A perennial topic of locker room banter and sex columns has caught the attention of scientists: Do women find bigger penises more attractive? The answer, it turns out, is yes. But it’s not a purely bigger-is-better relationship. The attractiveness of a larger penis is intertwined with height and body shape, new research suggests.
Much research has been devoted to the male genitalia of insects, beasts, fish and fowl. But man has fallen by the wayside, says Brian Mautz, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Ottawa in Canada who led the new work. The handful of studies that have examined whether penis length in Homo sapiens affects attractiveness have looked at penis size alone, rather than size as part of a package of traits. And research that has relied on direct questioning of women has yielded mixed results: Depending on the study, women prefer longer penises or wider penises, or think penis size is unimportant.
“People tend to give socially desirable or politically correct answers,” says Mautz, who has studied mating behavior in fiddler crabs, fish, crickets and flies. Yet the upright body posture of humans, along with a protruding, nonretractable penis that stands out from the hair surrounding it, suggests to many biologists that the organ’s conspicuousness is no accident. Perhaps female choice has even driven an increase in human penis size over evolutionary time, Mautz says. Because humans have probably covered their genitals with clothing for most of their history, however, it isn’t clear what opportunities females would have had to exert their preference.
Mautz and Australian colleagues generated computer images of a male figure and toggled three traits: flaccid penis length, height, and shoulder-to-hip ratio (creating torsos on the spectrum from V-shaped to heavily love-handled). The researchers recruited 105 Australian women and had each rate the attractiveness of 53 figures, a subset of the 343 generated by creating seven different penis lengths, seven heights and seven shoulder-to-hip ratios.