IS PENIS SIZE AND RACE REALLY UNCORRELATED?
I’d guess probably not? Penis size is correlated with height, and height is also correlated with race, so it’d be weird if there were no correlation whatsoever between penis size and race, just based on sheer physical size differences alone. Maybe it’s a super slight correlation, but we should see something, right?
My friend said “Hey, there’s no correlation between penis size and race” and linked Wikipedia:
The belief that penis size varies according to race is not supported by scientific evidence.[6][30] A 2005 study reported that “there is no scientific background to support the alleged ‘oversized’ penis in black people”.[31]
A study of 253 men from Tanzania found that the average stretched flaccid penis length of Tanzanian males is 11 cm (4.53 inches) long, smaller than the worldwide average, stretched flaccid penis length of 13.24 cm (5.21 inches), and average erect penis length of 13.12 cm (5.17 inches).[32]
A 2016 study of 248 Korean men identified the average erect penis length to be 13.53 cm (5.33 in).[18] A study of 115 men from Nigeria found that the average flaccid stretched penis length of Nigerian males is 13.37 cm (5.26 inches) long, which is near identical to the worldwide average, stretched flaccid penis length of 13.24 cm (5.21 inches) and average erect penis length of 13.12 cm (5.17 inches).[33] A 2015 systematic review of 15,521 men found “no indications of differences in racial variability”, and stated that it was not possible to draw any conclusions about size and race from the available literature and that further research needed to be conducted.[1]
According to Aaron Spitz, a urologist, many websites and studies promoting variation of penis size between races use unscientific methods of collecting information and often ignore contradictory evidence. He concludes that “when you really take a good look at the naked data, there’s not a whole lot there [showing racial variation in penis size].”[34]“
Uh, what? This is extremely confusing to me. Does this mean taller men (and thus taller races) have smaller penises relative to their body size, and shorter men (and thus shorter races) have larger relative to their body size? If that were true, it’d be uniquely interesting and I wanna figure out why!
But I suspect it’s not true, and that Wikipedia (or the literature it’s based on) has some incentive to deny that race and penis size have any correlation at all, so I took some adderall.
The belief that penis size varies according to race is not supported by scientific evidence.[6][30]
The source here is an article that describes a study, saying “The findings also deflate a few other myths about male genitalia. The notion that penis size varies according to race, for example, is false.”
The study itself, however doesn’t investigate race correlations whatsoever; it has a single mention of ‘race’, and it’s to say “More research is required on the effects of race and age on penile length”
A 2005 study reported that “there is no scientific background to support the alleged ‘oversized’ penis in black people”.[31]
The full context of this quote is “Interestingly, there is no scientific background to support the alleged ‘oversized’ penis in black people. Mean penile flaccid length and stretched length recently reported in 123 Korean military men were indeed lower than other values on non-Asian populations [5] (Table 1). At present, in the absence of any comparative study, these values remain debatable, but the possibility of racial differences in penile size should not be overlooked when investigating patients complaining of a short penis.”
Which I interpret as, “We haven’t seen studies saying black people have bigger penises, but there might be some evidence for penis size correlation in other races.”
A study of 253 men from Tanzania found that the average stretched flaccid penis length of Tanzanian males is 11 cm (4.53 inches) long, smaller than the worldwide average, stretched flaccid penis length of 13.24 cm (5.21 inches), and average erect penis length of 13.12 cm (5.17 inches).[32]
But if you continue reading, it says that their findings were out of the norm for other studies, probably due to stunted growth:
In this sample the mean SD adult stretched penile length of 11.5 1.6 cm is near the lower end of the spectrum of other studies. In the world literature length varies from 9.6 to 16.7 cm.15,17,19 –23 Our findings differ from published studies in West Africa.15,16 There are several potential explanations, including delayed puberty, stunted growth/poor nutrition and a preponderance of young adults in the adult category.”
(also, they do find correlation between glans circumference and height in this study)
But even if we take the Wikipedia summary at face value, then is it claiming that Tanzanian men have smaller penises than average? Wouldn’t this be dangerously close to suggesting there’s some racial correlation with penis size anyway?
A 2016 study of 248 Korean men identified the average erect penis length to be 13.53 cm (5.33 in).[18]
This study is specifically about the effects of circumcision on erect penis length (and also find a mild correlation of penis size with height). I think Wikipedia included this in an attempt to show “Look, different studies of subpopulations break stereotypes!”
But this meta analysis on penis length says there’s high variability across reports of penis length, because people usually measure penis length by stretching the flaccid penis, and it’s hard to know if people are putting the same amount of penis stretching force across different studies.
From the same meta analysis: “The question of racial variability can only be resolved by the measurements with large enough population being made by practitioners following the same method with other variables that may influence penis size (such as height) being kept constant.”
They want to control for height, the most plausible explanation for correlation between race and penis size? If people were claiming “There’s no correlation of penis size between races as a percentage of their height or body mass”, I’d be fine. I’m not sure if it’s true, but it seems like a really plausible theory. But people are claiming there’s no correlation between penis size and race at all, which seems ridiculous.
A study of 115 men from Nigeria found that the average flaccid stretched penis length of Nigerian males is 13.37 cm (5.26 inches) long, which is near identical to the worldwide average, stretched flaccid penis length of 13.24 cm (5.21 inches) and average erect penis length of 13.12 cm (5.17 inches).[33]
Again, this is a study (small sample size) that is subject to the same problems of the Korean study; hard to be consistent with penis measuring, and is why the meta analyses continue being “idk hard to draw conclusions.”
The study didn’t find a correlation of penis size with body mass, but did find a correlation of penis size with butt size. Bigger butts = bigger penises, which is new thing to watch out for, ladies.
A 2015 systematic review of 15,521 men found “no indications of differences in racial variability”, and stated that it was not possible to draw any conclusions about size and race from the available literature and that further research needed to be conducted.[1]
This is the same meta analysis I referenced saying that it’s hard to measure penis sizes, cause it’s hard to compare independent studies to each other (which is exactly what the rest of this Wikipedia section was doing, by the way).
According to Aaron Spitz, a urologist, many websites and studies promoting variation of penis size between races use unscientific methods of collecting information and often ignore contradictory evidence. He concludes that “when you really take a good look at the naked data, there’s not a whole lot there [showing racial variation in penis size].”[34]“
Unfortunately this dude made this claim in a book, which I don’t feel like buying and reading. And he’s not wrong – as far as I can tell we haven’t had a good, high-n study that was careful to use the same measuring techniques across races.
There are some other studies that do suggest penis size correlations with length, though a lot are self reports. This page from suspiciously-named penissizes.org claims to have gone through a bunch of studies and found correlations between penis size and race, but they don’t give a lot of info about their methodology and also say “we need to do more research.”
So I can’t say Wikipedia is wrong – according to the sources it gave, there’s no good evidence to support racial correlation with penis size, but there’s also not good evidence to say there isn’t any, either. And over and over again, I find articles online quoting the sources above to conclude that there isn’t any correlation. It’s like, if a few meta analyses found “Hey, we haven’t done the research required to determine if there’s a correlation between hand size and longevity yet,” and then everybody ran around reporting “There’s no correlation between hand size and longevity, it’s a myth!” No, jesus, we just haven’t figured it out yet.
(I also didn’t look deeply into arguments claiming that there is a correlation; it’s possible there’s some solid evidence out there in the other direction).
But race is correlated with height, and height is correlated with penis size, so thus, race should be correlated with penis size. If this isn’t the case, and it might not be, it’d be super interesting to know, and I’d love to see research about it. It’d be a much more fascinating reality than if there were a race-penis size correlation; why would smaller men have proportionately larger penises??
I know this is an old post, but I was surprised that it had zero comments, so thought I'd offer a few thoughts:
I'm not sure I'm convinced by your argument that "race is correlated to height, and height is correlated to penis size, therefore race should be correlated to penis size," for a few reasons.
1. Your citation for race-height doesn't actually say anything about race -- it just lists average heights by country. That's a problem for a lot of reasons, but I'll cut to the chase: what we really know is that height varies somewhat based on ethnicity, but we also know that ethnicity is not the same thing as race, and it seems self-evident (and is supported by science) that *many* (though not all) of the factors accounting for height differences across countries/ethnic groups are not genetic.
2. The evidence for the correlation between height and penis size, per the source you cited, is also not rock-solid, IMO. That study acknowledges some of the same limitations that you mentioned in methodology/confidence, first of all. But even beyond that, the correlation coefficient they found "ranged from r=0.2 and 0.6." That's a pretty big range! The low end of that range (0.2) indicates very weak-to-no correlation -- essentially, statistical noise that wouldn't be helpful at all in predicting one attribute based on the other. At the high end, it's a moderate correlation, still not an extremely strong one. And we still have to acknowledge the aforementioned limitations of the data.
3. Okay, for argument's sake, let's assume the correlation is at the high end of that range. Per your wikipedia source, the range of highest average male height to lowest, by country, is 185.6cm to 158.7, a range of 26.9cm. 90% of countries fall in the range of 180.7 to 163, a range of 17.7cm. So the range of average male heights by country, globally, shows a variation of about +/- 7.5% from the average, with 90% falling within about 5.2% deviation from the average. Now, when we're talking about human height, that makes for some fairly easily perceptible differences. But let's say we assumed a *perfect* correlation between height and penis length, and applied those same percentage ranges to that. Let's go with the "worldwide average stretched flaccid penile length" of 5.21 inches cited multiple times above. And let's use the larger range, from the tallest country to the shortest. With a perfect correlation, we'd expect the range of penis sizes, from the "longest" country to the "shortest" to be... 5.6 inches to 4.8 inches. We'd expect 90% of countries' averages to fall between 5.48 and 4.93 inches. All that's to say, I think we'd "notice" the difference in penis sizes a lot less than we do the difference in heights (and, again, that's if the correlation was "perfect," an r=1.0, which it is clearly not, and likely far from). And, again, that's not accounting for the fact that a lot of the difference in height across countries are due to non-genetic factors, and I'm not sure we'd find nearly so much variation in height if we were able to reliably measure for "race" rather than just the countries that folks were born in.
All that said... I tend to agree that it's somewhat unlikely there's *zero* correlation between race and penis size. But I'd be very willing to believe that, if it was even possible to figure this out in a scientifically rigorous way, the difference would be small enough as to be totally unworthy of discussion.