Christine Erickson was a List Editor at Mashable's New York headquarters, where she wrote strategic content and assisted with regular editing. She was with Mashable for four years after joining in 2011 as an editorial intern.Christine received a B.A. in English, specializing in Media Studies, from Virginia Commonwealth University. Before moving to New York, she was editor-in-chief of the student magazine, and covered culture for local publications in Richmond.Christine is a Brooklynite, GIF-maker, horse enthusiast and says "y'all" a lot.
Size matters ... for science, anyway.
While there have been numerous prior studies (both scholarly and unscientific) on penis size, the British Journal of Urology International (BJUI) published one of the girthiest analyses to date. Pulling data from 17 previous academic papers that included a total of 15,521 men worldwide, researchers in the UK came up with a meta-analysis of what they believe to be the average size and girth of a penis when erect and when flaccid.
Sorry, guys, but your eggplant emoji isn't exactly accurate. According to the new research in BJUI, the average flaccid penis is 3.61 inches in length and 5.16 inches in length when erect. Girth is 3.66 inches when flaccid and 4.59 inches when erect.
[seealso url=mashable.com/2015/02/04/more-emoji-gets-you-more-sex/]
Numbers aren't the only results to come out of the new study. It also questions some of the common penis size stereotypes, like whether your race or foot size are determining factors for penis size.
The researchers did not find enough evidence from the 17 previous studies to come up with a conclusion about the difference in size by race. Two studies incorporated foot size into account, and found penile length to be "significantly weakly correlated," while the other did not find a correlation at all between the two.
The stronger statistically significant correlations were between flaccid stretched or erect length and height, which was found in four studies, although the correlations were not extremely strong.
Of course, there are a few limitations that could affect penile dimensions, including temperature, level of arousal and sperm count.
But we're much more interested in what 3.61 and 5.16 inches actually looks like, so we've compared the two averages with everyday household objects.
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BONUS: Can You Estimate the Average Penis Size?
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