Nine Common Myths About The Male Reproductive Organ

by Francis Harmoney | Health

Nine Common Myths About the Penis

1 Think You Know All There Is About the Penis? …Think again! Here are nine common myths about the male anatomy that some people have been “straight up” wrong about.

2 “You Know What They Say About Big Shoes…” Turns out, big in the shoes ≠ big in the pants. Urologists at University College London examined 104 men, ranging from teens to the elderly, and found absolutely no link between a man’s shoe size and a man’s…manliness. (BBC News).

3 “The Penis Isn’t Very Flexible” French researchers ran an MRI while couples engaged in missionary intercourse (anything for SCIENCE!) and found that the penis curves into a boomerang shape during sex. The findings were published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy . Crikey!

4 “EVERY Guy Is Circumcised, and If He’s Not That’s Just WEIRD!” Across the globe, circumcised men are actually in the minority. Only 30% of guys over the age 15 have gotten the snip, 2/3 of them being Muslim (World Health Organization ).

5 “Use This Pill/Pump/Herb/Magical Genie Lamp to Make It Bigger!” Sorry to burst your bubble, saucy late night commercials, but male enhancement is just a load of B.S. The Mayo Clinic says that no penis-enlargement treatment (pills, lotions, pumps, exercises, etc) have been proven to actually be effective. Since they’re not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, manufacturers just get to make any claim about them that they want. For those curious, the penis stops growing when you finish puberty , sometime around your early twenties.

6 “Be Careful, You Might Break It” Fun fact: Humans are one of the only primates without a bone in their, you know, boner. Most other primates have the baculum , a bone located above the urethra. The baculum is notably absent in the body of human males. Moral of the story, the penis isn’t something that can be broken like a bone because it HAS no bone. You can, however, fracture your penis. It can happen when it’s bent suddenly and with a lot of force while erect, rupturing the lining responsible for erections. However, the Mayo Clinic assures that this is pretty rare. Phew. source 

7 “Size = Performance” As sex experts EJ Dickson and Nico Lang of The Daily Dot so eloquently put, “Just because you have the equipment doesn’t mean you necessarily know how to operate the machinery.” They say that while having a bigger penis might make a guy more confident, it might also make the guy ignore communication and physical cues from his partner because he’s TOO confident. Plus, only 25% of women are able to orgasm through vaginal intercourse ( Psychology Today ). That means size really, really doesn’t matter for 75% of female orgasms in a heterosexual relationship. source

8 “It’s a Muscle!” The penis is made up of spongy tissue called corpora cavernosa (this tissue is also found in the female clitoris ). An erection happens when increased blood flow causes the arteries around the spongy tissue to expand. That’s why one of the causes of erectile dysfunction is vascular disease , because you need a healthy heart to have healthy blood flow. source 

9 “The Signal to Finish Comes From the Brain” The signal that tells the penis that it’s time to ejaculate doesn’t come from the brain, it comes from the spinal cord ( US National Library of Medicine ).* Middle school jokes aside, this is why men with spinal cord injuries often cannot achieve ejaculation ( University of Iowa ). *Yes, we’re aware of how many times we said “come” in that sentence. source 

10 “The Average Size Is Seven/Eight/43,482,184,094,890 Inches” Kings College London examined over 15,000 men (yay SCIENCE!) and found that the average man’s length was 5.17 inches erect, 3.61 flaccid. So why do men overestimate what the average sized penis is? Partially it’s because, “People tend to overestimate themselves,” argues David Yeale , psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust ( Science Mag ).

 

In other words, they might be average and are just bad at eyeballing. Secondly, men could have developed unrealistic expectations on what “average” is because the men featured in pornography tend to measure above average. When that’s the standard you have to compare yourself with, it’s easy for your perception to be skewed .

 

* Culled from LinkedIn