18 Harsh Realities of Modern Dating - Macken Murphy - #1031

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Your area of expertise, penis size preferences, what's happening?

**Macken Murphy** (0:06)
Are we talking about women's penis size preferences?

**Chris Williamson** (0:08)
Yeah, sure.

**Macken Murphy** (0:09)
Okay. So slightly far field of my expertise now.

**Chris Williamson** (0:13)
Yeah, yeah.

**Macken Murphy** (0:13)
Okay. So women's penis size preferences are a bit of an emotional roller coaster, I think, for the men listening. Because when I have the experience of presenting on this topic, what I see is kind of a crescendo of, oh, that sounds really good to realizing it's not as good as it sounds. So the best study on this subject comes from Proust and colleagues. What they looked at was women interacting with real 3D models of various penis-shaped objects, cylinders essentially, and had them pick and choose which one they actually favored. And the reason that this study design is more powerful than just asking women, you know, what size do you prefer? The reason that this is powerful is because it gets around issues of misreporting due to not knowing how big or small a given size is.

**Chris Williamson** (1:14)
How many times has someone said, I think that's about six inches from the left, isn't it? You know, when you're trying to put a picture up or something. You have no idea how big six inches is.

**Macken Murphy** (1:21)
And when we're dealing with things that, you know, are all things considered on the scale of like couches and cars and things relatively small, you know, an inch off, that's 20 to 15 percent.

**Chris Williamson** (1:33)
Also, they're not judging their penis preference based on how big it is to look at, which is what you would be doing in terms of memory. You would be doing it based on feel.

**Macken Murphy** (1:44)
Right, exactly. So that's a really good point. So in terms of, you can ask women on a pen and paper survey, you know, like, what size do you prefer? But even if you get like a really consistent answer of like seven inches, you still don't know that they know what seven inches actually is, right? And there's actually a good reason to suspect because men, you know, overreport their own penis size, and that likely causes some kind of mass confusion as to what size.

**Chris Williamson** (2:10)
You think we've got penis inflation effect.

**Macken Murphy** (2:12)
Yeah, exactly. Where it's like men are saying that there are certain size, and so women are maybe learning about sizes through that.

**Chris Williamson** (2:18)
Ah, so it was seven inches.

**Macken Murphy** (2:20)
Yeah, exactly. And then that's coded. So unlabeled 3D models, I would say that's the gold standard if you actually want to learn what sizes prefer.

**Chris Williamson** (2:30)
What were they doing with them?

**Macken Murphy** (2:33)
Just interacting with them, just going in and picking. And in terms of length, it was 6.3 inches for a long-term relationship, 6.4 inches for a short-term relationship. So that's, if I'm correct, maybe 16 to 16.25 centimeters. And then in terms of circumference, 4.8 inches for long-term, 5 inches around for a short-term, which is somewhere on the order of 12.2 to 12.7 centimeters. And so when men hear that, they typically think, oh, that sounds pretty good, right? Like that doesn't sound that big because of what's socially said about size. And so this is kind of the peak of the emotional rollercoaster where it's like, oh, things are really good. Things are really great. The view is fantastic from here. But then you look at men's perception or at least their statement of their own size versus their actual size, and you see that men overestimate their own size by about 20 percent, right? Which is a lot. So rule of thumb, men are usually about an inch smaller than they think, or at least an inch smaller than they say. Again, that's quite a bit, 21 percent was the figure from the study I'm quoting. So where does that leave us? Well, in actual fact, the average man's penis, according to a meta-analysis of 17 studies, is about 5.16 inches when erect, right? And that would leave 6.3 inches as about 95th percentile, right? Now 95th percentile, what is that? That's about as common as a man being 6 foot 2 So it's not like really, really rare, right? If you walk into a lecture hall or an airplane, there's probably going to be at least one guy.

**Chris Williamson** (4:23)
A few guys, maybe, yeah.

**Macken Murphy** (4:24)
Exactly. There's going to be at least one guy who's at least that tall. So it's not like we're talking about some freaky preference. But in terms of the frequency with which it's encountered, that is big, right?