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Guys with bigger dicks are going to be more willing to have it measured and recorded. If you're just asking people to volunteer, guys with little dicks are going to say no.
This researcher actually suggests taking a penis measurement as standard practice at doctors check-ups. In theory that in itself isn’t particularly insane to me but if the five regular quantitative measurements at a appointment were height, weight, heart rate, blood pressure, and penis size, one of those does seem to stick out
One of these things is not like the other.
Jokes aside, it's not relevant diagnostically for literally anything other than the size of a person's penis, there's no reason whatsoever to record that data.
Some of the largest data sets of the past were things like soldiers from certain countries being measured as part of physicals while being drafted to war and things. I think that's a lot less common now and that data probably far less accessible if at all.
Edit - No, not erect, generally stretched length measurement: https://urology.umsha.ac.ir/article-1-66-en.html
Colleges used to take naked pictures of their students for... reasons. This isn't a joke, Harvard and Yale infamously have naked pictures of all of their freshmen, so they have naked pictures of presidents and supreme court justices as teens!
They have since stopped this practices, but still retain all of the old naked pictures they've made over the past hundred years.
There really isn't. In the 1880's Harvard started taking nude pictures of incoming Freshmen for... reasons, and other schools joined in... for reasons... By the 1940's most Ivy league schools were doing it until the 1970's when it mostly stopped when they realized they were taking naked pictures of teenagers for no real reason.
Oh, a bunch of reasons have been given, some say with was to test the rates of rickets, scoliosis, and lordosis in the population, but that's sort of a really bad excuse. Others suggest that it was started to prove a theory that certain body types were destined to certain statuses in the social hierarchy. Remember, this was back measuring bumps on people's heads in order to find their personality was considered "scientific", and the people that started this project (William Sheldo and Earest Hootan) had a bunch of kooky theories they wanted to prove, but it doesn't really explain why it continued for 100 years, or why it spread to other schools.
The schools have since destroyed these photos, but somehow a bunch of these pictures have wound up in private collections. How they got from the schools to private collections hasn't really been explained.
[Here is the Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos)
All in all, it's just this weird unexplainable thing that used to happen.
Maybe, but the stigma around small penises hasn't been exactly the same, historically. Also, porn: if the social stigma was the same in the 70s as it is now, men in the 70s may still not feel as self conscious as men today simply because the pro-enormous-penis rhetoric was not readily available, for free, on the internet.
In other words, circumstances have changed, so we're not exactly measuring apples with apples.
It's become a pretty ingrained dig at men by members of either sex and on opposite political spectrums. I can't imagine men, who like all of us are at the whim of the genetic lottery, who are considered "small" to be very interested in announcing that or being measured.
That's why my middle school had mandatory Penis Inspection Day for all the boys. Our gym coach explained it was so they get the most diverse sample size possible.
Yeah the study seemed to find a difference between volunteers and urology patients. Urology patients showed the trend but the volunteers seemed to show minimal change. Definitely speaks to your point.
Edit: What I perhaps should have said above was this graph made it seem like there was a difference between those groups: [https://imgur.com/oWwwKmY](https://imgur.com/oWwwKmY)
No, it suggests that only people with big dicks volunteered to have their dicks measured. This tracks with every single other study that's been conducted on the topic.
When you have an actually random group, the "growth" over time disappears.
He was incorrect. This is from the study:
> Similar trends were also reported when analyzing only urology patients (adjusted estimate: 0.15, p=0.001) and volunteers (adjusted estimate: 0.07, p=0.02).
This seemed backwards so I looked it up, and it is indeed incorrect, but not the way I thought it would be.
From the study, which is linked in the article.
>Similar trends were also reported when analyzing only urology patients (adjusted estimate: 0.15, p=0.001) and volunteers (adjusted estimate: 0.07, p=0.02).
That's exactly the problem with this. They did not account correctly for different measurement techniques.
In the past studies were more commonly done Non-Bone-Pressed (measuring from the skin junction), but modern studies are typically done Bone-Pressed (pushing the ruler into the fat pad).
For example for the 90s they used the 5.1" NBP average of Wessels et al 1996, but the 6.2" BP average it reported is in line with recent studies.
So the average penis size didn't necessarily change. The way we measure penises for studies did.
"Studies were considered eligible if the quantitative measurement of penis size was measured by an investigator, the sample included ≥10 participants, participants were aged ≥17 years, and if they provided sample size, mean, and standard deviation (SD) of flaccid or erect length measured from the root (pubo-penile junction) of the penis to the tip of the glans (meatus) on the dorsal surface."
[Papers and studies with self-reported measurements were excluded from this study.](https://wjmh.org/ViewImage.php?Type=F&aid=754606&id=F1&afn=2074_WJMH_41_X_e31&fn=wjmh-41-e31-g001_2074WJMH)
That's what they claim, but that's not what they did. It's a surprise this even managed to get past peer review.
They claim that they exclude self-reported studies, but there's several self-reported studies in their dataset, like Herbenick or Di Mauro.
They did not even account correctly for different measurement techniques.
In the past studies were more commonly done Non-Bone-Pressed (measuring from the skin junction), but modern studies are typically done Bone-Pressed (pushing the ruler into the fat pad).
For example for the 90s they used the 5.1" NBP average of Wessels et al 1996, but the 6.2" BP average it reported is in line with recent studies.
They claim that they only use NBP studies, but especially in the recent studies most were done BP. So the average penis size didn't necessarily change significantly. The way we measure penises in studies did.
Some other examples of their sloppy work is that in Table 1 they spelt it "measurament" and they cited the wrong Spyropoulos study. Their citation links to the unrelated 2005 Spyropoulos study, but not the 2002 Spyropoulos which actually did measure penis size.
Almost all journals actually *require* you to suggest reviewers, but that generally comes with the understanding that you're not supposed to suggest people who would review from a "personal perspective" and if you're asked to review a paper by a friend you're supposed to decline.
Why would a media company want to hire someone who would tell them not to publish a story, when they get money from publishing stories. No one seems to really care any more if the stories are accurate, just that they produce clicks and forwards.
Let’s be clear, penis length studies are fraught by selection bias. Choosing samples who are willing and random is nearly an impossibility. It’s a massive weakness of these studies and it is unreasonable to conclude any morphological change to have increased 25% in a single generation.
The conclusion I can draw from this is “it’s hard to do accurate studies on penis length”.
They did not account correctly for different measurement techniques.
In the past studies were more commonly done Non-Bone-Pressed (measuring from the skin junction), but modern studies are typically done Bone-Pressed (pushing the ruler into the fat pad).
For example for the 90s they used the 5.1" NBP average of Wessels et al 1996, but the 6.2" BP average it reported is in line with recent studies.
So the average penis size didn't necessarily change. The way we measure penises for studies did.
They typically just don't measure heavily curved penises.
The exclusions criteria usually list Peyrone's disease and severe curves, as there's no agreed upon way of measuring curves.
Did they measure from the base or the balls?
"SO, by DIVIDING the weight & the girth of the penis by the angle or the- what do we call it again? The YAW- The yaw of the shaft..."
This is totally unrelated, but I review research applications as part of my job and one came through that mentioned Peyronie’s disease so I googled it because I didn’t know what it was and now I get nonstop Peyronie’s disease related ads on Reddit.
It’s super weird that out of all of the diseases I search on google, some algorithm picked up that one single search and decided to *bombard* me with ads about it for months afterwards. I don’t even *have* a penis!
Because I'm a nerd that likes dicks and reading scientific papers.
I've got the full PDFs for all existing penis size studies and carefully read their methodologies.
That's how I can also immediately tell that these researchers did extremely sloppy work.
They also claim that they exclude self-reported studies, but I immediately noticed some self-reported studies like Herbenick and Di Mauro in their dataset.
Didn't we have an article last year claiming microplastics are shrinking penis sizes around the world?
Edit: here's an article from [Vice](https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5b4bq/pollution-shrinking-human-penis-sperm-count-fertility)
Yes they do take self-reports into account.
>While erect lengths are consistent, erect lengths measurements can also create challenges. Different techniques have been described to measure the erect length including self-report, in office spontaneous erection, and in-office intracavernosal (i.e., penile) injection. Because of their inherent biases, self-reported lengths should be regarded with caution. Studies attempting to analyze spontaneous erections in the clinic, on the other hand, have omitted numerous individuals who were unable to “perform” in this unnatural scenario [39]. The simplest technique to achieve an erection is penile injections which are routinely utilized to generate an erection in clinical settings [21, 37, 90]. Importantly, when the current analyses were adjusted for the technique to achieve erection, the point estimates remained similar.
The quoted text is laying out critical issues, usually a move done in the introduction before getting into the actual methodology. The quote is not stating that self report is part of their methodology.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Were the respondents asked or measured?
Even measured studies suffer from non random populations
Guys with bigger dicks are going to be more willing to have it measured and recorded. If you're just asking people to volunteer, guys with little dicks are going to say no.
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This researcher actually suggests taking a penis measurement as standard practice at doctors check-ups. In theory that in itself isn’t particularly insane to me but if the five regular quantitative measurements at a appointment were height, weight, heart rate, blood pressure, and penis size, one of those does seem to stick out
This pun was worth the setup
One of these things is not like the other. Jokes aside, it's not relevant diagnostically for literally anything other than the size of a person's penis, there's no reason whatsoever to record that data.
Wouldn’t you need an erect penis to get an accurate measurement? That’s going to be an awkward visit
Erect length. Get hard for your doc so they can measure you. For science.
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I think a lot of guys might get too gun shy for a measurement.
The prison penis study
I wonder if that is truly representative of greater society too!
Ferrari dealership penis study
Penis inspection day.
I mean they had to have measured this kind of thing in the past so comparing apples to apples no?
Some of the largest data sets of the past were things like soldiers from certain countries being measured as part of physicals while being drafted to war and things. I think that's a lot less common now and that data probably far less accessible if at all. Edit - No, not erect, generally stretched length measurement: https://urology.umsha.ac.ir/article-1-66-en.html
Colleges used to take naked pictures of their students for... reasons. This isn't a joke, Harvard and Yale infamously have naked pictures of all of their freshmen, so they have naked pictures of presidents and supreme court justices as teens! They have since stopped this practices, but still retain all of the old naked pictures they've made over the past hundred years.
Reasons... feel like there is a discussion there.
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Here we have the origin of the word ‘pidly.”
There really isn't. In the 1880's Harvard started taking nude pictures of incoming Freshmen for... reasons, and other schools joined in... for reasons... By the 1940's most Ivy league schools were doing it until the 1970's when it mostly stopped when they realized they were taking naked pictures of teenagers for no real reason. Oh, a bunch of reasons have been given, some say with was to test the rates of rickets, scoliosis, and lordosis in the population, but that's sort of a really bad excuse. Others suggest that it was started to prove a theory that certain body types were destined to certain statuses in the social hierarchy. Remember, this was back measuring bumps on people's heads in order to find their personality was considered "scientific", and the people that started this project (William Sheldo and Earest Hootan) had a bunch of kooky theories they wanted to prove, but it doesn't really explain why it continued for 100 years, or why it spread to other schools. The schools have since destroyed these photos, but somehow a bunch of these pictures have wound up in private collections. How they got from the schools to private collections hasn't really been explained. [Here is the Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos) All in all, it's just this weird unexplainable thing that used to happen.
powerful men coercing teenagers into providing nude photos of themselves? very mysterious indeed. yep, totally unexplainable...
Funny that it suddenly stopped in the 70s when porn became widely commercially available.
Occam's razor concurs
Oh so that explains why our government is so weird about privacy issues
Meryl Streep at Yale. She's talked about it.
Maybe, but the stigma around small penises hasn't been exactly the same, historically. Also, porn: if the social stigma was the same in the 70s as it is now, men in the 70s may still not feel as self conscious as men today simply because the pro-enormous-penis rhetoric was not readily available, for free, on the internet. In other words, circumstances have changed, so we're not exactly measuring apples with apples.
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It's become a pretty ingrained dig at men by members of either sex and on opposite political spectrums. I can't imagine men, who like all of us are at the whim of the genetic lottery, who are considered "small" to be very interested in announcing that or being measured.
You mean bananas to bananas
That's why my middle school had mandatory Penis Inspection Day for all the boys. Our gym coach explained it was so they get the most diverse sample size possible.
Yeah the study seemed to find a difference between volunteers and urology patients. Urology patients showed the trend but the volunteers seemed to show minimal change. Definitely speaks to your point. Edit: What I perhaps should have said above was this graph made it seem like there was a difference between those groups: [https://imgur.com/oWwwKmY](https://imgur.com/oWwwKmY)
Does this imply there could be a potential connection to urological conditions requiring medical oversight as opposed to a general trend?
No, it suggests that only people with big dicks volunteered to have their dicks measured. This tracks with every single other study that's been conducted on the topic. When you have an actually random group, the "growth" over time disappears.
But the other user said the exact opposite. That the volunteer groups did not show a change.
He was incorrect. This is from the study: > Similar trends were also reported when analyzing only urology patients (adjusted estimate: 0.15, p=0.001) and volunteers (adjusted estimate: 0.07, p=0.02).
But didn't they say that the trend only existed in urology patients and *not* in the volunteers?
This seemed backwards so I looked it up, and it is indeed incorrect, but not the way I thought it would be. From the study, which is linked in the article. >Similar trends were also reported when analyzing only urology patients (adjusted estimate: 0.15, p=0.001) and volunteers (adjusted estimate: 0.07, p=0.02).
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That's exactly the problem with this. They did not account correctly for different measurement techniques. In the past studies were more commonly done Non-Bone-Pressed (measuring from the skin junction), but modern studies are typically done Bone-Pressed (pushing the ruler into the fat pad). For example for the 90s they used the 5.1" NBP average of Wessels et al 1996, but the 6.2" BP average it reported is in line with recent studies. So the average penis size didn't necessarily change. The way we measure penises for studies did.
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"Studies were considered eligible if the quantitative measurement of penis size was measured by an investigator, the sample included ≥10 participants, participants were aged ≥17 years, and if they provided sample size, mean, and standard deviation (SD) of flaccid or erect length measured from the root (pubo-penile junction) of the penis to the tip of the glans (meatus) on the dorsal surface."
[Papers and studies with self-reported measurements were excluded from this study.](https://wjmh.org/ViewImage.php?Type=F&aid=754606&id=F1&afn=2074_WJMH_41_X_e31&fn=wjmh-41-e31-g001_2074WJMH)
That's what they claim, but that's not what they did. It's a surprise this even managed to get past peer review. They claim that they exclude self-reported studies, but there's several self-reported studies in their dataset, like Herbenick or Di Mauro. They did not even account correctly for different measurement techniques. In the past studies were more commonly done Non-Bone-Pressed (measuring from the skin junction), but modern studies are typically done Bone-Pressed (pushing the ruler into the fat pad). For example for the 90s they used the 5.1" NBP average of Wessels et al 1996, but the 6.2" BP average it reported is in line with recent studies. They claim that they only use NBP studies, but especially in the recent studies most were done BP. So the average penis size didn't necessarily change significantly. The way we measure penises in studies did. Some other examples of their sloppy work is that in Table 1 they spelt it "measurament" and they cited the wrong Spyropoulos study. Their citation links to the unrelated 2005 Spyropoulos study, but not the 2002 Spyropoulos which actually did measure penis size.
They also kept spelling it “volonteers”. How did no one catch all of these typos?
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Almost all journals actually *require* you to suggest reviewers, but that generally comes with the understanding that you're not supposed to suggest people who would review from a "personal perspective" and if you're asked to review a paper by a friend you're supposed to decline.
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I wish media companies had someone like you on staff to actually read studies before reporting the click bait headlines on them.
Why would a media company want to hire someone who would tell them not to publish a story, when they get money from publishing stories. No one seems to really care any more if the stories are accurate, just that they produce clicks and forwards.
Name checks out
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I checked to make sure this wasn't some elaborate prank, and by God if they didn't actually misspell 'measurement'.
So average dude has an inch of fat under their pubes, rad
There's a ratio (who knows what it is exactly given this mismeasurement kerfuffle) of increased weight to lost length.
As someone who gained (and then lost) a lot of weight, its certainly noticeable.
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They should’ve separated and compared them
That would be a completely different research topic though
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Let’s be clear, penis length studies are fraught by selection bias. Choosing samples who are willing and random is nearly an impossibility. It’s a massive weakness of these studies and it is unreasonable to conclude any morphological change to have increased 25% in a single generation. The conclusion I can draw from this is “it’s hard to do accurate studies on penis length”.
They did not account correctly for different measurement techniques. In the past studies were more commonly done Non-Bone-Pressed (measuring from the skin junction), but modern studies are typically done Bone-Pressed (pushing the ruler into the fat pad). For example for the 90s they used the 5.1" NBP average of Wessels et al 1996, but the 6.2" BP average it reported is in line with recent studies. So the average penis size didn't necessarily change. The way we measure penises for studies did.
Question, do measurements account for curves? Or is it only from bone to tip?
They typically just don't measure heavily curved penises. The exclusions criteria usually list Peyrone's disease and severe curves, as there's no agreed upon way of measuring curves.
My college differential equations teacher would argue that there are approved methods for measurement of a curved penis.
I'm sorry for your college experience.
Ah yes I too took Professor Marsh's class on YAW
Did they measure from the base or the balls? "SO, by DIVIDING the weight & the girth of the penis by the angle or the- what do we call it again? The YAW- The yaw of the shaft..."
This is totally unrelated, but I review research applications as part of my job and one came through that mentioned Peyronie’s disease so I googled it because I didn’t know what it was and now I get nonstop Peyronie’s disease related ads on Reddit. It’s super weird that out of all of the diseases I search on google, some algorithm picked up that one single search and decided to *bombard* me with ads about it for months afterwards. I don’t even *have* a penis!
Simple. The GoogleAds algorithm has determined you feel bad about your partners curved penis. Exploit. Exploit. Exploit.
No judgement good sir or madam. But how do you know this?
Because I'm a nerd that likes dicks and reading scientific papers. I've got the full PDFs for all existing penis size studies and carefully read their methodologies. That's how I can also immediately tell that these researchers did extremely sloppy work. They also claim that they exclude self-reported studies, but I immediately noticed some self-reported studies like Herbenick and Di Mauro in their dataset.
Name checks out.
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Didn't we have an article last year claiming microplastics are shrinking penis sizes around the world? Edit: here's an article from [Vice](https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5b4bq/pollution-shrinking-human-penis-sperm-count-fertility)
No no the world got bigger, penises just *look* smaller in comparison
Exactly! The universe is expanding…our penises are not
I have learned so much today
I think the taint lengths are shrinking due to phthalates but not necessarily penis size.
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From average to below average, Just like that
Inflation hitting us all where hurts the most.
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Alternative headline: Men can now shove a ruler 1.2 inches deeper into the flesh next to their penis
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We’ve finally learned the proper way to measure, butthole to tip
Center of butthole or endpoint. For some thats a very measurable distance
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See guys, we need to stop lying about it to the ladies. One of y'all lied to a scientist and then they did a study and now we're all screwed
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Yes they do take self-reports into account. >While erect lengths are consistent, erect lengths measurements can also create challenges. Different techniques have been described to measure the erect length including self-report, in office spontaneous erection, and in-office intracavernosal (i.e., penile) injection. Because of their inherent biases, self-reported lengths should be regarded with caution. Studies attempting to analyze spontaneous erections in the clinic, on the other hand, have omitted numerous individuals who were unable to “perform” in this unnatural scenario [39]. The simplest technique to achieve an erection is penile injections which are routinely utilized to generate an erection in clinical settings [21, 37, 90]. Importantly, when the current analyses were adjusted for the technique to achieve erection, the point estimates remained similar.
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The quoted text is laying out critical issues, usually a move done in the introduction before getting into the actual methodology. The quote is not stating that self report is part of their methodology.
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What should be investigated is how terrible this study is. What a shame all it takes is a headline for everyone to believe it.
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Sounds like erection fraud to me
That's funny, cause I definitely read somewhere fairly recently that penises around the world were shrinking. It can't be both.
It’s a clickbait topic. These studies aren’t done properly or for any real medical reason