I dare say that most males, at some point in their lives, have reflected on how 'normal' their penis is in terms of size.
Yet according to Peter Lehman and Susan Hunt in Lady Chatterley's Legacy in the Movies: Sex, Brains,and Body Guys, the need to define a normative penis is a relatively recent phenomenon. They also contend that it is "ridiculous to measure all men against one model of 'correct' . . . penis." Nevertheless, they concede that Western culture has "adopted an invisible norm against which some penises are judged small and others large."
In their book's chapter entitled "Hung Like a Horse . . . or An Acorn," Lehman and Hunt explore this "invisible norm." They do so, they say, because, "as the penis becomes more and more commonplace in movies and on television . . . it is imperative that we understand what kinds of penises are represented and in what contexts." The authors contend that: "It is also vital that we notice what kinds of penises are excluded. How do these representations of the penis contribute to our ideas about male sexuality and virility? In a world without an invisible norm, a man couldn't joke with great humor and insight that he is 'hung like an acorn.' Stripped of its comic context, the description 'hung like an acorn' applies to commonplace perfectly 'normal' men."
Following is the first of two excerpts from this particular chapter of Lehman and Hunt's Lady Chatterley's Legacy in the Movies: Sex, Brains,and Body Guys. (For a previously shared excerpt, one that explains the book's title, click here.)
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. . . After myriad studies the statistical norm is now accepted as four inches flaccid and six inches erect, meaning that the flaccid penis hangs completely or nearly completely over the scrotum. A humorous anecdote widely circulated in the media demonstrates the excessive "need" to always see this normative penis when the penis is publicly visible or represented. An exact replica of Michelangelo's David was displayed in the Appian Way shopping area of Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The statue was temporarily removed however, when tourists regularly laughed at the smallness of David's penis, which, in fact, does not hang down far enough to cover the entire scrotum. The statue was replaced for public viewing after a couple of inches were added to the penis, thus defiling one of history's greatest artistic masterpieces.
This obsessive need to perceive the penis as impressive is a twentieth century phenomenon, and it all begins with Sigmund Freud. A widely circulated story about Freud has him remarking, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Before the twentieth century, sometimes a penis was just a penis. Since the twentieth century, however, it is never just a penis. Freud writes, for example, "little girls . . . notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of large proportions, at once recognize it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ" (quoted in Heath 53; emphasis added). With his notions of penis envy and castration anxiety, Freud theorizes that our formation as gendered beings all comes down to that strikingly visible organ. Girls envy it and boys fear losing it. By the latter half of the twentieth-century, not only is the penis still central to masculine identity, but the issue of specific size becomes integral as well, a phenomenon succinctly summarized by David R. Reuben in his extremely popular 1969 sex manual Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). The first question the book poses is: "How big is the normal penis?" The answer begins, "That is the question of the century.
By the time we get to the twenty-first century, the notion of establishing a penis-size norm reaches an almost desperate level. The evidence of this curiously brings us back to Michelangelo's David. In 2005, two Italian art historians, Massimo Gulisano and Pietro Bernabei of Florence University, actually attempted to explain David's "smallness" utilizing a modern notion of scientific measurement, assuming his usual penis size demands an explanation. One of them remarked about his penis, "David is not really highly gifted, but he is totally normal. His penis measures 15 cm which, considering the height of the statue, corresponds to 6-7 cm in an adult [2.4 t0 2.8 inches]. . . . Here we have a naked man who is about to fight. He has an orthosympathic activation consistent with the combined effects of fear, tension, and aggression. A contraction of the genitals is totally normal in such conditions."
The assumption here is that David is only normal if we view his penis as being retracted owing to fear of battling the giant Goliath! In other words, in a more relaxed state he would hang further down, fulfilling our expectations for a "normal" if not "gifted" man. Without such contextualization he is indeed small. The art historians assume that the penis has always and only been perceived in terms equivalent to that of medical measurement and judged by a fixed historical norm and that a physiological response to the unusual context explains the sculpture's small penis. They do not, however, even consider as an option that there are many men whose usual flaccid size is in the two and four-tenths and two and eight-tenths range and even smaller, and that such men are perfectly "normal." What if Michelangelo's model was one such man? What if it didn't matter to Michelangelo, or what if he preferred it to the four inch flaccid norm?
By the time we get to the twenty-first century, the notion of establishing a penis-size norm reaches an almost desperate level. The evidence of this curiously brings us back to Michelangelo's David. In 2005, two Italian art historians, Massimo Gulisano and Pietro Bernabei of Florence University, actually attempted to explain David's "smallness" utilizing a modern notion of scientific measurement, assuming his usual penis size demands an explanation. One of them remarked about his penis, "David is not really highly gifted, but he is totally normal. His penis measures 15 cm which, considering the height of the statue, corresponds to 6-7 cm in an adult [2.4 t0 2.8 inches]. . . . Here we have a naked man who is about to fight. He has an orthosympathic activation consistent with the combined effects of fear, tension, and aggression. A contraction of the genitals is totally normal in such conditions." 
The assumption here is that David is only normal if we view his penis as being retracted owing to fear of battling the giant Goliath! In other words, in a more relaxed state he would hang further down, fulfilling our expectations for a "normal" if not "gifted" man. Without such contextualization he is indeed small. The art historians assume that the penis has always and only been perceived in terms equivalent to that of medical measurement and judged by a fixed historical norm and that a physiological response to the unusual context explains the sculpture's small penis. They do not, however, even consider as an option that there are many men whose usual flaccid size is in the two and four-tenths and two and eight-tenths range and even smaller, and that such men are perfectly "normal." What if Michelangelo's model was one such man? What if it didn't matter to Michelangelo, or what if he preferred it to the four inch flaccid norm?NEXT: Part II
See also the previous posts:
• Soft
• Hard
• Not a Weapon or a Mere Tool
• Body and Soul
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