“How big is your cock?” It’s a question that comes up a lot on hook-up sites and apps, probably more often than, “What’s your name?” Everyone wants to know how much you’ve got swinging between your legs. And while research says that the average hard penis is 4.7 to 6.3 inches (12 to 16 centimetres), very few men admit that they have a 5-inch cock. Online every man seems to have 8 inches or more, hence the term “Internet inches.”

I don’t know why we lie about it, a guy will surely notice that you’ve lost a couple of inches on the way over. Did it fall out of your pocket? Did it shrink because it’s too cold? And even when measuring their equipment in pictures, guys seem to rely on all kinds of trickery to squeeze out every possible inch.

So what is best the way to measure your penis? Get a plastic measuring tape, they’re better than the metal workman tapes because they’re flexible just in case your penis curves left or right or up or down. But if your dick is fairly straight, then a ruler will do.
Lay the measuring tape across the top of your shaft starting at the point where your dick leaves your pelvis. If you’re desperate to hit that 8-inch mark, you can dig the tape or ruler into your pelvis and give yourself another inch. But if you’re going for a fantasy, why not just eyeball it? Likewise, you can jam the measuring device into the crevice between your leg and cock, that’ll give you another inch or so.

Some guys like to impress us with everyday objects like lining 10 quarters down the length of their hard dicks. (A U.S. quarter equals an inch.) But some guys are so desperate to squeeze 10 quarters on their equipment that they have to overlap a couple of them or let one teeter off the end. Good grief, gentlemen, it’s an inch.
I’ve had some fantastic fucks from comfortably-average dicks and I’ve had a lot of boring sex with men packing big ones, so the size of your tool isn’t a predictor of the quality of sex. What I know for sure is that lying about it is going to lead to disappointment, and that’s probably not how you want to begin a sexual encounter. Maybe instead of figuring out ways to stretch the measuring tape, we should be thinking of better ways to use what we’ve got.