It’s time to celebrate men with small penises

A strange thing has happened in the gap between porn and an ever-censorious media culture: you’re almost never likely to see a healthy, average penis. Oliver Keens thinks we should address that before inadequacy becomes the norm

While stroking people’s egos for their conventional good looks is annoying, there’s something about genitals that make people lose their objectivity (iStock)

I met a nice man recently on a dating app who very quickly wanted to tell me about his incredibly small penis. He was adamant I knew how tiny he was. According to him, it wasn’t so much a conventional object of sexual desire as it was an almost comic prop. He didn’t have a fetish to be humiliated. His cheery shaming of his own genitals wasn’t part of a kink. He was just a sweet, normal guy in a world that cruelly deemed his penis to be abnormal. He was forced to treat it like a joke because, I’m suspecting, the rest of the world had done so for many years.

As someone who only started dating men later in life, I feel I have – dare I say it – a mature perspective on men and their intimate size. Which is lucky because, to be diplomatic, a significant chunk of men that I’ve been with have been what you might call “small”. Did I mind? Did it matter? Absolutely not at all. They all had enough personality and sexuality bursting out of them to shatter a dam. The only thing that shocked me was how little I cared, having been exposed to a lifetime of ambient penis shaming in every aspect of life.

You don’t need me to list the ways we use a man’s lack of size as an insult. Growing up in the Nineties, as I did, meant coming of age during a time of un-nuanced sexual expression, full of weird references to penis size with no apparent thought behind them whatsoever. A quintessential example is the 1994 house anthem “Short D*ck Man” by male Chicago producers 20 Fingers, which featured a female vocalist excoriating a guy’s manhood and asking: “Do you need some f***ing tweezers to put that little thing away?”. Just to prove how wildly inappropriate the Nineties were, someone recently sent me a clip of it being performed on a children’s TV show in Brazil. Imagine.

We pretend we’re better people today, but are we? It still feels like a weekly occurrence for a tabloid to report on some famous middle-aged celebrity being called “chipolata” by an ex. But what about internet culture? The idea of “big dick energy” grew off the back of an Ariana Grande tweet praising her then partner Pete Davidson’s supposed endowment. It snowballed into a personality trait that could be extended to anyone of any gender that had a quiet and assured confidence. Yet while it was great to have a bodily compliment go out to women as well as men, it still made the implicit connection between “big wang” and “good thing”. It reinforced the shallow idea that there’s a special kind of contentment and zen reserved for people who are blessed. This is the kind of thing you get when you let the internet philosophise. In the complicated real world, there are of course well-hung men who are neurotic, anxious and devoid of confidence or indeed happiness in their lives.

To be clear, I think it’s fine for people to have a preference. I’m not demonising “size queens” of any gender. But while stroking people’s egos for their conventional good looks is annoying, there’s something about genitals that make people lose their objectivity. Beyond the anatomical fit, as it were, I don’t think you can stop some people psychologically liking big penises, either. I just want more people to realise the joy in less-than-big penises at the same time, and appreciate the way we as a society dehumanise people who own them. Even the most woke of us will still find a small d*** joke funny. Look at when Greta Thunberg made the mistake of engaging Andrew Tate and flamed him by suggesting he had “small d*** energy”.

It’s true that when men think with their penis, things tend to go badly. But it’s also true that there’s an alarming and unsettling toxicity around the penis today, too, one that makes me anxious as a parent of young children

Many people my age will still guffaw at the mention of “10 inches” in any context, but do you know the actual size of an average male penis? It’s around five inches erect. Sixty per cent of the country’s men worry they’re small, which is frankly too many men. It’s hard to even know where to start with it. Imagine if your best male friend told you they were suffering from body dysmorphia due to their perceived lack of penis size. Would you know how to react?

Maybe it wouldn’t be a problem if we habitually saw more normal, healthy male bodies – including their penises – in art, culture, media, TV or even the news. Obviously gratuitous and exploitative nudity (historically of women’s bodies) has been rightly called out, but even though we think we’re in a progressive age, we’re in danger of stopping people from knowing what an ordinary male body looks like amid an increasingly censorious social media culture. That’s a problem on its own, but now factor in that there’s a place where male penises are seen hundreds of million times a day, and that’s in porn. I don’t need to tell you that porn penises are not reflective of average penises, or that they might cause enormous anxiety among men who don’t have a penis the size of an airport Toblerone.

Kim Cattrall’s Samantha weeps over the insubstantial size of her boyfriend’s penis in a classic episode of ‘Sex and the City’ (HBO)

While some excellent fringe events try to redress this balance, like the annual Smallest Penis in Brooklyn Pageant, for example, you would hope that traditional forms of broadcasting would also want to respond to this problem. But I worry that we live in an age where most people in power in the arts and culture can’t make up their minds about male genitalia. Is it too smutty and prurient for the BBC mainstream? Is it too much of a symbol of toxic masculinity to depict at all? We see penises all over the place, they might reason, in our urban architecture to Jeff Bezos’s wang-shaped vanity rocket. Do we really need to see any more? Well, yes. There are frankly too many enormous penises in the cultural canon for our own good: from prehistoric cave paintings of comically big phalluses, to the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset, to famous showstoppers in movies and telly. Think Michael Fassbender in Shame (huge, real). Or in Netflix’s Sex/Life (very huge, realness unknown). Or Boogie Nights (enormous, prosthetic, Jesus).

Penises get attributed to a lot of bad things in the world, and it’s true that when men think with their penis, things tend to go badly. But it’s also true that there’s an alarming and unsettling toxicity around the penis today, too, one that makes me anxious as a parent of young children.

Having had two kids, a daughter first and then a son, it’s been fascinating to me to watch the small differences between their behaviours. One of the most stark is that my son loves to wave swords, sticks, batons, bats and broom handles as much as possible, something my daughter never did. His male friends – his age and beyond – all do the same. While it’s annoying, and can seem aggressive at times, I’m convinced all they’re trying to do is visually manifest the fact that they have a penis. They know it’s special to them, somehow – they just don’t know why yet. There’s a purity and innocence to his relationship with his willy that will be lost really soon. Having better representation of what normal men look like in the wider world will slow down that loss of precious innocence, I’m sure.