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Penis Size Preferences
NOTE: This page was rewritten in calcSD v3.4.
Ah, the topic of penis size preferences. A story as old as time. First, let's approach this solely by analyzing some studies and seeing what information they bring us.
Do women care about size?
First, let's take a look at this research which asks a group of 75 women what attributes in a man are more important penis size:
You'll notice attributes relating to personality type like "Kindness" and "Intelligence" were unanimously chosen as more important, while attributes related to day-to-day life like "Good Clothes", "Enjoys Cooking" and "Type of Car" were among the most frequently chosen as less important than penis size. When talking about physical attributes, "Taller Than Me" has a much higher preference than penis size, while "Eye Color" has lower preference.
There were also answers as to whether they stopped seeing a man because they were too big or too small, and while there more answers towards "too small" (about twice as many), the vast majority of women answered "No" to both questions.
And even for those only concerned about sex, "Foreplay Skill" was signficantly chosen as more important than penis size.
Let's move on to a different research, one where participants rated flaccid penises on attractiveness:
While all countries follow a natural bell curve, with a bias towards larger than average sizes, the attractiveness of larger sizes is rated about on par with average within those based on the United States.
On the topic of size preferences, let's focus in this study, in which women rate their preferences not on images of flaccid penises, but on 3D-printed "erect" sizes. Unlike the previous one, they can only choose one of the sizes here, but the chart below shows the total distribution:
Unconvinced? Then's let's include one where women were directly asked what size they prefer: Johnston et al. 2014 which reported an Average Ideal Erect Length of 6.09", which is 0.79" above what they reported for the male average.
When averaged, all these women's penis size preferences yield:
Ideal Erect Length: 6.39" (0.63" above what they reported for the male average)
Ideal Erect Girth: 4.90" (0.40" above what they reported for the male average)
If you believed that perhaps toys like dildos would give a different result to the above, then we can look into an informal study where randomly sampled women on Reddit who mentioned their personal favorite dildos gave out the dimensions of said toys:
So now we're looking at dildo preference data which is generally: free from estimation errors (such as the so-called "girl inches"), free from the dishonesty of self-reporting to maintain social desirability, and free from settling for anything other than their ideal preference.
When averaged, all these women's dildo preferences yield:
Insertable Length: 6.23"
Circumference: 4.80"
Additionally, a random sampling of comparable dildos showed that women on average are not choosing larger sizes than are available, and if anything may actually prefer slightly smaller lengths and girths than are typically available.
These dildo preference results agree with the previous studies and demonstrate the consistent conclusion that the average woman's preference is just a fraction of an inch above the average length and girth of a man's erect penis.
There's also one study that surveyed the average size of recently-pregnant women in Australia: Stewart et al. 2009
Average Bone Pressed Stretched Length: 5.91"
If you believe that they are just settling for what they can find and would wish for their partners to be larger, several studies[1],[2],[3] seem to suggest that's not the case and mention a roughly 85% of women were satisfied with or did not wish to change their partner's penis size. So while it's true that in around 15% of couples the woman would prefer her partner be larger or smaller, and though that is not a negligible minority, it's still rather uncommon, and that doesn't tell us how much those women care that their partner's penis isn't their ideal. As shown above in the first "Prause et al. 2015" graphic, only about a quarter of women claim to have ever had penis size be a factor in ending a relationship with a partner, which based on the average of 6 sexual partners these women report, there would be overall just under a 5% chance of penis size (too big or too small) being a factor in ending a relationship.
Here's an aggregation of some of the studies mentioned above:
Summary and Conclusions
In essence, while this data is limited, it does suggest that penis size matters but much less than foreplay skill, personality type, wealth and height. Therefore, unless you already know your partner or whoever you are going to be intimate with, sweating over it is likely a waste of your time. And before you ask, none of the studies so far use NBP (non bone-pressed) data, so the argument of "maybe NBP/BP data is giving out skewed number" doesn't really work here.
The following paragraph is a conclusion from the same person who did the Informal Study mentioned above, taken from an older version of calcSD:
A broad conclusion I can offer after doing all this research on the topic of women's sexual preferences is that: of all the mature women in the world, a very small portion of them aren't sexually inclined, of the remainder a very small portion feels almost no physical sexual pleasure and can barely if at all orgasm, of the remainder a sizable minority doesn't even enjoy penetration (and even among those that do the majority still find other forms of stimulation such as clitoral and vibrational more enjoyable than regular penetration), of the remainder that enjoys penetration (people who would be inclined to use dildos) the majority place more importance on other factors such as rigidity, shape, curvature, ridges, etc. than they do on size, however they do typically have a minimum usable length and a range of girths that they prefer for better stimulation, within this group there is only a very small minority that prefers the feeling of being stretched by large girths (6-9"+ avg. girths) or stretched by deep penetration (7.5"-8"+ lengths), instead the vast majority of women prefer sizes of avg. girths within 3.5-5.5" and even though insertable dildo length is likely to be an overestimate since women only really care that a dildo is long enough while additional length may go unused, they still usually only prefer total usable lengths less than 7" and instead prefer typical penetration stimulations such as from g-spot and/or thrusting stimulation from naturally occurring male penis sizes. Furthermore, the vast majority of these women prefer the intimacy of sex with a caring lover to any dildo.
Do men care about size?
Broadly speaking, yes. But we should be more specific here.
Do straight men care about their own size?
While we don't have many studies to put here in this section, and as such it's more opinion-based (so take it with a grain of salt), I think it's reasonable to assume that yes, anxiety and worry about their own size is something very common with a lot of men. What could cause this? Many things actually.
Firstly, the porn industry does not help, it is documented that a lot of "big dick" porn is actually made with large but not huge sizes, but on short men of smaller stature with women of similarly small stature. The subreddit /r/MeasuredPornstars (NSFW) can show this for you. Why do they bother with this? 1. the larger the size, the more rare it is, meaning the higher percentage of men that are below that size. 2. an extremely large penis size is, realistically, more likely to be painful to many women, but with this trick, they are able to have portray a penis as larger than it actually is, and thus easier to have sex with and thus more pleasurable, in fact they can even exaggerate that pleasure for the camera.
Combine these effects together and you can portray that a size larger than most men have will bring extreme pleasure to their potential partners, but since said men can't change their physical attributes, instead they will enjoy that pleasure vicariously through said porn and seek more of it. This will lead to an addiction, which profitable for the porn industry. It's important to remember that what is said above is mostly relevent to big players in the porn industry like MindGeek / Aylo which own a lot of the most popular porn sites (the is list is on Wikipedia if you're curious to know), but its effect is spread throughout society in western media and culture.
Another aspect is emasculation, as many men want to compete in manlyness, attributes like strength, height, attitude can become a question not of genuine self-improvement but of competition, and while competition can be friendly, it can also be about making others "below" you feel inferior. Penis size is simply another attribute to add to the list. And a lot of women know too, as there are many reports of women lying about how big a partner or ex was in order to either praise or insult them, because they know it's something many men are insecure about.
Note that the above will not be true to everyone, it is spoken generally, and since we don't have many studies to put in this section, it's left more as food for thought than proof. Still, in the beginning of this post, there has been extensive evidence that most women prefer sizes that are at most above average. There's no point trying to disprove that through anecdotal evidence, only further research can give us more insight into this, though we can and did brainstorm a few explanations about why there's such a discrepancy between expectations and reality here.
Do gay/bi men care about size?
There really isn't much data available to determine the penis size preferences of men who are attracted to other men, but the decades old Kinsey Study does have some data on the subject. Granted it uses nonspecific self-reported perceptions with respect to "small" "medium" and "large", so it should probably be interpreted with respect to what sizes they typically consider themselves to be, and we can use data from another study of non-heterosexual men for that. Similar to results from women, 40% of the homosexual men reported no notable penis size preference, with the remainder skewed in favor of larger sizes (much like men were skewed towards self-reporting themselves as above average).
Another more recent and more detailed self-reported study on the subject of preference for partner's penis size comes from Serbia.
According to the self-reported survey by Grov et al. 2010: Men who claimed to have below average penises were significantly more likely to identify as “bottoms” (anal receptive) and men who claimed to have above average penises were significantly more likely to identify as "tops" (anal insertive).
Similarly according to Moskowitz & Hart 2011: Men's self-reported penis size was a decent predictor for men's sexual position top/versatile/bottom roles both in the roles they desired and in the common roles they had in actuality. Men who reported larger penis sizes were more likely to be and want to be tops, those reporting close to average sizes were more likely to be and want to be versatile, and those reporting smaller sizes were more likely to be and want to be bottoms. Among the men whose desired and actual sexual positions were discordant, penis size was a decent predictor for which sexual roles they were pushed into in reality, following the expectations from above trends (for example a larger sized ideally versatile man would be more likely to be pushed into the top role). The study doesn't provide much useful data for penis size, however they do provide data allowing for a comparison of how men's ideal positions compare with their actual positions.
We can look at dildo preference data as well to see what sizes men who enjoy receiving anal penetration typically prefer.
When averaged, all these men's dildo preferences yield:
Insertable Length: 6.96"
Circumference: 5.07"
In comparison to the same dildo study on women, men preferred on average: 0.73" more length and 0.27" more girth than women. This suggests that anal receptive men tend to have slightly higher size preferences than women. Additionally, a random sampling of comparable dildos showed that men were favoring dildo retailers that typically had appreciably larger dildo sizes available compared to those retailers favored by women.
Data Sources: Male Dildo Size Preferences - Informal Study & Female Dildo Size Preferences - Informal Study
While the differences between the preferences of men and women may seem like a lot, keep in mind that insertable dildo length is likely to be an overestimate since it only really matters that a dildo is long enough while additional length may go unused. The above studies' conclusion that anal receptive men prefer larger sized dildos than women is supported by a separate analysis of sales data which found that the insertable sextoys women prefer to buy tend to have smaller insertable lengths and girths than the sextoys men tend to buy.
