Everyone’s had the reassuring ‘size doesn’t matter, it’s what you do with it' conversation at some point. But now, it seems that was as shallow a conversation as it always felt – because size does matter. But for men. Not women.
Dr Christopher Morris-Roberts, a senior professor at the University of Brighton, has discovered that penis size matters to male athletes stripping off in the ‘locker room’ (note: isn't it weird how this Americanism has caught on?) after sports because he claims men idolise their fellow teammates with bigger penises. Hilariously, his research also found that if a teammate’s member is considered too large, it makes men suspicious because they wonder whether or not it could actually be used sexually. Just a little something for you to mull over there.
To complete his year-long PhD research, Dr Morriss-Roberts interviewed eight London athletes who played a variety of sports, including football, tennis and rugby. Half of the men were gay and the other half were straight. He found that all of the men he spoke to were inclined to check out their teammates’ junk in order to compare how their own package measured up – and the guys with the biggest dicks were more likely to become key team-building members of the group. By comparison, men who had smaller penises had to work harder to climb up the team social hierarchy, especially if they were a bit overweight.
‘This knowing of who has a large cock and who didn’t within a homosocial environment helped individual sporting males climb up a social hierarchy of importance. Those with the larger penises were revered and idolised by their teammates as a symbol of masculinity,’ Dr Morriss-Roberts wrote in Outsports.
Apparently, penis size was also the basis for jokes and nicknames among teammates (nice) and this ‘banter’ would often spill out into social situations. One athlete described how, if they saw a well-endowed guy chatting up a woman at a club, they might inform her of his massive schlong.
Apparently (and bizarrely), some of the men were so worried about it that they gave themselves a semi-erection to make their penises look bigger. All of which makes us re-read that piece that Robert Foster wrote for us on penis anxiety with fresh eyes, and remind us why we're glad the ‘locker room’ atmosphere just doesn't translate into the female world.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.