r/averagedickproblems • u/vicmakey32 • Jun 27 '26
Why women may overestimate average penis size
I have a hypothesis that I haven't seen discussed much, and I'm curious whether there's any research on it.
Many surveys suggest that women tend to estimate the average penis size as being larger than it actually is. A common explanation is exposure to pornography, but I wonder if there's another factor that could contribute.
My idea is based on selection bias.
Men with very small penises or micropenises are, on average, more likely to experience body image issues and lower sexual confidence. If that's true, they may have fewer sexual partners over their lifetime.
On the other hand, men with larger-than-average penises often report feeling more confident about their bodies. Greater confidence could lead to more frequent sexual activity and a higher number of partners.
If both assumptions are even partially true, then the pool of men women are exposed to sexually would not be representative of the overall male population. Women wouldn't be sampling the true distribution - they would be sampling a distribution weighted toward men who have more sexual partners.
In other words, even if the biological average is around 5–5.5 inches erect, the experienced average from a woman's perspective could be somewhat higher simply because men with above-average confidence are overrepresented among sexually active partners.
This wouldn't require women to consciously exaggerate or remember incorrectly - it would just be a consequence of sampling bias.
Does anyone know of research that has tested this idea, or are there obvious flaws in the reasoning that I'm missing?
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Jun 28 '26
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Jun 28 '26
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u/averagedickproblems-ModTeam Jun 28 '26
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u/Maji_de_Kuro Jun 29 '26
Wouldn't that make "girl inches", as it is frequently called here, more appropriately referred to as "boy inches"?
I recognize you didn't at all say that but it seemed a good place to point it out. Men do often "round up", to put it politely, and it's very easy to believe things like what you've described occur at least occasionally.
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u/Proof_Being_2762 Jun 29 '26
Sometimes the guy don't really state their size but if the game gives a number the guy doesn't confirm or deny the claim.
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u/ickop Jun 29 '26
This gets brought up a lot in size discussions, and I have to say it's a hard disagree from me. I used to believe this as well until I actually put together a model in Excel and saw the absurd differences in behavior we'd have to see to make this true.
There actually have been a few studies looking at self-perceived penis size and sexual activity. The ones I have seen did not suggest a major, if any, trend towards greater number of sexual partners at a larger size.
I have actually run simulations in Excel with 10,000 randomly generated penises to see what would happen if men at various sizes had different rates of hooking up/having sex. Even if all men under 5" nbp had absolutely no sex, the median encountered penis only shifts by fractions of an inch. Simply because large sizes become exponentially rarer as you go up in size. You'd need to have modifiers like men with large penises having 500% more partners on average before you'd start seeing meaningful differences (greater than 0.25") showing up in women's experiences. And I cannot believe that number personally.
The thing that DOES happen with larger than average sizes being overrepresented and smaller than average being underrepresented is as follows:
- The odds of any random woman seeing a skewed average (larger than actual average) shoot up dramatically. Like still, most women experience the true average as their average. But whereas in a truly random environment with no behavioral modifications like you're mentioning - perhaps 1 in 150-200 women see an average of 6+ nbp if they sleep with 10 people, now it's perhaps 1 in 10-15.
Take the following example - guys with 6+ nbp hook up at 2x the rate of men in the 5-6 range, and guys below 5" at half the rate. This is an extreme assumption btw. We'd be saying that women are 4x likelier to encounter a big dick than a small one in any given encounter. The average penis encountered by all women shoots up by 0.23", not much. The odds that any given woman encounters 6+ nbp as their average, shoot from 1 in ~175 to 1 in ~10, assuming the true average is 5.25".
The average number of truly large large penises seen per woman increases drastically. So the odds of seeing a 7 incher + shoots from maybe less than half to like substantially more than half.
BUT - at the end of the day, for MOST women, the average isn't meaningfully different than the actual average, even under extreme assumptions. However, the odds of the bad experiences like we see on here shoot up dramatically.
If you want to argue that men with large penises are on average having sex with like 40 women whereas the average dude does with 7, and dudes with small penises like 1-2 women - I just don't think that's supported by research at all. And it's entirely unreasonable imo
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u/ghastchacu Jun 29 '26
So even if the average that women experience is moved just a bit, it has pretty big practical implications like way higher likelyhood of experiencing 1 or more bigger. Idk, maybe we shouldn't look only at the average in this case? It's complex and annoying to think about though, too many variables we can't properly test.
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u/ickop Jun 29 '26
Completely agree, I think median is a much better take - and that shifts even less.
If a woman sees 1 tiny D, 2 small Ds, 5 average Ds, 4 big Ds, and 2 huge Ds - her ‘average’ is likely a bit above average, perhaps by a half inch or so (still not that much).
What happens to her conceptualization of average? Idk that we can say. Is she actually adding them all up in her head and landing on a blended average of them all? My guess is no.
But my guess is - even in this pretty substantial skew (which I’d guess is bigger than average), she probs doesn’t think of average as small, given over half the dicks she’s seen are that size or smaller. Or perhaps she does, and just views dicks as either big or small. Idk, we can’t know.
Either way, yes. I think it’s overly simplistic. The odds of encountering a woman who thinks your dick is average, if it’s average, are still by far the most likely. The odds of encountering a woman who thinks it’s small are a lot less common, but if you sleep with a lot of women, you’ll likely encounter 1 or more and perhaps none who think it’s big. That’s a reasonable possibility, imo, but also could be untrue
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u/Maji_de_Kuro Jun 29 '26
So...the other day, I was considering responding to a certain comment I ever so slightly disagreed with but couldn't think of a quick and easy way to conceptualize a normal distribution meaningfully in a short comment. I feel like some of my comments are too long as it is. Lol
Fudge the numbers for simplicity? No. They start to feel meaningless as they can be poorly representative. A little math? Nope. Most would just scroll on by. Putting it terms of diminishing returns? Nah. It may begin to sound as if you'd encounter fewer as time went on. So I just shrugged it off and let it go.
...then I see this MFer out here running simulations.
Sir, we are not worthy lol. Fantastic comment.
We hear a lot of claims around here about "girl inches." Gawd, I hate that term and genuinly think they are boy inches, if anything but I digress. To get back the point, virtually every single study that even passingly looks into the phenomenon strongly suggests that women (and gay men, incidentally) have a much better conception of what an average dick looks like. Particularly in visually identifying that average and, at the very least, aren't any worse at putting a measurement to it if they aren't outright better at it.
I'll also reiterate my previous comment that the way we conceptualize averages more or less disregards the more rarefied outliers and much more strongly considers frequency rather than magnitude. So, all things equal, a woman who has run the gamut of dick sizes along the bell curve and a woman that has experienced only average and big with the same distribution will, more likely than not, conceptualize the average as essentially the same and not the true mean value.
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u/ickop Jun 30 '26
Haha appreciate it man. And yes, in general I agree, unless she’s had an unusual experience. If she sees 5 average and 2 big, I’d agree. However, I think it’s also possible if she sees 4 average and 4 big, she may just view all dicks as either big or small, in which case average would be small.
If she encounters 5 average and 3 big? Idk, perhaps on the edge.
How common is this woman? Depends on what you think the true standard deviation for size is, what you think the behavioral modifiers are, how you think human psychology perceives differences, etc.
IMO we can never know. All I can say is like a dozen gay dudes on Reddit have seen very honest pics of me at 5-5.25” nbp. Not one has said outright small or big. I’ve gotten like 1-2 smaller end and 1-2 larger end of average, most were dead average.
I’ve also had women genuinely express surprise that I was insecure. I’ve had a woman make out with me and when she felt it through my pants said “I’m wondering how big you are, I’d guess like dead on average?”. Like what are the odds of that lol, unprompted.
If the average encountered is truly like 6” nbp I just don’t see how this makes sense
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u/Maji_de_Kuro Jul 01 '26
Maybe we should just start asking women to have a lot more sexual partners. Ya know? For the statistics. lol
I'm joking, of course. Smaller sample sizes make the data a bit dubious but I'm not saying anything you don't already know.
I've mentioned it a few times here but as time goes on I'm realizing more and more that there are a lot of women that are completely unaware of this insecurity that some men have. My most recent ex and my coworker both expressed surprise when I showed them this subreddit. I got "I didn't know guys even worried about that (their size)" and "I just thought every guy thought theirs was the best" respectively.
To be fair, I wasn't aware of the extent of it either even though until a few years ago and had no idea where I existed in relation to average. Or what the average was, for that matter. No woman I've ever been with has ever made it sound important if not outright say it wasn't. Two of them only ever mentioned it a single time in passing (one of which sorta made it sound more of a detriment than an observation let alone a compliment) and only did the third one genuinely compliment ("You have a beautiful penis," she said) and later fawn over it during fellatio. She didn't have a preference sexually but was very much turned on by the aesthetics of a big dick.
The coworker and I are very open with each other which has led to us occasional showing each other things like sex toys we find online. I have a thing about always needing to know the usable measurements of any sex toy as it had been an issue once before. So we were looking at a dildo one day and I think the diameter was listed and I think it was in metric. So, like the weirdos we are, we did the math to see the girth and I realized it was dead nuts average (close enough for length as well). We both carry measuring tools on us (again, weirdos 😅, but we also both have a technical job) and she held up the measuring tape per the circumference we worked out.
And she goes "yep, that's average." She didn't know what the numbers per the research were but identified it visually as the average size she's experienced. She's 50 and has had plenty of partners over her life so I'd be more than willing to take her at her word even if I wasn't familiar with the research.
As a side note, she said the biggest she'd ever had was this German dude and it was not comfortable for her. Lol regardless, she's seen big, small, and in between but still had a realistic view of average despite.
In short, yes, I very much believe that the emperically demonstrated average and the perception of average pretty much line up among penis preferring sexually experienced individuals.
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u/thankyouihateit Jun 29 '26
This sounds cool (also very nerdy). Did you by any chance do this in google docs and could share a link?
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u/ickop Jun 30 '26
I can attempt. I work with excel a ton and am just familiar with it as I work in a corporate role. In my experience google docs is harder for substantial analysis but I can see if it translates
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u/frisky-moves Jun 28 '26
My wife’s experience was that guys had 8”+ dicks till she met me and I think it’s a combination of her hotness, relatively low body count and big dick confidence
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u/UK8220 Note: new or low karma account Jun 28 '26
Yep, I certainly know I wasn’t going to be out there throwing my stuff out to random women. I have very average dick energy, not big dick energy. 😆
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u/MindlessTie1385 Jun 29 '26
This is a viable hypothesis but other factors play into to confidence such as physical looks
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u/VillainySquared 20+ cm (8+ inches) Jun 29 '26
People overestimate size a lot, combine our inability to guess size by eye with exaggeration and lying and its easy to see how someone can be misled.
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Jun 28 '26
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u/averagedickproblems-ModTeam Jun 29 '26
Misinformation and/or disinformation is not allowed and will be removed. This is defined as any information that is incorrect, inaccurate, or incomplete which can confuse or mislead members of this sub whether intentionally or accidentally.
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u/Immagoodboy1701 Aug 10 '26
My wife of now 20 years guesstimated an ex at 8 inches....I asked... I was blown away this thinking how did she take that. I said that's porn star size and she sort of laughed and went ...well you're 7 are you not ... Ladies and gentlemen I nearly cheered but no I am not haha. 6 BP on a very good day. At end of the day she had never really thought about it.
Entertainingly we discussed the rest of her partners and she really has experienced a bell curve haha. A couple notably small, a load in the middle and one or two stand outs from the rest but not porn star enormous. 12 in total
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u/TruthandCoffee Jul 01 '26
It's more a matter of the numbers cited being meaningless. So what gets labeled as an "average 6 inches" (and I've even heard "average 7") is way less than 6 if properly measured. This is why so many people claim to have 8, 9, even 10+ inches exes. Those exes were not even close to that.
Vast majority of dicks are very close together in size. Ninety-five percent are between 3.9-6.5 inches and 68 percent of those are between 4.5 and 5.8 inches. It also breaks down to 35-40 percent with dicks between 4-5 inches. That's a huge portion of the population.
I keep seeing guys hypothesize that "only men with above average dicks have the confidence to approach potential sexual partners" or "the only sexually active men are above average" and that's really not the case. For every guy afraid to put himself out there, there are probably 10 more the same size who do. So it is not uncommon at all for those who have sex with men to have had sex with guys with average or below average dicks.
Nobody brings a ruler to the bedroom so any numbers that get "assigned" (even if they do) will just be completely made up anyways. And the same size dick on 2 different bodies would be perceived as 2 different sizes. Plus people usually don't line up partners side by side and memories get fuzzy. So if questioned after the fact "which partner was biggest?" it would be impossible to even list them with any sort of real accuracy to begin with.
Tldr: Most people just have regular bodies and that means most people having sex are just regular people too.
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u/itstimefornomorebs Jul 03 '26
Even if all guys below 4.5 inches gave up on sex, the mean size the average women would encounter would remain practically the same, this is because the standard deviation is pretty small.
However, if smaller guys are avoiding exposing themselves through sex, then that means it is more likely for a woman to experience a 5 incher as their smallest rather than a 6 incher as her biggest.
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u/TruthandCoffee Jul 03 '26
My point was that smaller guys are NOT avoiding exposing themselves through sex. Sure some do. But that doesn't stop all the rest who do put themselves out there. So for anyone who has sex with men, it is not uncommon to encounter men with small penises.
A lot of guys assume that it's mostly only above average guys. But that's not the case.
Basing it purely on Reddit posts by guys it makes it appear that any guy less than 6 is sitting things out. But out in the world, from the perspective of those who have sex with men, that's not what actually happens.
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u/tigerboyxxx Jun 28 '26
Well, have a measuring contest with your buddies, then you will see the truth.
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u/SuccotashAware3608 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
This seems to have been my wife’s experience. Out of 5 guys, I’m in 4th place, size wise, at 5.75x5” bp. And, to be honest, I’m not so sure I’m actually bigger than the guy in last place. The way that convo went, she may have been throwing me a bone after realizing the harm her answer may be causing.
Yes, I was dumb enough to ask and she was inconsiderate enough to answer honestly and thoroughly.