![]() ![]() “It’s a crucial place to look if we want to understand why some organisms are more successful than others.” “Genitalia really are hugely important evolutionarily,” Brennan says. In some ducks, for example, average penis size grows when more males are around. The study can’t answer whether the attractiveness of longer organs to females has influenced penis length over human evolution. “But sometimes we find that males are doing 10 things and females are paying attention to only one.” “Female choice in most species is quite complicated,” Brennan says. Sexual signals in nature are often complex affairs - sage grouse for example, have a whole presex mating display that combines physical traits, such as an inflated air sac and contrasting plumage, with vocalizations and strutting. The study “is really great,” says behavioral ecologist Patricia Brennan of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, whose recent research has focused on duck penis length and shape. A larger penis did little to increase the attractiveness of the shorter, pear-shaped male figures. The researchers found no maximum preferred penis size - the male figures generated for the study topped out at 13 centimeters, about 5 inches. Yet penis size alone doesn’t override the relative unattractiveness of being wide-of-hip and short-of-stature. To find that penis size has the same effect is quite surprising.” “Height is one of the most studied traits - it influences how much money a man makes, his place on the leadership scale and how many children he has. Teasing apart the effects of the various traits suggests that penis length influences attractiveness about as much as height, a trait with a well-documented influence on male reproductive success. The figures with larger penises were rated considerably more attractive, the researchers report April 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. The researchers recruited 105 Australian women and had each rate the attractiveness of 53 figures, a subset of the 343 generated by creating seven different penis lengths, seven heights and seven shoulder-to-hip ratios. Mautz and Australian colleagues generated computer images of a male figure and toggled three traits: flaccid penis length, height, and shoulder-to-hip ratio (creating torsos on the spectrum from V-shaped to heavily love-handled). ![]() Because humans have probably covered their genitals with clothing for most of their history, however, it isn’t clear what opportunities females would have had to exert their preference. Perhaps female choice has even driven an increase in human penis size over evolutionary time, Mautz says. ![]() Yet the upright body posture of humans, along with a protruding, nonretractable penis that stands out from the hair surrounding it, suggests to many biologists that the organ’s conspicuousness is no accident. “People tend to give socially desirable or politically correct answers,” says Mautz, who has studied mating behavior in fiddler crabs, fish, crickets and flies. And research that has relied on direct questioning of women has yielded mixed results: Depending on the study, women prefer longer penises or wider penises, or think penis size is unimportant. The handful of studies that have examined whether penis length in Homo sapiens affects attractiveness have looked at penis size alone, rather than size as part of a package of traits. But man has fallen by the wayside, says Brian Mautz, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Ottawa in Canada who led the new work. Much research has been devoted to the male genitalia of insects, beasts, fish and fowl. The attractiveness of a larger penis is intertwined with height and body shape, new research suggests. But it’s not a purely bigger-is-better relationship. A perennial topic of locker room banter and sex columns has caught the attention of scientists: Do women find bigger penises more attractive? The answer, it turns out, is yes. ![]()
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