Health matters: Bigger is not always better for penis size

A number of men complain that their penises are small and seek ways of enhancing the sizes. Many buy a myriad of products on the internet in the belief that they will enhance their members. Many of these drugs do not work and leave victims more frustrated. 

Then there are men who suffer erectile dysfunction. It is known that once a man has experienced erection failure, they start paying undue attention to their phallus. They then feel that their member is retracting and the size is diminishing. This can be a very stressful experience for a man. In fact, they keep touching their manhood to confirm that it is still there. Of course, in an actual sense, there is no shrinkage that goes on.

But these two common scenarios are not the ones that I am concerned with today, even though they present a quagmire to men who are affected. Today I am concerned with a case of a woman who came to the Sexology clinic seeking help on how to escape from what she described as an anaconda. 

“I am serious, it is damn scary, it is an anaconda, please save me from it,” this woman, Agnes pleaded.

An anaconda is a type of snake that is known to grow to massive sizes. A green anaconda can grow up to 10 metres or more in length and can weigh over 200 kilos with a circumference of up to 100 centimetres. 

“What’s this anaconda story all about?” I ask her. 

“My husband’s penis is huge and it hurts,” she replied.

Agnes was 25 and was newly married. During their one year of courtship, they rarely met as they worked in different towns. The few times that they had tried to be intimate, Agnes had pleaded with her boyfriend now husband to stop, because she was in too much pain. 

 “Though I was not a virgin, I didn’t have so much experience in the bedroom. I thought that the pain I felt was because we were unfamiliar to each other body-wise, and with time things will improve,” Agnes shares. 

While the bedroom experience didn’t improve on the few times that they copulated, the couple’s love grew sporadically.

“I grew to love him. He was a caring and kind boyfriend, and I could see a future with him. I just wished I would stop feeling the pain when we had sex,” Agnes says. 

Agnes admits because of the discomfort in the bedroom, she avoided visiting her boyfriend, until it was necessary. 

“But you still went ahead and married him?” I enquire.

“Yes, I guess I looked at the good and hoped the bedroom issue would improve with time. I wanted the relationship to work really badly,” Agnes says. 

A year later, the couple walked down the aisle in a colourful ceremony. However, during the honeymoon, everything broke down. Now, three days into the honeymoon Agnes was here at the clinic seeking help. 

 “I am on the run, I can’t stand it,” she says, her eyes welling up with tears.

Incidentally, for the three nights that they had been together, her husband constantly wanted to have sex, but Agnes could not stand the pain after the first encounter. 

“It was too huge. It tore me down there, and I couldn’t walk, yet he wanted more,” she declares.

It is known that 85 percent or more of women are satisfied with their partner’s penis size even though only half the men think they are of normal size. The rest of the women say that they could do with a bigger size. A negligible percentage of women, about 0.2 percent, find their partners bigger than what they would want. 

Objective measurement of penis sizes however shows that most men are actually within the normal range which may vary from 14 to 18 cm in length on an erect penis. Of course, an expert should be the one to take the measurement, as it is not easy for one to do so. That said, the issue of penis size is overrated by men because it has a mythical social connotation; that the bigger the penis the manlier one is. As the saying goes, however, it is not really the size that matters but what you do with it.

“I think you do not understand why I have escaped and left that man in Mombasa,” Agnes says, “it is not possible to engage with him sexually, I have had sex before and I know what I am talking about.”

I asked that her husband comes back to Nairobi so that we urgently resolve the issue. He came to the clinic two days later. Agnes did not accompany him.

“She is so scared of me,” Sam her husband lamented, “she is staying at her friend’s place and just told me to come and see you, that she does not want to meet me anymore.”

I asked Sam about their sexual experiences and he confirmed that it was hard to have penetrative sex. In his view, Agnes was too scared and tensed up any time they tried. I examined Sam and yes, his manhood was above average, not in length but in girth. This is a condition that may sometimes happen when one has had repeated incidences of priapism, i.e. abnormally sustained long erections. Priapism can happen in diseases such as sickle cell disease. In some cases, however, a big girth penis cannot be explained.

In cases where sex is impossible, surgery may be done to correct this abnormality. I explained this to Agnes on the phone but she refused to come back to the clinic.