Australian researchers recently showed that guys who are well endowed really are more attractive to women. Just like any other physical attribute, male genitalia are subject to sexual selection, and certainly before we all started wearing clothes it really would have all been out, front and centre for prospective mates to assess. This is why biologists have suspected for some time that the human penis has become longer and wider than those of other primates because of the evolutionary pressures of sexual selection. Before you all go reaching for pills, potions and pumps though it’s all a bit more nuanced than that.
The study, led by Brian Mautz, conducted a study among heterosexual women. Computer generated images of men of various sizes were displayed and the women – who were told only that it was about rating male attractiveness – were asked to mark them on a scale of one to seven. As the title of this article suggests, the results showed that penis size does in fact matter to women.
However – that’s not the whole story. Analysing the responses showed that these attractiveness scores were also dependent on few other factors – which included body shape, the width of shoulders and height. Broken down overall, about eighty percent of the score came from someone’s body shape. Penis size accounted for six percent and height about five percent. That similarity in score for height and genital size therefore seems to make a case for attractiveness to be largely about the shape and proportions of a guy. As the author of the report says, a guy will only really reap the benefits of having a big penis if he’s actually attractive in the first place. Otherwise it really won’t do him much good at all.
Maybe it just goes to underline that it’s not what’s in the trousers that counts as much as how you wiggle it?