SEX ACCORDING TO MAÏA
Do you find your penis, your vulva, sufficiently aesthetic? Desirable enough? I hope so. But now allow me a more snarky question: does your gender match what you see on screens or in museums (let’s not even talk about porn movies)? And since we put our feet 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 much attention for several years now. Generally, this conversation stops at pornography. There are, however, other vectors of representations – and which are no less biased. Take for example the world of art. According to a study published just a month ago in the British Journal of Sexologythe size of penises depicted in painting and sculpture has steadily increased over the past seven centuries, with a sharp acceleration in the 20the century.
What about the female sex? If you want to contemplate the first vulvas ever represented, I recommend you the exhibition on art and prehistory at the (misnamed) Museum of Man. You will see much the same thing there as today: hairless pubis, split in a single line. We are far from voluptuous excesses of flesh… which are nevertheless the (big) lot of many women.
Besides our physical complexes ” generalists », we must now reckon with our genital complexes. To understand the mechanisms, a brand new study conducted in Sweden looked at the intimacy of more than 3,500 individuals (Stockholm Karolinska Institute, September 2022). It emerges, to start with good news, that extreme dissatisfaction with one’s genitals concerns only 3.6% of women and 5.5% of men. Would everything be fine in the best of briefs?
Size and shape, too much or not enough
Have. Because things get more interesting when you go into detail: 29.8% of women and 38.4% of men say they don’t like the size of their sex. Specifically, women find that their labia minora protrude ” too “, while men find their penis too small. The researchers therefore asked the guinea pigs to measure their sex. First observation: the labia minora of the respondents exceeded 7.6 millimeters on average, while erect penises reached 12.5 centimeters on average. These dimensions are quite 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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