Tyranny of “ideal” sex or kingdom of complexes

Do you find your penis, your vulva, aesthetic enough? Sufficiently desirable? I hope so. But now, allow me a more sneaky question: does your sex correspond to what you see on screens or in museums (let’s not even talk about pornographic films)? And since we set foot in the dish: is your sex normal?

The discrepancy between our “real” sex and the sex represented in the media has been the subject of great attention, for several years already. Generally, this conversation stops at pornography. However, there are other vectors of representations – which are no less biased. Take for example the world of art. According to a study published just a month ago in British Journal of Sexology , the size of the penis represented in painting and sculpture has constantly increased in the last seven centuries, with a strong acceleration in the XX e century.

What about the female sex? If you want to contemplate the first vulva never represented, I recommend The exhibition on art and prehistory (badly named) Museum of Man. You will see about it the same as today: glabrous pubis, split of a simple line. We are far from voluptuous overflows of flesh … which are the (large) batch of many women.

In addition to our “generalist” physical complexes, so we must now count with our genitals. To understand the mechanisms, a whole new study conducted in Sweden has looked at the intimacy of more than 3,500 individuals ( Karolinska Institute of Stockholm, September 2022 ). It emerges, to start with good news that extreme dissatisfaction linked to its genitals only concerns 3.6 % of women and 5.5 % of men. Everything would it be for the best in the best of briefs?

size and shape, too much or not enough

To see. Because things become more interesting as soon as you fall into detail: 29.8 % of women and 38.4 % of men say they do not like their gender size. More specifically, women find that their little lips exceed “too much”, while men find their penis too small. The researchers therefore asked the guinea pigs to measure their sex. First observation: the small lips of the respondents exceeded 7.6 millimeters on average, while the erect penis reached 12.5 centimeters on average. These dimensions are completely standard. There is therefore no complex to have – unless we start from a bad estimate of what “should” look like these organs.

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/Media reports cited above.