From the book, The Sensuous Man, written by “M”, published 1971
Sex counselors, who aren’t, and don’t wish to appear, unsympathetic, are just about fed up with answering anxious people’s questions about penile size. We‘ve spent years telling enquirers, correctly, that penile size is, functionally, wholly unimportant and that most people who worry that they are smaller than other males aren’t (they simply haven’t seen other males in erection, at least since boyhood).
And the only difference between penises which are large and small when flaccid, a few rare conditions excepted, is that the large kind enlarge less on erection; and that imagination matters far more in love-making than a donkey size dong.
Open sex and mutual observation would cure a lot of this nonsense – large size may be idealized in Texas, but they do fine in New Hampshire, too. The trouble is, however, that the anxiety isn’t personal but programmed. The penis is not only for putting in the vagina, but is also apparently a dominance signal in other primates.
We don’t, unlike squirrel monkeys, get an erection to warn off another male, but we seem to have kept the wiring that this (seeing another man’s erect penis) forms our attitudes. Saying you are small compared with other males is therefore probably really a statement about your self-esteem.
In fact we’ve probably moved the dominance-signal behavior into infancy, where Father’s penis is bigger than mine.
One thinks of Cassius’s remark about Caesar: “Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world Like a colossus; and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.”
One practical importance of this, and of feeling small in our relations with more-dominant males, is that if you feel small your penis will, as a result, actually retract when you are naked together, as it does in cold water – hence the vicious circle. Assertion training and warm weather will do more to give you a normal-sized resting penis than devices that increase the size of the makers’ bank accounts.
One or two good sex experiences will do still more.
Women who put down a partner, either over resting size or over erection capacity, can upset unconfident people and would make bitchy partners anyway.
It pays to recall that dominance isn’t everything, and some king-sized flaccid penises attached to muscle-men stay flaccid at the moment of need, while many smaller specimens move briskly into an operating position.
It must be the oldest human conviction and anxiety that “Others” (black if you’re white, white if you’re Asian) are larger, more potent and generally better at sex than you are. It would in fact be pretty odd, given the diversity of people, if all black men were better or worse at anything than all white men, except perhaps hiding on a dark night; but humans are given to idiotic racial generalizations.
The old chestnut about genital size is also bunk. It probably originated from white encounters with Africans in a hot, humid climate where the resting penis isn’t shrunk by cold and the intrepid explorers were clothed and couldn’t see their own equipment. This sort of nonsense does no favors to both black and white.
Where black people undoubtedly do score sexually is that Black culture has never lost its body sense as White has and isn’t physically uptight. Its body language is much freer and accordingly many black people are better at sex than anxious Wasps for the same reason that they dance much better. Some degree of soul, rhythm and body sense is something we others badly need to relearn.
Video – men rank their penis size – you can’t take this seriously!
Penis Size – When Is Enough Enough?
(From The Joy Of Sex by Alex Comfort, published 1977)
I know what many of you are thinking ‘This pep talk is all well and good for most guys, but I have-er-a special problem.’
Your special problem is the most common source of sexual anxiety among men: the fear that your penis is too small.
How can your penis be too small? It reaches your body, doesn’t it?
The number of men who share this feeling of inadequacy is out of all proportion to the number of men who have small penises, which shows how seriously most men take the supposed value of a large penis.
But even the man with the small penis is unfounded in his fears. However glamorous or ‘manly’ it may seem to be ‘well hung’, penis size is not really a factor in intercourse.
The size of a man’s penis is not a central concern to a woman, who knows from experience that she is equally satisfied by any size, as long as the man wielding it knows what he’s doing. (Besides, most women are too busy worrying about the size of their breasts to concentrate on your trivial fears.)
My favorite penis story (not that I collect them) concerns the two golfers coming in off the golf course on a hot day. The first golfer, a real little guy, says, ‘Com’on, Harry, let’s go in and take a cold shower.’
‘Uh, no thanks, Charlie,’ his big, strapping friend says. ‘I’m in kind of a hurry.’
Aw, you’ve got plenty of time, it’ll feel good.’
‘Yeah,’ Harry says uneasily, ‘but I-‘
‘For God’s sake, man, it’s a hundred degrees, you’re soaking wet. You can’t go home without a shower!’
‘Well, to be perfectly honest, Charlie,’ Harry confesses in an embarrassed whisper, ‘I’ve got kind of a small penis. It doesn’t look good in the shower.’
‘A big guy like you?’ Charlie’s jaw falls in astonishment. ‘You must be kidding!’
‘No, it’s real small.’ Harry says, head bowed.
‘Well, listen – does it interfere with your sex life?’
‘No,’ Harry admits. ‘I make love to my wife four times a week, and I have my secretary every day during the lunch hour. And then there’s my mistress…’
‘Listen,’ Charlie says, clapping Harry on the shoulder. ‘How would you like to trade yours for one that looks good in the shower?’
Anyway, if you are really neurotic and find yourself unable to laugh at your fears, consider these two points:
The difference in men’s penis size is not so pronounced during erection.
In other words, penises which are large in the flaccid state do not gain as much in size when they attain an erection; as smaller penises, which grow proportionally larger. And you don’t really care what it looks like in the shower, do you?
Whatever its size, the penis is not the primary instrument for arousing and satisfying a woman. Let’s face it – penises don’t have joints, they have no protruding surfaces, they are relatively inflexible when erect, and it takes a great deal of muscular effort to make them move even a little bit.
You just can’t do much with a penis except wave it around, bat it against something, or move it in and out. The real sexual organs, when it comes to making love to a woman, are the hands and the mouth. Whatever the size of your penis, it is worthy of its limited function, and it is fully capable of giving you pleasure as well. Once you realize that you are not defective physically, you will have shot down one of your excuses for not being a good sex partner.