Penis size important to both straight and gay teammates

Just as spring has sprung, it's been the unofficial Week of the Weenie in Vancouver theatres. With the recent run of The Final Member, a documentary about an Icelandic penis museum, and the release of Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac and the gay-cruising thriller Stranger by the Lake, there's been a lot of unpacking of not only assumptions but packages—of the male kind—on screen.

It's something that you don't see very often in films, and far less so than women's breasts (as a certain ill-conceived song by Seth MacFarlane at the 2013 Oscars reminded us).

While it's something that has long been hidden from view onscreen, a senior lecturer at the University of Brighton and podiatrist found that guys, both straight or gay, actually do devote a lot of attention to each other's peckers—in the locker room.  

Dr. Chris Morriss-Roberts focussed his doctoral thesis on masculinity in sport which led him (much to his own surprise) from studying how shoes and feet relate to muscle bulk in sport to the next logical body part: penises.

He coauthored the book Jockocracy: Queering Masculinity in Sport in 2013 and wrote about his research in a post on OutSports.

For his research, he conducted interviews with four gay athletes and four straight athletes from professional and semi-professional sports clubs in London, England, to find out what role penis size played in team socialization.

What he found was that although the men may have had different sexual orientations, they were united in the activity of checking out the size of each other's penises. Also regardless of sexual orientation, men with smaller dicks were perceived as admirers of those with larger ones. (In other words, penis envy.)

Those who were fat were associated with having smaller cocks, and were deemed lower on the pecking order in the sausage factory.

Those with an enviable phallus were "revered and idolized by their teammates as a symbol of masculinity" and "became a focus of camaraderie and team building within their sports environment".

They would garner nicknames that would continue outside the locker room. One athlete said that teammates would even promote a "schlonger" as well-endowed if he was talking to a girl but—take note, breeder boys—this failed to impress women.

In fact, having a teammate with a massive member was perceived to be so paramount to team unity that one rugby player theorized that one teammate was only on the team because he had a big penis, even though he was a dink at rugby.

But it's not just for Spider-Man that with great power comes great responsibility: athletes with a unwieldy wang faced increased pressure and expectations to ding their dong sexually in order to maintain their social standing.

Overall, being sized up by teammates proved to be a stressful experience for all, regardless of sexual orientation, age, or sport.

So the moral of the story is: size matters, you weenies.