least some women too — else the original correspondent wouldn’t have written her letter to Em & Lo in the first place. But that’s not the same as mattering to everybody. Or even mattering the same way to those for whom it does matter.

Honestly, though, it’s like men worrying about preferences for chin size, or hairline, or chest hair, or age, or smell. (Aside: No need to do the cliché opposite-sex comparisons, and just because they’re popular doesn’t breast-size/penis-size analogies are a good idea anyway.)

What’s funny, though, is that some women really do only want partners who are older than them. Or want men who smell better to them. Or men with certain accents, or faces, or hair. Or, oh, say, “men who are not muscle-bound; men with more feminine face shapes, men with attractive faces“

Yet men rarely take those “inadequacies” to heart. We rarely, say, compare our feet to other men’s in the locker room and worry that this one or that might be a better dancer.

Hearing that some women prefer bigger penises, though, puts an awful lot of men in a tizzy. Let one man’s penis be even a little bit bigger than another’s and reassurances notwithstanding there’s a good chance second one will decide the larger guy would be every potential partner’s first choice.

At any rate, I think the commenter’s bafflement nicely illustrates the difference in the way penis size matters to women vs. the way it matters to men.

Incidentally (and this relates to the comment thread in Melissa’s fascinating post about men and body image at Feministing Community) I think a lot of this derives from men’s self-indoctrination in Rule #2 of the bogus Two Rules of Desire: it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. Lacking an understanding of men’s appeal to women in general we can’t locate penis-size preference as one among our partners’ many perfectly real but also perfectly flexible preferences.