Size Does Matter, Especially for One-Night Stands, Study Reveals

How much do women care about penis size? It’s a sensitive subject. As much as men like to think “it’s not about the size of the boat,” a new study shows that women do, in fact, prefer larger penises. Especially when it comes to one night stands. Surprisingly, though, it’s not all about the length. Many women are more interested in girth.

Women preferred larger-girth (but not longer-length) penis models for one-time partners than for longer-term partners, Shannon Leung, a researcher at UCLA’s Sexual Psychophysiology and Affective Neuroscience (SPAN) Laboratory, found. The study was the first of it’s kind; rather than using images or subjective size terms (small, medium and large all mean different things for different people), Leung and her colleagues used a variety of 3D printed penis models. This allowed women to actually handle the models, which ranged in size from 4 inches long and 2.5 inches in circumference to 8.5 inches long and 7 inches in circumference.

The participants, 41 women in total, were then asked to pick which of the models’ they would prefer for a one-night stand and which they would prefer for a longer-term partner.

6.5 inches was the magic length for both long-term and one-time partners, but girth was where preferences varied. Women picked a larger girth model for the one-timers than they did for the potential boyfriends.

For the second part of the study, women were given a penis model and asked to examine it for 30 seconds, keeping the size in mind. Ten minutes later, they were then instructed to search through a penis-model haystack (a bin with 33 differently-sized models) to find the one they’d initially examined.

Women overestimated the size of the penis they’d originally examined, selecting a bigger model from the bin. For guys who are worried about the size of their boat, this could be good news; if a woman is recapping her one night stand at brunch the following morning, maybe she’ll tell her friends that her partner was larger than he really was.

“For men who are considering surgery to increase their phallus sizes, maybe they do not have to after all, if women tend to overestimate,” Leung told LiveScience.

So maybe skip the surgery. But remember: girth does matter.

(h/t HuffPost Science)

Alexandra DiPalma is a producer for Fusion Lightworks, Fusion’s In-house Branded Content Agency.