Large dog breeds don’t live as long as their tinier counterparts. A Great Dane, for example, only lives an average of eight to 10 years, suffering primarily from heart and joint issues. A chihuahua, meanwhile, can live to nearly 20. In many cases, the same dichotomy exists in humans. Globally, shorter heights correlate with lower rates of cancer, blood clots, respiratory issues and cardiovascular illnesses. But does this “bigger isn’t necessarily better” logic also apply to the health of your dick? Namely, is it harder for guys with larger penises to get, well, hard?
“Assuming you have normal blood flow and cardiovascular health, your size shouldn’t matter in terms of your ability to get or stay hard,” says Joshua Gonzalez, a urologist and sexual health advisor for Astroglide. Those two factors are really what the quality of your boner comes down to — while there are many issues that can contribute to erectile dysfunction, tons of which are mental, the most common physical culprits simply have to do with your particular heart and its ability to pump blood.
Being taller might impact these functions as you age, in turn producing erectile dysfunction, but there’s only a minor correlation between height and dick size, so that theory doesn’t fly. Likewise, being tall might contribute to blood pressure problems, which could, in turn, cause trouble producing and maintaining an erection, but again, this could be the case regardless of your dick size.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of guys with big dicks out there who feel confident their hog size makes it more difficult for them to get hard. In particular, many complain that their erections don’t feel as “full” as they could be.
In a thread on r/bigdickproblems, someone posed the question, “Do larger penises have difficulty getting rock hard?” There were a mix of answers, but some of those who answered “yes” suggested that it takes their bodies longer to distribute blood throughout their dick because they’re just so freakin’ big. “After all, it requires blood flow to the corpus cavernosum, more blood for a large penis than a small one,” one person wrote. “You need higher blood pressure to fill a bigger volume,” wrote another. “It seems right when you think about it for a second.”
And sure, it does sound kind of right, but it ignores the fact that your dick is only one part of your body, and that each person has a varying amount of blood depending on their overall size. It’s not as though people with bigger dicks just don’t have enough blood to fill them up, or that small people somehow have more blood to make their dicks hard. That said, there are true outlier cases of men with actual monster cocks (like, bigger than 12 inches) that aren’t quite functional. For the purposes of this conversation, however, we’re mostly talking about guys whose dicks are certainly huge but otherwise “normal.”
But hey, there hasn’t been a ton of research on the topic of dick size and ED to confirm either way, so the jury may still be out on this one. In all likelihood, though, guys with big dicks who aren’t getting as hard as they think they should be might be dealing with mild ED — or another condition — for which there are many treatments. Or maybe, that’s just what’s “normal” for a particular guy. In other words, their giant schlongs are, at best, a very tiny part of the problem.
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
