What's the ideal penis length? Depends where you live.
A new survey conducted by British online medical website Dr. Ed asked women and men from Europe and North America about their sexual health and happiness. Respondents had to guess the length of the average erect penis and also answer what an ideal penis is, length-wise.
No matter what people thought the average penis length was, everyone's ideal length was always bigger. Some things really are universal.
Of the 2,121 respondents, between the ages of 18 and 75, 1,148 identified as male and 973 identified as female. Almost half of the survey pool was from the United States (1,055) while the rest lived in nine different countries throughout Europe. The survey did not account for sexual identity or ethnicity of respondents. And because Dr. Ed is a UK-based website, the results are measured in centimeters (1 centimeter = .4 inches).
While the study's results were intriguing, you might want to take the findings with a grain of salt. Because the researchers didn't account for sexuality, the definition of "ideal" is in the eye of the beholder. Is "ideal" in the context of a sexual relationship or in the context of self-confidence? And if you're a lesbian? Well, just take a wild guess about penis size!
We can assume that the survey was measuring heterosexual preferences because the conclusion reveals how important penis size is to women, but not how important penis size is to men. (It did, however, ask men how size affected their confidence.)
The research revealed that men believe both the average and ideal penis sizes are larger than what women thought.
On average, women perceived the average male penis length to be 5.5 inches (13.8 cm) and the ideal penis size to be 6.3 inches (15.8 cm). Men, on the other hand, thought the average penis length on average is 5.6 inches (14.1 cm) and the ideal length is 6.6 inches (16.6 cm).
When comparing what people believe to be the ideal vs. average penis sizes by country, Poland had one of the the highest bids. On average, the Polish respondents assumed the average penis size is 6.3 inches (15.7 cm) and the ideal penis size is 6.9 inches (17.3 cm).
The U.S. fell somewhere in the middle with American respondents reporting the perceived average penis size as 5.7 inches (14.3 cm) and the ideal length as 6.8 inches (17 cm). American respondents were pretty spot-on with their assumptions considering it's been reported that the average American man's penis length is 5.6 inches.
According to the data, only 10 percent of men are dissatisfied with their penis sizes, while 45 percent are perfectly content. The majority of women (67.4 percent) reported that penis size is "somewhat important" while 21.4 percent said it's "not important" and only 11.2 percent said it's "very important."
As researchers wrote in their explanation of the survey, perceptions of penis size are very different from actual penis lengths. "Men's worries about size occur in the context of many social pressures," the article reads. "Perceptions of penis size have become so distorted in the popular imagination that the reality is often ignored and exceeded by exaggerated notions of an ideal size... Is it any wonder that men often struggle with anxiety about this very personal issue?"
But penis size is only one small (or large?) piece of the sexual puzzle. "At the end of the day, there's much more to satisfying relationships and sexual confidence than this one simple measure," the Dr. Ed article reads.
So, when does the penis girth study come out?
Head over to Dr. Ed to read more about the survey.
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