Sun, 2009-11-22 13:39

Summary: Based on the disconnect between a woman’s response to men’s concern this is a meditation on how men use our own criteria for determining the significance of penis size to women.

In response to… quite a few other comments on an advice post at Em & Lo titled “My Boyfriend Has a Small Penis,” where the correspondent complained her new boyfriend’s penis was 5-6 inches long a commenter named SP said

Guys, really, 5″ isn’t a small penis! It’s average; no woman in her right mind would look at you and feel short changed.  I can’t believe more than 1% of all women out there would think 5″ is too small. I had no idea so many of you [guys] feel this much pain about this issue. That was tough to read, especially since I know your dick size doesn’t matter! Don’t believe the hype!

Read the comment in context here.

No wonder Em & Lo made it that week’s Comment of the Week. I say good call.

As I read through the comments it’s actually clear that while penis size really does matters but it doesn’t matter much. To women.

It seems to matter quite a lot to men, who evidently can’t shake the notion that it matters, a lot, to women. Yes, it actually does matter to at least some women too — else the original correspondent wouldn’t have written her letter to Em & Lo in the first place. But that’s not the same as mattering to everybody. Or even mattering the same way to those for whom it does matter.

Honestly, though, it’s like men worrying about preferences for chin size, or hairline, or chest hair, or age, or smell. (Aside: No need to do the cliché opposite-sex comparisons, and just because they’re popular doesn’t breast-size/penis-size analogies are a good idea anyway.)

What’s funny, though, is that some women really do only want partners who are older than them. Or want men who smell better to them. Or men with certain accents, or faces, or hair. Or, oh, say, “men who are not muscle-bound; men with more feminine face shapes, men with attractive faces“

Yet men rarely take those “inadequacies” to heart. We rarely, say, compare our feet to other men’s in the locker room and worry that this one or that might be a better dancer.

Hearing that some women prefer bigger penises, though, puts an awful lot of men in a tizzy. Let one man’s penis be even a little bit bigger than another’s and reassurances notwithstanding there’s a good chance second one will decide the larger guy would be every potential partner’s first choice.

At any rate, I think the commenter’s bafflement nicely illustrates the difference in the way penis size matters to women vs. the way it matters to men.

Incidentally (and this relates to the comment thread in Melissa’s fascinating post about men and body image at Feministing Community) I think a lot of this derives from men’s self-indoctrination in Rule #2 of the bogus Two Rules of Desire: it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. Lacking an understanding of men’s appeal to women in general we can’t locate penis-size preference as one among our partners’ many perfectly real but also perfectly flexible preferences.

Sat, 2009-08-22 17:43

I can’t have been the first person to mention it but if penis size was all that important to women’s satisfaction in sex then it ought to stand to reason that women, who’s hands after all are much smaller than men’s penises, mustn’t be able to satisfy themselves at all.

That’s obviously not to say there’s no distinction to be made about size at all. Or even that more people find one size nicer than another. It’s just that it seems like to believe that size matters or especially to imagine that larger is always more enjoyable is to misunderstand the part men and our… well… parts play in women’s sexuality.

Update: Just to clarify, I’m not saying I have magic insights into what works for women. Nor am I saying intercourse isn’t important. I’m saying I’ve got a very strong idea of how men encourage each other to think it matters. Instead of checking in with the individuals for whom it actually matters.

Thu, 2009-04-30 13:05

Via economics blogger Tyler Cowen and sex-blogger Violet Blue we’ve got not one but two works of epic fiction, one sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that, together, explain perfectly why so many women can have orgasms the regular way (with fingers, toys, tongues) but no so much from intercourse.

Exhibit #1 would be sociobiologist David Barash (in his first book, incidentally, he claimed the behavior of microscopic, parasitic acanthocephalan worms somehow explains or justifies homosexual rape in humans) who’s new book, How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories: Evolutionary Enigmas co-written with long-time collaborator Judith Eve Lipton, M.D., spends an entire chapter on the “Enigmatic Orgasm” (Note: sociobiologists think only women’s orgasms are enigmatic while men’s are thoroughly self-evident… and therefore absolutely unnecessary to explore)

Anthropologist-primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy suggests that female orgasm evolved as a spur to having sex with many different males. “Based on both clinical observations and interviews with women,” writes Hrdy, “there is a disconcerting mismatch between a female capable of multiple sequential orgasms and a male partner typically capable of one climax per copulatory bout.” A potential consequence of this “mismatch” is that females would be inclined to seek multiple partners in order to achieve their orgasmic potential. As for why this potential exists at all, Hrdy suggests that it is ultimately driven by the fitness benefit of taking out an anti-infanticide insurance policy, as proposed earlier for the evolution of concealed ovulation. Thus, female orgasm and its requirement of sustained stimulation may have provided the proximate mechanism underpinning the ultimate payoff deriving from having sex with multiple partners. Here are Hrdy’s own words: “It is possible that as in baboons and chimps the pleasurable sensations of sexual climax once functioned to condition females to seek sustained clitoral stimulation by mating with successive partners, one right after the other, and that orgasms have since become secondarily enlisted by humans to serve other ends (such as enhancing pair-bonds).”

Read the quote in context here.

So. Got that? Them gang-bangin’ hoor women somehow evolved multiple orgasms… or maybe evolved… um… difficulty having orgasms with just one partner… in order to encourage them to have lots of group sex. Got that?

But wait, there’s more!

This month’s Scientific American Jesse Bering summarizes the latest word on Ev Psych thinking about the evolution of penis shape in “Secrets of the Phallus: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?“

It too takes the line that women are just a bunch of train-pulling cum dumpsters, and therefore, mens penises have evolved our evidently atypical bulbous glans and flared coronas in order to…

...effectively displace the semen of competitors from their partner’s vagina, a well-synchronized effect facilitated by the “upsuck” of thrusting during intercourse. Specifically, the coronal ridge offers a special removal service by expunging foreign sperm. According to this analysis, the effect of thrusting would be to draw other men’s sperm away from the cervix and back around the glans, thus “scooping out” the semen deposited by a sexual rival.

See page #2, here.

So. Got that? Men evolved the kind of penises we have becausea them gang-bangin’ hoor womin pulllin alla them trains. Got that?

So we’ve got a little concordance here between “creationist” sociobiology and it’s more sophisticated “intelligent design” ev-psych descendant: them gangbangin’ hoor women forced men to evolve plunger-shaped penises out of reproductive self-defense. We didn’t want to, women made us!

Now this is where things start to get tricky. See, the researchers Bering mentions tested their semen-extraction hypothesis with sex toys. Specifically with “anatomical” vs. smooth-sided dildos inserted into masturbation sleeves. And sure enough, dildos with coronas extract more artificial semen (they boiled precisely measured quantities of flour and water for precisely measured quantities of time so it has to be science) than did dildos without coronas.

All well and good. Except, of course, unlike dime store “pocket pussies,” actual vaginas, rather like actual live human beings with vaginas, are complex, dynamic, muscular, and responsive. Worse, from the ev-psych/sociobiology point of view real women’s vaginas do that darned tenting thing as they get close to orgasm, meaning this carefully selected-for “semen extraction” business isn’t going to do much good at all if the woman’s even slightly aroused. From, say, the cooperative intercourse with preceding partners during these allegedly evolved serial couplings.

Which is where the ev-psych/sociobiology unified field theory rides to the rescue! If penises don’t efficiently displace (other men’s) semen in pre-orgasmically aroused women then men must not be accidentally incompetent about helping their partners have orgasms during PIV intercourse compared to other methods, our incompetence is evolved!

At last! Not just a biological basis but an evolutionarily determined basis for the proscriptions and prescriptions of the no-sex class paradigm! :-)

—-

Now truth be told there are more than a few teeth missing from the ev-psych/sociobiology combs here. Which is fine, of course. There are a few muffins short of a baker’s dozen in my arguments as well. The difference being, however, that I don’t pretend to be a scientist.

Gap #1: Other closely-related species are also promiscuous (hello chimps? bonobos? Orangutans? Though not gorillas) but Bering says they’re not semen pumper-shaped.

Gap #2: Which means we would have had to evolve ours in the ~6,000,000 years, or call it 2-300,000 generations since separate speciation from common ancestors. Which, sorry, isn’t a lot of time for multiple-partner competitive semen-extraction to be a significant selective factor at the margin.

Gap #3: Just because it’s not selected for doesn’t mean that human penis shape doesn’t facilitate semen extraction. The authors Bering cites aren’t the first to notice the effect. Bering cleverly proposes that the male post-orgasmic refractory is evolved to prevent men from pumping their own semen back out of their partners by resuming intercourse too soon after ejaculation. The down side of this, though, would be that if Barash’s interpretation of Hrdy is correct and women “evolved” to favor lots of group sex (um…) then a refractory period would tend to be maladaptive for all men who weren’t a women’s final partner.

Gap #4: So based on #3 the refractory period suggests men and women both evolved having more single-partner sex than Barash, Hrdy, and Bering suggest, or else there’s some other reason for the refractory period. I can see having one, or the other, but both doesn’t make much sense. (And, at least as Barash is willing to admit in his title, these are all “just so” stories so there could be plenty of other reasons instead of the ones proposed.)

Gap #5: All of the above leaves out… um… y’know… women, even “primitive” proto-human women, making decisions in the matter. A counter experiment I might propose would be instead of using phthalate-laden plastic sleeves to ask real, actual women to try not two types of dildos but three: the original smooth-sided and “anatomical” ones, sure, but also one of the new glass dildos which tend to have lots of extra bulbs and ridges. Oh wait! We don’t have to conduct that experiment, women who can afford them speak highly of glass dildos. (For instance.)

Gap #6: See gap #5.

Gap #7: See gap #6.

Gap #8: For something called “Evolutionary Psychology” these guys (and it’s still mostly guys) don’t spend much time on the psychology part. In fact they’re highly resistant to it. The problem being that humans almost certainly started being able to do mind hacks around the time we learned to make tools — which would have been at least 1.36 million years ago. And the problem with mind-hacks is that they by definition derail predestination.

That doesn’t mean humans haven’t evolved. Or even that human penises haven’t evolved. Or even that human behavior isn’t adaptive or selected for (see human facial expressions, for instance.) It just means you can’t base every flipping hypothesis for human sexual selection on the behavior displayed in reruns of The Flintstones and Mad Max.

%$$!@$!^&*!!!

NSFW Caveat: If and only if you’re an adult you can click here for an extravagantly not-work-safe image possibly related to penis evolution… in a primitive habitat no less. :-)

Wed, 2007-11-28 14:32

Exhibit A: Knitting by Christina of Vovare.

Exhibit B: Crocheting by me.

And so you know I’m not immune to typical male vulnerability, I’m totally intimidated that hers looks bigger than mine. :-) Totally semi-serious. It’s a complete reflex! Yeah, I get over it pretty quickly but it always surprises me when I get caught me off guard like that. Kind of like flinching even decades later when you spill your coffee or tea in case your kindergarten teacher somehow was still right on your case. :-)

Hey! But speaking of size, hers is 25 stitches cast on, I’m pretty sure mine was 27, but she used #7 needles (U.S.) and my hook was, I think, a five. Which is exactly the sort of irrelevant justifications we make up when we’re indoctrinated to worry about size whether it’s penis size, bust size, waist size, height, weight, you name it. We’re all so different, and so cool, and it’s so foolish to compare blunt numbers anyway but if you do put a number on something then we just reflexively gotta compare. As if everything was a race. And there was only one way to win it. And only one person on the entire planet could be the winner.

Wild huh?

—-

All joking aside, one of the very nice things about a crocheted cock-cozy vs. a knitted one: crocheting is way easier to pull out while you’re still wearing it, and the little nubbly vibrations circling round and round and round as you pull might not ever get someone off but they feel very, very nice!