Penis Size, Performance Anxiety, and What Women Really Want

A man came to me because his marriage was close enough to over that they'd both used the word divorce. Underneath the resentment and the withdrawal and the fights about everything else was this: his erections came and went. Sometimes they softened partway through. Sometimes they didn't show up.

That is normal. It happens to men at every age. But he was so ashamed of it that he avoided sex with his wife for ten years. She had guessed, and she had told him more than once that it did not matter to her. He did not believe her.

We solved it in about four sessions. None of the actual problems were about his penis. They were about the shame, the silence, the misdirected anger, and the avoidance.

This is the third episode in my body shame series, and it's the one for people with penises. I'm giving you the real numbers on size, hardness, and duration, because they are nothing like what porn taught you. Then I'm going through each specific worry with a fix that gets you both more pleasure and less anxiety.

In this episode:

• Where penis shame comes from, and what porn does to your subconscious when you don't get better information
• The actual average erect length, from clinician-measured data on over 55,000 men, plus what's normal variation (hint: 3" is as normal as 7")
• Why 85% of women are satisfied with their partner's size while only 55% of men are satisfied with their own, and what to do about size, regardless of yours
• The single change that solves lasting-longer anxiety better than any technique, and why stopping sex when you orgasm is the real problem
• Why 75 to 80% of women don't orgasm from penetration alone, and what that means for where your anxiety is aimed
• How performance anxiety physically restricts blood flow, and why you cannot will an erection into existence by worrying at it
• Specific fixes for size concerns, a genuinely small penis, erections that fluctuate, delayed ejaculation, aging, and lower desire
• What women consistently report actually caring about

Your penis was never the problem. Don't spend any more years of your life creating unnecessary misery because of shame about it.

Topics: erectile dysfunction anxiety, penis size, delayed ejaculation, premature ejaculation, how to last longer, what women want in bed

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Transcript

Welcome to Pleasure Uprising. I'm Dr. Laura Jurgens, intimacy coach, somatic practitioner, and your guide to getting out of your head and into your body, your desire, and your real capacity for connection. This show is for people who are done performing and ready to actually feel it. Let's go. Welcome, everyone. 

Welcome, everyone. Today I want to start with a little client story. A man I worked with came to me because his marriage was really on the rocks. They were struggling. They were close enough to a divorce that they had both occasionally used the word.

Once we got there, what was actually going on underneath the surface was that there was all this resentment and all these fights, all this withdrawal, all this lack of connection and communication. But what was actually happening was that he had erections that came and went. Sometimes they were there. Sometimes they softened partway through. Sometimes they didn't show up at all.

I want to say clearly before we go any further: that is normal. It is really normal physiology. It happens to men at every age. It is really common for erections to come and go.

The problem is that he was so ashamed of it that he had started avoiding sex with his wife, and then he just kept avoiding it for ten years. Ducking, finding reasons, getting mad about random other things to avoid closeness. Lots of resentment building. Going to bed at different times to avoid each other. And he never told her what was going on for him.

The thing that's really interesting is that she actually guessed. She told him more than once that she did not care, that it did not matter to her. But he could not believe her. He was so convinced that his body had failed some masculinity test, and he had internalized it around his identity, that he could not take in information from the one person whose opinion actually mattered in this situation besides his own.

So we worked on this. It took about four sessions. It was, in the end, not a big deal to solve. It was the avoiding it that was such a big deal that nearly cost him his marriage, and it definitely cost him years of agonizing self-recrimination and low self-esteem.

None of it was about his penis. None of the actual problems were about his penis. It was about the shame and the silence and the avoidance around what was going on with his penis.

So today I want to tell you the truth about what's actually normal, with real numbers, because the numbers are nothing like what porn teaches you. Then I want to address each thing you might be worried about, because there are so many things that men get worried about with their penises. I want to give you a fix for each thing that helps you both get more pleasure and less anxiety, and works way better than avoidance.

For a lot of men, your go-to has been avoidance. Not talking to your partner. Not believing her when she reassures you. Not figuring out how to be her best lover no matter what's going on with your dick. Just avoidance. And the avoidance doesn't serve you.

So we need to actually open it up, because so many men carry all this shame, and it absolutely sucks to live with genital shame no matter your gender. For men there's so much identity wrapped up in penis self-image in our culture, and it puts so much pressure on you that gets in your way and can make you really miserable.

Even men who have great penis self-image are often in their own way too, because they get over-focused on it rather than on mutual pleasure. And at some point in every person with a penis's life, you are going to run into a challenge with your dick. If you are completely focused on it, it can really throw your self-esteem for a loop, even if you had really positive penis self-image before. I don't want your self-esteem and your worth as a person tied up in what's going on with your dick.

A quick scope note. I'm going to speak to straight and bi men having sex with women, since that's most of the men in my audience. I want to acknowledge that gay and bi men having sex with men have their own versions of this, but the way men tend to think about it can be a little different, and I'm frankly not the best person to speak to that. Some of my queer male colleagues are, so I want to leave that topic to them. I have some ideas for people who might want to come on if we can get our time zones aligned. There's also some great content out there focused on you. And for trans men and men with other genital configurations, you have distinct experiences that deserve their own coverage, and I recommend the book Gender Magic by Rae McDaniel.

Here's the roadmap. We're going to talk about where you got these standards embedded in your head. Just like women get a lot of vulva shame, men get tons of penis shame from the general culture, and most of it is from porn and media. We're going to talk about the real numbers on the metrics people with penises tend to worry about: size, hardness, duration. We're going to talk about why anxiety-driven hyperfixation on your penis is actually the problem and how to unwind some of it. For each type of shame, one at a time, we'll go over fixes that get both of you more pleasure and less anxiety. And we'll talk about what women who like men and who like penises actually say.

You can't think about male genital shame without thinking about performance anxiety, because porn is the primary sex educator for most men in modern Western society. This is a real shame, because porn is not sex education, but it is standing in for sex education, and our subconscious doesn't know the difference.

What porn actually is, is an entertainment product. A performance product. It is cast for statistical outliers, for very extreme ends of the spectrum of size in particular, and of body type. It is massively edited. The performers are heavily medicated with things like your typical blue pills. And on top of that it is filmed to distort the scale. It is oriented toward making the dicks look huge and having everybody focus completely on the dicks.

The standard it manufactures is these enormous, permanently rigid penises lasting indefinitely, with the entire encounter revolving around the penis, because most porn has been made for men until very recently, and a lot of visual porn is still mostly made for men.

There is very little correction available to you as a man in this society, because most boys and men don't see a lot of real-life variation in erect penises. You tend to see flaccid penises in the locker room, at home, your grandpa or your dad walking around. The only reference library most boys and men get for erect penises is an entertainment-business curated one. That's the only visual reference you tend to see.

On top of that, men who don't show a large size when flaccid, what a lot of us call growers rather than showers, tend to assume they're smaller in comparison than they actually are when erect. There's a lot of movement toward the mean in the erection itself. You can have a small flaccid penis that's the same size erect as one that looks much larger flaccid.

Even in media beyond porn, the size joke is one of the last socially acceptable ways to humiliate men. In comedy, in ads, in casual conversation, in classrooms. There are a lot of penis-size-oriented jokes aimed at men, so men can be really afraid of each other's criticism and ridicule around penis size. And women do that too. We even allow "small penis" to stand in for the idea of male insecurity. They're almost linguistically equivalent, and that's pretty fucked up.

We live in a culture that ties a man's worth to power and performance and then makes his body a scoreboard. This is the same machine. The same patriarchal system that sells women insecurity also sells men insecurity, just for different products. It sells you insecurity as a man so you'll buy supplements and pumps and extenders and so-called male enhancement, and even porn itself. There are a lot of men out there who are too anxious to have real sexual connections with partners in real life and who go to porn instead, in part because of all this manufactured insecurity.

An interesting difference is that women's genital shame is mostly about being judged, and men's is mostly about performing. Same root system, different fruit.

Unfortunately, because of patriarchy, men also tend to focus most on what the culture at large, as defined by other men, thinks. On other men's standards and how they compare to other men, rather than on their own partner's desires and needs. That's a big problem, and it's a big solution available to you, because it's really insane to focus on comparing yourself to impossible porn standards rather than on your own partner's actual desires and needs, and the real intimacy you could have in your real life.

I promise you, on your deathbed you are not going to be worried about what some dude in a porn thought or how big his dick was. You're going to be thinking, gosh, I wish I'd spent less time feeling insecure and more time actually connecting with people I loved.

Let's look at what's real, because there's so much misinformation out there and so much focus on porn that you're missing the real data.

There was a systematic review in an international journal with clinician-measured data from over 15,000 men. Average erect length was a little over five inches. A 2023 global review of over 55,000 men found average erect length of 5.48 inches. So the real average is somewhere around five to five and a half inches.

And remember, normal includes a much larger range than that. That's just the mean. Three inches is just as normal as seven inches. I'm going to say that one more time. Three inches is just as normal as seven inches.

Here's what's more important. In a survey of 52,031 people by Dr. Janet Lever and colleagues, 85% of women were satisfied with their partner's size, but only 55% of men were satisfied with their own. Forty-five percent of men wanted to be bigger, even though most of them actually felt they were average. They still wanted to be bigger. Women are satisfied at nearly double the rate men are.

The problem is not the anatomy. It is the story men are telling themselves about it.

And a fair number of the 15% of women who wanted things to be different actually wanted their partners to be smaller. There are products that can help with that, like the bumper-style devices and other shallowing devices.

Where the research shows women's preference for size at all, it actually tends toward girth rather than length, because of the way women's anatomy is oriented. We have more nerve endings at the opening of the vagina than inside the vaginal canal.

There are a few circumstances where you might have a female partner whose main method of orgasm is cervical stimulation, and your penis may not be able to reach that. This is the exception, not the case for the vast majority of women. But guess what? There are a lot of other things that can reach that. It's not a problem.

One of the things men fixate on most is duration. How long you last. I have a standalone episode coming soon specifically about what it really takes to last longer. There's an earlier episode with Caitlin V where we touch on some of it, though I don't think we went into enough detail. I don't recommend the off-the-shelf quick-fix programs, because you actually need to learn a couple of specific techniques, and you need to take the pressure off yourself, because anxiety is a big part of it. I'm going to give this topic its due very soon, so make sure you're subscribed.

There are very good, very accessible ways to learn to last longer, and they center on different issues than you think. You do not need to be thinking of other things. Your female partners do not want you counting baseball cards in your head or thinking about your grandpa's Adam's apple while you're having sex. They do not want you checked out. It's not that fun for you either, and it doesn't tend to work. Please don't bark up that tree.

At the end of the day, the problem is not that you need to last an hour or even half an hour. The problem is stopping sex when you orgasm.

If you stop paying any attention to your partner once you come, that is a big problem. Imagine you and your partner go to a fancy restaurant. It's a lovely meal, a really nice experience, everybody's having a good time. The food comes. You wolf down your food and then get up and walk out while she's still eating. Nobody does that. Unless you're a total asshole, you don't do that.

That's what happens during sex when you come early and she is just left hanging. And the sad thing is that so many women are socialized to prioritize their partner's emotional needs over their own that they're afraid to tell you it's not working for them. Girls are socialized to people-please so much that they'll just be disappointed and not say anything, and over time the resentment builds and the distance builds, and now all of a sudden they don't ever want to have sex. Well, surprise. Why would they? Just like they're never going to want to eat at that restaurant with you again if you walked out in the middle.

The problem is that it's as if the penis is the only thing that matters. As if the person with the penis is the only one who matters. The problem is ignoring your partner's needs after you ejaculate.

What you actually need to do is replace the stopping with other activities. Hands, mouth, a vibrator, a dildo. No problem. As a continuation of sex, not as a consolation prize, not as an apology. As a continuation of sex.

Incidentally, this will take so much pressure off you. You'll be so much less anxious and so much less fixated on whether you disappointed her, and less likely to have a little meltdown, which also doesn't make her feel good, by the way.

It's a pretty easy solution. Get thee to the toy store with your partner. Find some things she's going to like and use those.

I think men resist this because a lot of men treat toys as a threat, or as evidence that they've somehow failed. They're just tools. A carpenter with one tool isn't more masculine, he's just less useful. A guy comes to your house to fix your deck and all he's got is a hammer. He's not the most useful handyman. He needs to go back to the store, get more tools, make sure he's got a saw, make sure he's got a drill. You want to be the carpenter with lots of tools.

So get comfortable with toys. Get comfortable using your hands and your mouth after you've come. Understand that the encounter isn't over until you're both happy. This single change fixes more of the lasting-longer anxiety than any technique, because it removes the whole reason you were hyperfixated on duration in the first place.

If you take nothing else from this episode: do not decide that sex is done just because you had an orgasm.

The other thing that's really important is that what actually produces her orgasm is not your dick. If you've been anxious about size, hardness, or endurance, that organ by itself is not the primary route to orgasm for about 80% of women. Seventy-five to 80% of women will not come from just a penis. So the anxiety is aimed at the wrong thing. The vast majority of women need clitoral stimulation, not penetration, in order to orgasm.

Statistically, lesbians are having the most orgasms of all women, and there is not a dick in sight. Do you know what's happening? They are staying there. They are staying with it. They are in it for the long haul. They're enjoying the five-course meal. They're not trying to shove a Happy Meal in one person's face and then take off. They're actually present.

They tend to have much longer sexual encounters, which is very fun for all involved, and they tend to use a lot of toys, mouths, dildos, vibrators, fingers. All of it. You too have that power. You too have those options.

So focus on what works for your partner and what will help her have orgasms, instead of just focusing on your dick. And yes, some women love penetration, love a penis. Awesome, you can work that into the mix too. But if it's done playing for a while or needs a break, you want a toolkit of other options. Even women who love penetration are usually totally fine if you need to switch to something else for a little while.

The problem is the avoidance. The problem is the hiding or the shame that makes it not okay for her to get her needs met.

What the science predicts makes better and more orgasms for women, over and over again: time building arousal, having a partner who knows and cares what she likes, and emotional intimacy. Those are all things you can do something about without any of it having to do with your anatomy.

So while we're going to talk more about lasting longer in a future episode, please don't see that as the only option for pleasuring your partner. It's really a distant fifth at best on the priority list. Your top four are taking your time, emotional intimacy, openness to her desires, and a willingness to learn the types of oral, fingers, and toys that work for her. I cannot emphasize them enough. Go back and listen to that again. Take notes. You will be a wonderful lover before long, and you won't have to worry so much about what's going on with your penis. You can let it be part of the fun instead of the only thing that matters.

The real problem under a lot of this is hyperfixation. Men have been sold the idea that your penis is a referendum on your worth as a man. It is not true, but it creates anxiety, and then you hyperfixate on your penis and lose track of your partner.

From her side, what it looks and feels like is that you're technically present but mentally somewhere else, monitoring and evaluating your performance. Your partner feels that. It reads to us as absence, and absence tends to kill your partner's interest.

There are two main ways this anxiety shows up in how your penis responds. When you're hyperfixated, when you have a lot of performance anxiety, it can affect your erections and it can affect your orgasms, as well as your partner's experience and your own. Your internal experience of intimacy is very likely not to be good, because you're not even really present. You're so worried about your performance that you can't take in the real intimacy of the encounter.

For erections: anxiety triggers sympathetic nervous system activation, which restricts blood flow. That in itself physiologically makes your erections less reliable, and that increases anxiety. Now you have a negative feedback loop. Erections actually require you to be somewhat relaxed, and you cannot will one into existence by worrying at it. That will make it worse. So anxiety is a big target when we're working on anything to do with erections.

Anxiety can also affect orgasm in both directions. It can push you toward ejaculating faster than you want, and it can block orgasm entirely by keeping you locked in your head and out of sensation. The symptoms look opposite, but the root cause is the same.

This is a lot of what's going on with the rise in younger generations using ED pills. It's an underlying anxiety, and if you don't treat the anxiety, you're going to be on those pills for the rest of your life. They may actually stop working, because you're not treating the underlying issue. If you don't want to be on pills forever, treating the anxiety, and performance anxiety in particular, is really important.

So the fix is never to try harder at the thing you're worried about. It's redirecting attention to be grounded in your body and present with yourself and your partner. Redirecting toward presence lowers the anxiety and improves the sex at the same time. We teach this in my practice, but however you want to learn it, know that presence is the pot of gold. Presence is your riches in sexuality.

Now let's go through the specific shames one at a time and how to start addressing them.

We talked about size. The truth is you're almost certainly in the average range, and most women are satisfied with their partner's size. The outer third of the vagina, and I mean the actual vaginal canal, not the vulva, holds the majority of nerve endings. The vulva holds far more nerve endings than the vagina, and your clitoris is where the primary nerve endings are, along with the labia. Depth is not where most of her sensation lives, unless she's a cervical orgasmer. Even the G-spot is within the first few inches, so you are almost certainly able to reach it depending on angle and position. The cervix can also sometimes be reached by position or by using different toys.

The fix, if you have size concerns, or if she has particular cervical orgasm needs: learn to use your hands, your mouth, and toys. When playing with a penis, use angle and pressure instead of worrying about depth. Positions that change the angle of contact and allow for using hands and mouth are far more impactful than the length of your penis.

What If You Actually Have a Micro Penis?

I want to be upfront about this. Some men do have a particularly tiny penis. It is real. It is not super common, but it is real. If you are one of them, being told you're all average doesn't help you, and you know it. I don't want to drop you here.

It may be true that your partner can't feel much during penetration. That's a real thing. It is not a failure of either of you, and it doesn't mean you can't have great sex and be a great lover. I have definitely known people who are fantastic lovers with very small penises. But it does mean vaginal penetration is not going to be your main event. And given that it's not the main event for 80% of women, you are not having a problem.

The fix is the same as everyone else's, it's just non-negotiable in your case. You have to orient elsewhere and organize sex around other things: your hands, your mouth, toys. Men who do this are excellent lovers.

But if you hyperfixate and decide that it's a referendum on your worth as a human being, which it is not, then you tend to get oversensitive and defensive, even aggressive, or you shame spiral. That does not allow you to be a great lover, because you've sucked all the air out of the room into the self-worth issues. So you have to work on that for yourself, so you feel like a worthy person regardless of your penis size, and so you're able to get really good at all these other things women really like.

The real risk for that group is avoidance, not anatomy.

I know some women who are thrilled when a new partner has a really tiny penis. My dear friend said to me, and this is literally a quote: "I love it when I find a new partner who has a tiny dick, because it's going right in my ass." She loves having a small penis for anal, and she is not the only one. So find somebody like her, or somebody who loves hands and mouth and toys. There are a lot of women who are going to be 100% okay with it if you're a good person and you're willing to prioritize pleasure and not get sucked into a shame spiral.

As we started this whole episode: erections fluctuate. They soften. They return during a long encounter. That's normal physiology, not failure. It's the shame and the silence that damage your relationship and your sex life, not the erections.

I'm going to be honest that some women, through not knowing any better, use hardness as an indicator of their own attractiveness. Some women honestly just don't know that isn't true, because they've been sold the same messages you have and shown the same porn and lacked the same sex education. So you may need to tell them it is not a referendum on their attractiveness, that it's just normal physiology, and that's totally okay. In fact it's normal for a lot of men.

Most women are 100% okay, 110% okay, switching activities for a while. A lot of us actually enjoy playing with a softie, or just receiving for a while from you. That is okay. No problem. The ones who aren't okay with it, it's typically just an education error. They have this weird idea that if they were more attractive you would be harder, and that's not usually the case.

So the fix is to stop treating softness as an emergency. Have other things you know how to do, so the encounter doesn't collapse when the erection changes. And say something to your partner instead of avoiding them. First, believe her when she says it's okay. Second, have something to offer.

It can sound really simple. Here's what I might say: "Hey babe, sometimes my erections come and go, and that has nothing to do with how hot I find you. It just happens to men's bodies. So can we both be okay and roll with that? Can we just do other stuff for a while? How would it feel if I went down on you, or you fondle me for a bit?" Offer some options. This is what happens, no big deal, but let's talk about it. That's your gold approach.

Delayed ejaculation and taking a really long time gets very little airtime, even though it's really common. I'm going to keep this brief, but I want to name it.

There are a few main causes. One is a heavy solo porn history with a death grip in your masturbation habit. Two is medications like SSRIs and others. Three is anxiety.

One thing you can try is changing your solo pattern first. Lighten up your grip. It's going to take a while to retrain your penis to respond to that. Less screen time, slower pace, varying the sensation more, and really practicing allowing yourself to take time. If that doesn't help, there are also breathing techniques that increase blood flow that work really well, which I teach in my practice. It's also worth checking your medication list with your prescriber before going further with other solutions.

If you have changes in your penis, that can be hard for some people, especially with aging. You can have a longer time to orgasm with aging. You can have less reliable erections. All of the fixes are the same, because this is normal. Aging is normal. It's about adapting and not relying on your erection to do all the work, and not relying on coming at the same rate. Allow yourself to take more time. Usually women are 100% okay with that, and chances are male partners will be too, especially if they're aging along with you.

The last big category I want to talk about is the shame men carry for not always wanting sex. The idea that men constantly want sex is false. It's not just exaggerated, it's wrong. Most men don't constantly want sex.

I work with a lot of men whose desire is lower than their female partners'. There's nothing wrong with them. It's totally navigable. The problem is that men with lower desire often think they're uniquely broken, because we've got this cultural narrative that says a man who doesn't constantly want sex must be defective or must not love his partner. Neither is true.

So talk about it with your partner. Treat it as a dynamic to navigate together rather than a verdict on your manliness. You don't have to constantly want sex. You're normal. The fix is normalizing it and not avoiding it or making excuses or feeling bad about yourself, because that's not going to help either.

Here's what women in my practice and women at large actually say to me.

First off, the opinion that matters most is your own. It's not even your partner's, that's the one that matters second most. Your opinion of yourself affects your confidence and your ability to be present, and that actually matters most to your partners, and it affects how you feel about yourself. That's what matters most to you and your quality of life, and to a loving partner.

Secondarily, the opinions and preferences of your partner or partners should matter more than porn, comedians, or that stupid kid from seventh grade who said some shit about your first pube. Who cares about those people? Let's not let them run your opinion about your life, and let's not let them into your sex life now. But a lot of times men haven't updated their own self-image, stopped comparing themselves to other men, and started actually listening to their partner. I want to encourage you to do that.

What women consistently report caring about is presence, attention, responsiveness, enthusiasm, willingness to focus on her pleasure, openness to feedback, and not being made to feel like a prop in someone else's performance.

The honest caveat is that some women are cruel about your genitals or your performance, and some men have genuinely been wounded by partners' comments. But that is an individual person being hurtful. It isn't a verdict on your body, and it isn't representative of the vast majority of potential partners out there for you.

The standard you've been measuring yourself against was built to sell you things. To sell you porn, supplements, pumps, procedures, subscriptions. The insecurity it manufactures is what sells the product. But maybe the real product you want isn't what they're selling. You might genuinely want connected, fun sex with a real person. So don't focus on those distractions.

Instead, get sold on what works for real women. Focus on your own presence, approving of yourself, and learning to really please your partner.

In closing: your penis was never the problem. Avoidance is. Not understanding the real dynamics is. Not understanding what really pleases partners is.

Please don't spend the next ten years avoiding like that former client of mine did. Get the support as soon as you know you need it, because you really do deserve it.

I want to invite you to pick one thing from this episode and dive into it this week. For most of you, it's not stopping when you finish. That is a real common one. Almost every couple that comes to me, that is one of the problems we have to fix right away. So get out in front of that. You're both going to have more fun.

Before you go, if you enjoyed this show, I want to invite you to check out one of my favorite things that I've ever created. It's a free guide called "Get Out of Your Head, a starter guide to releasing the pressure, shame, and shoulds around intimacy. It has four reflection exercises that go deeper than anything you'd find in a typical freebie, and most people feel a shift just after part one. So go grab it at https://laurajurgens.com/guide. The link is in the show notes, and if you're ready to find out what your specific path looks like, I'd love to talk to you. Booking info is also in the show notes, and I will see you here next week.