Originally Posted by a_ht
Yeah but it also says circumference measured.. Why measure circumference if you are just gonna _ask_ about length? Interviews were "intimate".
The data you’re referring to ("interviews conducted 1938-1963 by the Institute for Sex Research, tabulated 1979") are the infamous Kinsey data. They are self-report, not physician measurements; the participants were instructed to measure their girth in a certain way. The full citation from the Kinsey page :
Gebhard, Paul, and Johnson, Alan. (1979/1998). The Kinsey Data: Marginal Tabulations of the 1938-1963 Interviews Conducted by the Institute for Sex Research (reprint edition). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
You can tell the data are self-report if you look at the
girth table. A substantial number of men (1+%) with a 2" girth or less?? No. Some guys got confused and reported diameter rather than circumference. Notice that the (presumably) physician-measured Asian data show no girths under 3".
As documented in this thread, men seem to exaggerate their sizes in self-reports. If anything, the Kinsey data may overestimate the actual girth distribution. As others have said in this thread, though, there really aren’t many good objective data available on girth compared to length, so who really knows. Most agree the average is somewhere between 4.5 and 5".