Ask yourself a question: How well do you really know your own penis? Pretty well, I bet you’d say. But ask it a different way: What would a penis reviewer say about it? In a world of 3.5 billion penises, how does mine stack up?
I gave some thought (like: maybe too much) to how one might discover the answers to these essential mysteries. And I realized I know a number of penis reviewers—they’re called ex-girlfriends. Fortunately, mine happen to be a candid, saucy bunch. Turns out, they were more than happy to indulge my curiosity. The truth wasn’t always what I wanted to hear.
Your dick’s not small, exactly, said L., an illustrator in Chicago. (The identities of the penis reviewers have been changed for everyone’s benefit.) It’s a bit on the shorter side, but it’s thick and it gets the job done. L. told me that most dicks she’d seen fell within a general median range, with a few memorable outliers. There was the MMA fighter she’d dated who had a dick that was a monstrous, veiny thing. The guy was kind of a jerk. His overconfidence worked in sexual situations, she told me, but not in a long-term relationship.
Size, of course, was my primary area of interest. But I quickly came to realize just how nuanced and textured a woman’s feelings about a penis can be. My balls, L. began, were normal-size. Wait, I said. Are there a lot of guys with abnormal-size balls? Yes, she said. She dated one guy whose cojones were so big they were basically a scientific curiosity. Another thing in my favor: My angle was straight on. L. said she’d dated boomerangs—guys with sideways-banana-shaped dicks. The trouble there: hitting her G-spot. But what she liked most about my dick, she said, was its level of firmness. I told her I didn’t understand. She patiently explained that there were dicks that were squishy, even at their hardest. Likewise, there were some that were too hard: She’d dated one guy whose dick was like a Magic Marker. Sex with him was like being probed by aliens, she said. My mind was blown.
What have other girls said about your dick? This was the first thing that S., a teacher in Kansas City, Missouri, asked me. I told her I didn’t want to contaminate her thinking. Well, she said, you’re smaller than average, but you’ve got girth. My friends used to call you Girth Brooks.
Here’s something else I learned. Not only do women have complicated algorithms for penis assessment. They also apparently conjure up dick-related nicknames for all the dudes their friends date. I pressed S.: How small is my dick, exactly? At this point, her husband came home with their toddlers, and I heard her say to him, No, it’s Davy. You remember Davy. He wants to know how big his dick is compared with the other guys I’ve slept with.
Look, I should go, she told me. But your dick is totally fine.
I hoped K., an editor in Houston, could settle things for me when it came to how I really measured up. We’d dated over a decade ago, but I knew she considered herself boy-crazy. In my life, she explained, I’ve probably seen a hundred dicks. And where, I asked, did mine rank? With 1 as the smallest, and 100 the biggest? You’d come in at 33. So there I finally had it—out of every three guys sitting at the bar next to me, two had bigger dicks than mine and one had a dick that was smaller. Fair enough.
If my dick was totally fine, I asked, have there been any that are so small that they’re not? K. began telling me about a guy who had been her boyfriend. His dick was miniature, she said. Going down on him was like sucking my own thumb. So many times I thought, Oh my God, this is what I have to look forward to the rest of my life? It was like having a pinkie inside me.
I winced. What hope was there for guys who’d drawn Mother Nature’s shortest straw?
If you’re a guy and you have a small penis, K. said, you need to be good at doing other things. You need to master the hand job. That’s my favorite! I would rather have a guy who’s good at that than a guy with a big dick.
—Davy Rothbart
I mean, of course, it usually is, if we’re talking about schlongs that fall on a scale of pig-in-a-blanket to actual recently-born-infant-pig-in-a-swaddling-blanket. But despite what Ron Jeremy claims in that flashy banner ad on the side of PornHub, bigger is not always better. A penis is not a Subway sandwich. It’s a tool. Attached to a real live person (hopefully). And what you do with your dick is much more important to us ladies than its size. Seriously. Case in point: I once dated a guy with a Paul Bunyan cock—maybe eight inches—who was so lazily assured by his endowment that he simply hammered away like he was playing a game of Crocodile Panic. Not fun. You try shouting Just the tip! in earnest. The best sex of my life, though, was with a man who had a much smaller penis—probably even on the small side of average. But he had moves. And hands. And a kind of passionate life force in bed that could rival Roberto Benigni’s in Life Is Beautiful. And most important: confidence. That’s the one thing size seems to give you that matters—the pride to walk into any room naked, the swashbuckling sense that you can render any woman paralytic with pleasure. The important thing isn’t that you have a flesh baseball bat in your pants. It’s that you think you do.
—Siobhan Rosen
When I was 14, I nicknamed my penis Mister Softee, because I never got any action and because vanilla soft-serve dribbled out of it. I thought it was soooooo clever. I even wrote a song in my head about it (sample of the chorus: Dooooon’t fuck with Mister Softee), complete with a four-minute Layla-style coda. You can do that when you’re 14, because 14-year-olds are complete morons. You, Mr. GQ Reader, have no such excuse. You can’t go around making fancy ginger-beer cocktails and rocking distressed-denim undershirts while being a guy who still refers to his dick as the Springboard. Or the Master Blaster. Oh, sure, making the occasional Dr. Kenneth Noisewater joke is just fine. But actually committing to a penile moniker? That is a definitive don’t. You may as well nickname your brain the Hole.
—Drew Magary
Puppetry of the Penis creator Simon Morley stretches his junk into odd shapes (the hamburger!) for a living. Here he explains the penis’s shape-shifting possibilities.
GQ: How pliable is the material?
SM: Everyone is different. Some people have serious stretch factor, some people haven’t. We don’t like to say size matters, but let’s just say the more clay the sculptor has to work with, the more it can create.
Have you learned anything helpful about how a man might change his penis?
Most definitely. We always find it quite hilarious when you see all these penis pumps. Spend ten or fifteen minutes practicing a couple of our tricks every morning, it’s bound to give you an extra inch or so over time.
—Jen Ortiz
The First Time: I Self-Loved
Like every man in the world, you would like your penis to accompany you well into old age. Steven Lamm, M.D., director of men’s health at NYU Langone Medical Center, tells us how to have the best, healthiest, and happiest penis possible.
GQ: What do you mean when, in your book The Hardness Factor, you write, The penis is a barometer of a man’s health?
SL: I often say that if there was a single question that would determine whether or not I’d give a man a $10 million life-insurance policy, it would be: Does he regularly wake up with an erection? To wake up with a regular erection really means he’s sleeping well, has normal testosterone levels, and overall is in pretty good health.
What’s bad for my penis?
Smoking, obesity, stress, cholesterol. Everything you already know that’s bad for you is bad for your penis.
Okay, so what’s good for it?
Think of your penis as a Ferrari. What kind of gas will you put in your Ferrari? You better pick high-test. Same thing applies to food. Cocoa, as pure as you can get it, is great. Also, fruits, vegetables, fiber, fish (omega-3’s are very important), vitamin B. A good rule is this: Everything you’ve heard that’s good for your heart turns out to be very good for your penis.
Please tell me to have lots of sex.
Absolutely. Sex is really important, because you’re increasing blood flow to the penis. It’s a physiologic way of bringing in fresh oxygenated blood, which will nourish the tissue well.
How long can I expect my penis to be the intimidating sexual weapon that it currently is?
I have patients in their eighties who are still leading great sex lives. I had one guy recently who was 96 and wanted me to give him Viagra so he could have more sex than he was already having. There does come a point where erections are not effortless. There’s no reason, then, to not have a little support with some Viagra or Cialis, if your cardio status is good. An 80-year-old shouldn’t have to worry about getting a firm-enough erection.
—John Dean
Comedian Julieanne Smolinski gives advice on behalf of all women
Do: Trim.
The only unbreakable rule is never to have anything that looks (or God and baby Jesus forbid, smells) unruly. I love a hairy dude, but there’s nothing worse than when you’re about to go down on a guy and you take off his pants and it looks like Gregg Allman is already down there. Here’s a good rule: The hair below your stomach and above your knees shouldn’t be long enough to wrap around your thumb. First, because pubic-hair thumb rings are out for spring. Second, because it’s difficult enough to keep my own hair out of my face when I’m blowing you without getting yours stuck between my teeth.
Don’t: Denude.
A naked scrotum makes it look as though a penis is reclining on a beanbag chair, and I have to stop and picture it with a tiny bag of Cheetos, watching reruns of Taxi in a sweet finished basement.
Do: Prepare ahead of time.
You know when you get a haircut and the barber brushes off your shoulders? That’s because if he didn’t and he licked your neck, he would be like totally grossed out. So next time you think somebody might put their face on your lap, remember to shower after using those tiny scissors.
Don’t: Do anything that involves a neologism.
You know, like manjazzling (or scrotazzling). I don’t want a sack that looks like a disco ball.
Do: Go naturally scented.
Please don’t spray anything on down there. Giving head to a guy who’s doused himself with scent is like being in an elevator with an overperfumed old lady. Except that old lady is your penis. Regular showers should do the trick.
The First Time: I Had Kidney Stones
Almost nothing strikes fear into the hearts of men like the feeling something ain’t right with their penis. Peter J. Stahl, M.D., director of Male Reproductive Sexual Medicine at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, describes four netherland problems and what they mean.
An erection that lasts more than four hours
Really, this is a thing and not just a laugh line in the FDA warnings attached to Viagra ads. Stahl says that priapism, as it’s known among dick docs, is incredibly rare, but if it’s not treated immediately, blood supply could be cut off, resulting in oxygen deprivation and—gulp—tissue death.
Testicular cancer
You’ve heard it over and over: Check your balls. Regularly. (See below.) And especially if you have risk factors such as a family history of the disease or fertility issues, or if you had an undescended testicle as a child.
Peyronie’s disease
Have you noticed a change in the aesthetics of your erect penis—perhaps it’s developed a noticeable curve or a lump or a bump? That could be Peyronie’s disease, which affects 5 to 8 percent of the population. If not treated, Stahl says, it is progressive and can result in severe curvature such that sex becomes impossible.
STIs
Of course. Any small clusters of painful bumps around your junk could be herpes. Warts are likely from HPV. A discharge from your penis that is not urine or semen means you might have either chlamydia or gonorrhea. There’s a big stigma associated with them, says Stahl, but most STIs are very, very treatable.
—Josh Dean
Do you have testicles? Then you should be examining them at least once a month, says Dr. Stahl. Testicular cancer is the most common cancer among young men, but it has a 95 percent survival rate if found early enough.
- Do it in the shower, bath, or steam room. That’s when the muscles in your scrotum are most relad. Also, you’re already naked.
- Know your nuts. On the top backside of each testicle is a small bump called the epididymis, where the sperm congregates. A lot of people don’t know it’s there, Stahl says, and think it’s a lump.
- Put your thumbs on top and your index or middle fingers at the back of your sack and then gently feel each testicle, looking for any inconsistencies—in particular, a part that feels harder or heavier.
- Don’t freak out. The majority of people who come to see me with a lump have no actual incidence of testicular cancer, says Stahl. Most things you feel will end up being nothing or benign.
- That said, err on the side of caution. You should have a relatively low threshold for going to see your doctor.
—J.D.