Can you tell the size of a man’s penis by looking at his hands or feet, or by how tall he is? Urban legend asserts that you can. It’s not uncommon to hear a woman speculate about a man’s member after sizing up his broad shoulders or scoffing at his dainty hands. Just the other day, I caught myself drifting into wonderland after catching sight of some of the largest, thickest man hands I have ever seen. I wasn’t even attracted to the owner of said hands, but I couldn’t get my mind out of the gutter. Damn, I thought, his penis must be huge.
But what evidence is there for correlating a man’s twigs and berries with the size of his extremities, or his height, or even his race?
The answer is not as clear as you might think. In a 2002 study conducted at the University College London, researchers wanted to know if a man’s shoe size correlated with the length of his unit. Measuring 104 men’s feet was easy; measuring their penises was not. That’s because there is no perfect way to measure a man’s penis. Should length be measured when it’s flaccid, stretched, or erect? Most men would probably want their penises to be measured when they’re erect—putting the best foot forward as it were—but not all erections are created equal. Some are really big and hard, and some are just big and hard.
In this study, and in many others that measure penis length, the researchers stretched the penis with a defined amount of force to determine how long it can get. This gives a pretty good indication of how long the penis would be when fully erect. (You can also inject a hormone into the penis to make it fully erect, but the idea of a needle near a penis makes for very few volunteers.)
The result of this study, to the relief of all size seven shoe-wearing males, was that “there is no scientific support for the relationship” between the size of shoe and length of penis.
Another study, which looked at body height in addition to foot length, had similar results. Researchers at University of Alberta measured the height, shoe size, and stretched penile length of sixty-three healthy men. They found that body height and foot length were only weakly correlated with the size of their penis and that “height and foot size would not serve as practical estimators of penis length.” Big feet mean that, ho-hum, he’ll wear big shoes. However, the issue of height is not so clearly resolved.
Although the above study did not find a correlation between height and penis size, my own anecdotal evidence in this category has proven otherwise. The biggest penis I’ve ever seen was attached to the biggest and tallest man I’ve ever slept with. The smallest penis? You guessed it, a petite man only a few inches taller than my 5'4". But a handful of men does not make a truth. So, digging deeper, I found a 2001 Italian study, conducted among 3,300 young men which found that penis dimensions (length and girth) were significantly correlated with weight and height. Another large study, published in the International Journal of Impotence Research in 2007, found a correlation between height and penis dimensions in 1,500 men. Although I’ve definitely seen some statistical outliers—tall men with small penises, short guys with big ones—the averages seem to show that males, parts to a whole, are proportionately scaled. But what about hands?
