There is a whole market around growing the size of your penis and some of the tools used can actually be harmful for your penis, and make it difficult to hold an erection.” All of this can cause us to be disillusioned when we look down at our own penis. “Underwear models wear padding in their underwear to give the effect of a fuller package. “Nowadays we use the eggplant emoji to symbolize a penis, but the reality is very few men have a penis that large,” he notes.
Porn isn’t the only place that’s pushing the size myth, Prado says. Koushik Shaw, MD, of the Austin Urology Institute points out, “there is a decent variance in lengths between folks of different ethnicity and genetics,” most guys are well within the ‘average’ range, meaning that standing out is a tall order.Īnd finally, the fact that half of all guys are ‘below’ the mean penis length means there’s a very good chance that your penis isn’t going to shock anyone, size-wise. There’s also the fact that, like most physiological aspects of humanity, penis size exists on a bell curve. But the reality is… the average penis is size is 5.1 to 5.5 inches, not the 8-plus inches we all see in porn.” Society further reinforces this when the butt of a joke is a person having an average/below average size penis. Eventually, we learn to relate masculinity with penis size. “The man with the huge dick is glorified and seen as the most desirable. “Men start to gain unrealistic experiences at a young age when they watch adult films,” says Fabian Prado, co-founder and CMO of Pure for Men. A lot of these stem from cultural messages around masculinity that they've receive before having a sexual experience with another partner, which may be compounded in recent years as the incredible prevalence of online porn has made accessing this content all too easy for minors. Many people are well aware of the growing prevalence of body image issues for men, but fewer people realize that they’re not limited to wanting to lose pounds or gain muscle. Tons of guys around the world freak out about their penises, leading them to make bad decisions as well as simply experiencing emotional turmoil.īelow, AskMen spoke with a handful of experts about the subject in order to better understand the unrealistic expectations guys have for their penises.įirst and foremost, guys have unrealistic expectations about penis size. That wouldn’t be so bad necessarily, if not for the fact that these unrealistic expectations can and do lead to bad and disappointing sex (as well as anxiety, stress, and even self-hatred, too). RELATED: Average Erect Penis Girth and Length Guys expect them to perform under pressure, to last as long as they want to, to grow to incredible length and width, to pleasure every partner beyond their wildest dreams, and so forth.īy now, you may already see that men have, frankly, unrealistic expectations of what their penises should be able to do. Symbolically, they are expected to represent their owners - maybe that’s why they are so often referred to as a guy's manhood.
Men put a lot of pressure on their penises.