Penis Size: The True Average

Recumbent means lying down (face up or down).

Supine means lying face upward.

Prone means lying face downwards.

Ref: The Concise Oxford Dictionary 1964

Point taken, Doughty. It would be a little difficult to measure the penis of someone lying face-down, though, absent specialized equipment. I think that would be noteworthy enough that they would mention it, if they were measuring someone in that way.

My question still stands; how does any of that speak to the point that, if they’re measuring from the symphysis, they must be measuring from the top (superior), not the side (lateral) or underneath (inferior)?

Someone got up on the wrong side of the bed. (:

Nope, not the wrong side of the bed. Wrong position. I was sleeping prone, not supine. Made it tough for the researchers to accurately measure my morning wood. :)

(At least I was recumbent.)

Your gratuitous definition of “recumbent”, though, really does nothing to address the point in play at the moment, though, which is whether they are measuring from the top, the side or from underneath. You’re free to go ahead and do so, but it just muddies the water, and normally your posts are good at clarifying things, not the opposite.

Isn’t it possible though that the researchers could have misapplied the term? The symphysis is merely the central point, the “keystone” as it were, in the pubic arch. When people say the pubic bone they often are referring to the symphysis but it is not the same thing or the same structure and I have seen both sports trainers and doctors make this same mistake. I believe it’s possible that they may mean the entire structure that is the traverse from one side to the other.even though only the central portion is truly the symphysis. Thus you might measure on the side yet be straddling the symphysis structure and the place where it abuts to either of the actual pubic bones.

We all know that the further to the side you go, the more apparent length is revealed, leading to the observations that some people using a side, but still “top” technique might be “stomach pressing”.

I agree with Fantom - a misapplying.Anyway, even taking author’ words so literally as you insist, Lamp, you also have an inflated measurement:

"The pubic symphysis is the midline cartilaginous joint (secondary cartilaginous) uniting the superior rami of the left and right pubic bones . It is located anterior to the urinary bladder and superior to the external genitalia ;…….."

http://en.wikip … Pubic_symphysis

measuring from a point higher than the base of the penis (external genitalia) to the tips gives a wrong measure.

But the basic points are:

a) that study doesn’ t seems perfectly done (or maybe just described);

b) it gives numbers pretty differents from previous studies.

All that considered, it seems that they got bad measurements.

Who knows. I have included the study in the list at the beginning of this thread, because other studies may have had similar minor flaws. In any case, the dicks in this study seem strangely skinny for their length (or strangely long for their girth), but the general figures (average girth between 4.5-5”, average length around 6” BPEL) are consistent with other studies.

6.61” BPEL measured lying down; subjects were in the 47-74 years old - we do have a good amount of anecdotical evidence that the penis tends to shorten wile getting old (If you are not doing PE, dear reader) I’d say 1/4” legnth loss by the time one is 50yo is a prudential estimation. This gives that the average BPEL of a young man 7”+, with an EG of 4.76”.

I’m not buying.

Average was 6.06”, marinera (and 5.98” for the non-surgical group).

Correct me if Im wrong here, but many of those guys on the first page measured less than 5” in a FSL (flaccid stretched length) state? That just doesnt seem right to me.

It seems to me RH is right: pre-surgery BPEL, according to this study, is 6.61".

No. Look at the actual study, to which RH links: http://www.osbo … .au/fraiman.pdf

Table 3 shows the average NSRRP (prostatectomy) and NS (no surgery) figures.

RH made the mistake, as Fantom pointed out and I confirmed, of taking only the figures from Group A (those 17 subjects who happened to be between 0 and 4 months post-op), and reporting those as the averages for all the men in the study (230 total, if we include surgery and no-surgery). Even if one were to argue that the men from Group A were most nearly representative of "normal" men out of all those in the study, a sample of 17 is too small to produce a narrow confidence interval for this sort of thing. (For similar reasons, I find the authors’ statistical analyses in the paper to be extremely weak evidence for the gradual post-op loss of size they want to claim. They really need to use a longitudinal rather than a cross-sectional design.)

Post-op have decrease in penile size, so their measures are unuseful, or am I wrong? We have to take pre-surgery sizes. A way or another, we agree that this study isn’t useful to give us a figure of the average size - this also wasn’t the purpose of the study.

What instead I found interesting is the idea (fact?) that low tension electrostymulation could reduce ED and reduce decrease in penile size (look at page 5).

‘taking author’ words so literally as you insist’?

Why, yes. I tend to think that when it comes to the rigor of medical journal publication, they mean what they write, literally. That would mean that if they are measuring from the pubic symphysis, they are measuring midline and superior to the base of the penis. And it is immediately superior; you can measure from the pubic symphysis and still be measuring immediately adjacent to the penis. That’s as close as you’re going to get until you start measuring from the inside (ruler down the urethra, anyone?).

And it’s the same methodology suggested on this very site for measuring:
Measure Your Penis - 2001 Site - Tom Hubbard

I think that measuring from the side or beneath, which would be absent such a specific anatomical landmark as the symphysis, is more likely to be inaccurate, inconsistent and inflated. I suspect that is why both Thunder's and the medical journal measure from the pubic symphysis.

But hey, if you don’t like the results, you can believe whatever you want.