https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thin...-big-deal.html
Is penis anxiety really such a big deal?
A new study has found that 30% of men worry about the size of their penis – regardless of how big or small it actually is.
Tom Sykes reports on the male anxiety that just won’t go away.
By Tom Sykes7:00AM BST 11 Oct 2013
These days, boys have the internet to feed their insecurities about the size of their penises, the poor things. During my schooldays, our first point of reference was the infinitely less threatening Adrian Mole.
Adrian was obsessed by the size of his “thing” and spent much of his diary taking a ruler to his member and chronicling its growth (and occasional depressing episodes of shrinkage). Thus, on Tuesday March 17 he wrote, “Measured my thing, it was 11cm,” which led to hordes of boys taking their geometry cases to bed with them, and then, a few months later, the all-time classic penile entry, worthy of Pepys himself, “Just measured my thing. It has grown 1cm. I might be needing it soon.”
Mole was getting ahead of himself. It would be many moons until poor Adrian really did need it, and he suffered agonies of doubt in the intervening years as he fretted whether his penis would be big enough to avoid humiliation, if and when it was finally revealed to his beloved Pandora Braithwaite.
How ironic that it was a woman, Mole’s creator Sue Townsend, who zeroed in on the real truth about male penile anxiety – that it’s what’s going on in the mind, not the boxer shorts, that really counts.
The same conclusion is drawn as part of new research into penile anxiety carried out by David Veale, a psychiatrist at King’s College, London, who specializes in the subject of body dysmorphia (obsession with an imagined body defect) and published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine (JSM).
Veale asked 43 men, who also agreed to have their penises measured, to agree or disagree with a series of ten statements (available here) such as, “Others will be able to see the size or shape of my penis even if I have trousers on,” and “Others will talk or laugh about my penis.” He then correlated their anxiety levels with their actual penis size.
And guess what? Having a mighty mickey doesn’t make you any you less prone to penile anxiety – which almost a third of a larger group of 173 men questioned in total were said to suffer – than having a little peanut down there. Whatever we have in our pants, there are some of us who will worry and others who won’t (and still others who will agree to let clinicians measure our private parts, but that’s another story).
The study also suggests that the various penile enlargement creams and pills marketed to us via our email accounts would still be a waste of money, even if they worked, if the aim was to make you feel better about yourself.
I don’t think 33% of the men I know are anxious about their packets. I spoke to as many of my friends as I dared (three), but none would admit to penile anxiety.
“It’s actually the one thing about me that is entirely anxiety-free,” said one mate. “Sure, there are dudes out their with bigger penises, but mine is fit for purpose.”
But no-one’s going to admit to having a small one, are they? As the comedian Richard Herring notes, “Is size important? And if not, why are there no two-inch, pencil thin vibrators?”
I am sure readers of Telegraph Men are far too confident to be interested, but just in case … the average size of an American male’s erect penis is 5.6 inches or 14.2 cm, according to a survey of 1,661 men published in the JSM this year.
I know. Tiny, right?