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Britni of Oh My God, That Britni’s Shameless, who blogs about sex toys as well as sexual assault, counseling, feminism, and BDSM, has a PSA about pernicious myths about “stretched out” vaginas.

Attention people (especially guys, because they seem to be guilty of this most often) that are grossed out by women sticking large objects in their vaginas: SHUT THE FUCK UP. Don’t be horrified by the size of the toy and please, don’t make comments about the woman getting “stretched out.” Because guess what? VAGINAS ARE STRETCHY AND ELASTIC. After a fist has been in there, it retracts back to normal very quickly. The same with a toy like Randy. Yes, the vagina will stretch and expand to take the large object. But the elasticity also means that it will shrink back again.

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[S]he can push a baby out of that thing; a fist is nothing! So you and your penis need to stop with the inferiority complex and marvel at the wonderous things that vaginas can do. ‘Mkay?

She said it here.

Even more eerie? When I did that really massive survey of Tumbler-style porn-photo blogs earlier this year I was reminded again that most people don’t seem get that women’s vulvas change when they’re aroused. Like, a lot. Like that old lyric “lips so sweet and tender / like petals falling apart” vulvas don’t just become “moist,” they engorge with blood — the outer labia push out and open, the inner labia can become almost erect, and the swelling of the clitoral hood led early researchers to mistakenly think the clitoris lost its erection as orgasm approached. If you’re completely clueless about women’s actual bodies, and actual sexuality it might seem alarming; once you figure it out it’s kind of awesome.

A surprisingly common reaction when someone miraculously does appear to be engorged and juicy with her own actual lubrication is that she looks “stretched out.” Hello! You know how people talk about porn giving people the wrong expectations? That’s a really wrong expectation! (As bad as seeing only unaroused penises in porn and then deciding you had to ice them when they got erect because otherwise they looked “wrong.”)

BTW, I’ve got very large hands and yeah, just moments after fifteen minutes of allllmoost (did I mention I have very large hands) fisting someone she squeezed my perfectly-average size hard enough to make me jump. It felt very nice but it was also a very strong squeeze. So yeah, inserting something even very large doesn’t even temporarily “stretch out” anyone’s vagina.

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.

A post from last April about Unforseen Consequences of Men Believing Themselves Unseen has been picked up on by the social-referral site StumbleUpon.com. I’m glad it’s been picked up — I think it’s a good piece about an important topic. I have no idea, however, who originally, um, stumbled upon the post and linked it, nor how to find that original link so I could thank or otherwise credit them.

At any rate thanks. Welcome. While you’re hear you might also want to check out

• Em & Lo’s post The World Needs More Male Nudes
• Christina Lloyd’s blog Erotica Cover Watch, which advocates the whacky idea that publishers should put actual men on the covers of erotica written by and for heterosexual women.

• Hugo Schwyzer’s post Of never feeling hot: the missing narrative of desire in the lives of straight men and his follow-up post More on desire, ranking, and body anxiety: some less organized thoughts

Via Maxwell Hammer of News for Perverts here’s a YouTube version of an ad that’s evidently not being shown in Australia.

Hammer’s take is that Australia is more prudish than America. My take is that prudish or not the male centrism is kind of out of control in the sense that people with really big boobs… even boobs they can’t see their shoes over… tend to have spacial awareness and kinesthetic agility such that they can see… pretty much everything. Especially given that to reach one’s mid-twenties implies that one was once in one’s two’s, three’s, five’s, eleven’s and consequently even if they’d been pubescently precocious they’d have long-since figured out how to see around and over them. Oh, and speaking of seeing, someone cognitively capable of addressing a service person would most likely have seen the platter as it was being set before her and so she would have registered that fries were present even if they were momentarily obscured.

Aww, that’s just me being no fun at all. I know, maybe she’s got short-term memory loss from, say, a stroke, medication, a blow to the head, or maybe a date rape drug like flunitrazepam. Ha ha, wouldn’t that be a riot!

Dang, I’m still not getting into it. I know, maybe she’s a 21st-Century version of Fred McMurray in the Absent-Minded Professor and she’s got her head so wrapped around a problem in the synthesis of amphiphilic block-copolymers it’s a marvel she remembered to order fries at all. Hey, now that would actually be pretty funny.