Penis Size: The True Average

I’ve used a dollar bill to measure my girth, but as far as length you can’t “Bone Press” a dollar bill so I don’ think its as accurate as using a ruler for measuring Length.

Something I’ve become interested in is not just the averages, or even the standard deviations, but the total distribution of sizes, especially at the upper end. I like the Nigerian study because it tells us the largest and smallest ones measured. The study with the largest number of men is the Italian one, by far. Over 3000 healthy men, that’s a goldmine. Unfortunately you can’t access the full paper without paying for it and the abstract only gives the average. However, I found this paper which was by the same authors and gave more information about the study. It didn’t give absolute upper and lower limits, but it went as far as top 1% cutoff.

http://www.natu re.com/ijir/jou … l/3900887a.html

Click on the figure 1 link at the bottom for the distribution:

Amongst other results: the top 1% of men remain below 5 inches flaccid. For FSL, it’s 6.9 inches. I’m at 6.5 inches, so I’m at the 5% mark. The paper also explains how they measured. It was non bone pressed along the top, and rounded to the nearest half a centimeter.

Does anyone have access to the full versions of other papers? Can you share distributions with us?

"We did not measure the penis in erection: as demonstrated by Chen the length of the stretched penis provides a reliable estimation of its potential maximal elongation during erection."

Sorry, I don’t really see how this reserach is valid when they didn’t measure the erect penis?

It’s all very well mentioning flaccid state, but i’d say most are interested in the erect state.

The answer is right there in your quote: the stretched length approximates the erect length. In fact it may even be greater. I think some surveys here showed BPFSL >=BPEL more often than not.

When yanking extremely hard, as we do at Thunder’s, FSL can exceed EL by a fair bit. Studies 1 and 9 on the first page on this thread suggest, however, that in medical studies, FSL is typically slightly shorter than EL.

I just measured my BPFSL to see how it would compare with BPEL and I get a free half inch (at least). If I measured BPFSL as the length that I would tell someone, I would be 7.6” now. I think my new signature is going to be “I measure what goes in (BPEL).” My wife would agree, that’s what ultimately counts.

I just compare my bpfsl to the bpfsl in the paper. It’s very highly correlated with erect length. I still think these results are pretty interesting. Out of a large, representative sample, at least 99% were under five inches flaccid and under 7 nbp. That says a lot about how many “big ones” are out there, as some have speculated on.

But why settle for a high correlation when you can get actual results from the erect penis?

Speaking personally my FSL is about 0.5” greater than my erect length at the moment.

Drawing “general” conclusions from this survey also seems incorrect because as I read it this survery wasn’t a cross section of the population, it was people referred to a clinic over short penis size or their thoughts there of?

“sixty-seven patients were evaluated with a median age of 27 (range 16-55) complaining of 'short penis' and requesting surgical correction”

I think it is valid to say these guys would be shorter than the general population because you would assume they have some information on penis size and seek out treatement because of knowledge, or how else could they evaluate their size to decide to seek a consultation?

Don’t get me wrong I should be delighted with this because I qualify in the top 1% in this survey. But of course it is the top 1% of guys who feel (and probably have some accurate basis to judge that) to be smaller than average.

I admit I don’t feel big, but even I with my penile dismorphia (i.e. 6” girth ISN’T large to me) understand I am above average, if not “large”.

A 7” penis is not in the top 1%, no way.

I think researchers tend to use FSL for convenience. Inducing a great erection in medical settings often requires the injection of a drug, or at least time and patience.

The graph of “normal dick size” (including the percentiles Joe_joe refers to) used in the study was drawn from an earlier study by the same researchers that included 3,300 randomly selected Italian military conscripts.

Indeed, the men in the short-penis study clustered on the shorter end of the distribution of the military men’s penis sizes.

It was in the sample of Italian military conscripts. I suspect that if the researchers has tugged harder on the men’s penises, and used the optimal angle for maximizing length, as we PEers do, you’d find the 99th percentile for FSL to be more like 7.5” or 7.75”. Remember that this is NBP.

This is non bone pressed.

Also, I’m not using erect length because it’s not measured in this 3300 man study, the largest posted on tp.

No, the men in the 3300 man study were not there for penis enlargement, that was from a random sample of italian army conscripts. The study I just linked to referenced this study, it was by the same authors. The men in for PE had smaller dicks. I linked to this paper because it gave more info on the random sample.

You beat me.

What is fascinating to me is how little of a skew there really is on this study of men who are literally obsessed with the size of their penises.

It’s not as if this study attracted a lot of micropenis guys. They match up with the averages fairly well. Instead of 50% being at or above the 50’th percentile of the Italian soldier study, they had 40%. That isn’t really that much of an effect. From that we can assume that 1 of 5 guys who actually should have bigger dicks, didn’t.

So my thinking is if you ran the inverse of this study, and tried to get a bunch of guys who think they have BIG dicks, then you might expect to see 1 of 5 guys who should have smaller dicks, have larger ones. That is, an extra 10% should fall above the 50% percentile. And so the conclusion from that would be, in terms of an expectation, is that just as most of the men who think they are small are actually “normal”, most of the men who think they are big, are actually just “normal” as well. 1 of 5 really is. The remainder are simply mistakenly convinced of something that just isn’t true.

Obviously the real skew that comes into play is the “perception” of penis sizes because small men don’t advertise it, whereas big men do. For example, big men make porno, take pictures of their sexual trysts with girlfriends and post them online on amateur porn sites. The expectation here is that we wind up inundated with pictures from the big end of the spectrum. The “signal” of average penis size is drowned out with all this visual noise.so to get the real data we have to look at studies like this.

This thread is proof positive that FSL doesn’t vary much across most of the studies, doesn’t vary much by sample size, or by geography, or ethnicity. There is perhaps about a half inch of “play” that seems to represent the typical variance, (sorry, no time to do even a quick weighted average to pin this number down, but someone interested might want to.) and while some of it might possibly be attributable to actual penis size differences, it’s probably more likely due to differences in measurement method and sample size.

Actually, there’s a strong pattern of average differences by geography/ethnicity.

Well, I’m going to nitpick here and say there isn’t really enough data to show much of a pattern, let alone a strong one. Just because here in this thread, there is really only the one legitimate outlier which is Korea. However, in this thread there isn’t much data out of Asia at all, (unless you count the Indian subcontinent, which I would argue is fair), so even averaging them together, you’re still looking at a FSL which is within one SD of the FSL from studies on three other continents.

If it’s a pattern it’s kinda weak. I’m not saying there aren’t regional or ethnic differences that are geographically clustered, but in my opinion there isn’t enough to suggest that.

Nonsense, balkans (greece) is lower than western europe, turkey is lower than that, iran lower than that, india lower than that, and south korea lowest of all. That’s a very strong east-west pattern across eurasia.