There comes a time in every woman’s life when she reflects on her boyfriends and lovers past and realizes the good, the bad and the curious fact that she can barely remember their dicks. It happened to me. I’m not that old, but I realized recently that I guess I’ve hit the age or life stage where I actually can’t remember all my boyfriend’s dicks. Or even most. There weren’t that many — not that it matters — but I can scarcely conjure their members any more than I can remember the movie I saw last week. Is this just me? Do other women not remember their boyfriends’ dicks either? And if so, why not?
I decided to find out.
First off, I remember a couple of dicks. There was a botched circumcision that stands out. There was the guy in college who had a really big one, maybe the biggest I’d ever seen, but it never got all the way hard. It was soft and malleable, as if it were made of clay. (I later realized he was a big-time drinker and had chronic whiskey dick.) I can remember the dicks of my two major relationships for sure — at least how they felt. I can remember the smallest dick, too, because it was pencil-thin but very long, as if it could fold up and be put away afterward for efficient storage. But even searching my brain for individual sexual experiences I remember, I’ve got nothing on the dick. Why?
Men would have you believe women remember every dick as if it were permanently etched into their vaginal psyche. They seem inordinately concerned about what women think of their dicks in the first place. If they are big enough, if they are satisfying enough — and, if the internet counts as solid, peer-reviewed journal-level research — whether their dick moves are constantly being ranked like Katy Perry did with her exes, or compared to the all the other dicks the woman they’re with has ever seen or experienced.
In 2007, someone identifying as a 41-year-old man asked the OKCupid forum, “Do women remember the size of their former lover’s penis?” The impetus was that he’d been so bombarded with dick-increasing spam emails with subject lines that burrowed into his paranoid brain that he had to crowdsource it:
Your girlfriend remembers her past lover’s size, how do you compare? Make her forget all about them with MegaDik.
While men on the forum tended to recall anecdotes about women discussing the members of previous lovers in “amazing detail,” and confirmed that women absolutely remember past dicks, the women who responded cast a bit of doubt on that assertion as truth.
“Basically, we don’t remember all of them, but certain shapes and sizes that hit us in the right spots are definitely remembered,” one woman said.
Another woman reader confirmed my experience: “The biggest guy I have been with was 9 inches and white Dutch, oh yes it does make a difference it’s not just motion in the ocean,” she wrote. “The smallest was from Ghana and black, coming in at 5 inches erect, which proves sometimes stereotypes are not accurate, well in this case anyway.
One female reader admitted she remembered all of her past five partners. But I wondered, was she the exception, or maybe it was because she only had five?
So I asked my friends, including women years younger than me, and who have had a wide range of partners numbering from just one or two to dozens, if they remembered any of their boyfriends’ dicks. Surely their more nimble brains could perform instant dick recall.
“Oh no,” said one. “Absolutely not.”
Others remembered some, but not others, and none of them remembered all of them in any real detail, with a few exceptions. There was the uncircumcised one that a friend remembered — a rare standout in the South. Another remembered one that was long and thin. And another said, “In a glory-hole situation, you could poke in every dick I’ve ever seen and there’s zero percent chance I could get any of them correct.”
I asked more women. “Kind of,” another woman messaged. “No specifics. The Irish guy was uncut and on the large side. The bartender had a tiny dick and didn’t make any effort to compensate for it. The housemate I banged a couple of times had a dick the size of my arm and ALSO didn’t try to compensate for it.”
We tried to piece together why this was so. At first, we weren’t exactly sure. Maybe it’s because women really truly don’t care that much about shape or size. But then we saw the clear penis pattern: Most of us only remembered the standout dicks—the ones that were really big, really small, really weird, or just right. All the unremarkable ones in between were by and large forgotten.
The exactly right ones actually stood out more than the really big or really small. Undoubtedly, these are the dicks women fantasize about, or possibly even pine for. The internet seems to bear this out: There are pieces detailing women’s recollection of the “best” dick they’ve ever had, and the ones that make the cut are the most memorable because they’re big or perfect, but perfect not necessarily meaning big. Others stand out because of the novelty alone — the shade, the shape, the grooming, the cleanliness, the smell, the hang, the frightening size it balloons to when aroused, or whether it’s a grower or a shower.
But clearly, it’s only the more notorious ones that really stick in the mind, because most dicks, we realized, are just too ordinary to remember.
“I just did some quick math,” one woman offered. “Just under 7 percent of the dicks I’ve seen would qualify as large. Those two, I might be able to match up. Only one was small enough to be notable. But most men, in my experience, have perfectly ordinary dicks that, to be honest, I never really think that much about. I’d be willing to bet that any man who’s spent a lot of time in a locker room around the same dudes would be far better at dick-to-person matching than any straight woman.”
Another woman who works in the medical industry with clinical dick experience agreed. “They usually look like what you’d expect,” she wrote. “Like legs. Some are longer, or fatter, but all legs basically look the same to me.”
Or feet. I realized as I tried to reconstruct the dicks I’d seen, that I would think I landed on the correct dick image to match the man. Then I realized what I was doing — for some crazy reason I was actually picturing the head of the dick to match something like the man’s big toe. Kind of like that Honda commercial where the person’s face looks exactly like the car they drive.
Another interesting find: While a boyfriend dick is actually considered to be a great relationship dick, it turns out to be less great in the rearview mirror, and not necessarily the dick that ends up in the hall of fame.
“I think most of them had boyfriend dicks, to be honest,” one woman said. “Not too large, or too small, nothing special going on. One had VERY weird balls.”
Fine, so we can’t remember your dick. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If anything, that should at least give men a bit of reassurance on the dick size paranoia front.
But this all left one other question: Surely women can all remember the dicks of their current partners? The one they maybe even just slept with this morning? Of course they could reconstruct it out of clay, blind in the night, so intimately do they know it?
“Absolutely not,” a friend said.
I asked another.
“Could you pick out your current partner’s dick from a lineup?”
“Ummmm,” one thought. “I could probably pick it out of a lineup? But if the lineup were all ‘cut white dicks on the generous side of average’ then no. It’s just a dick.”
“More penises need freckles,” another replied. “Freckles always help.”
Tracy Moore
Tracy Moore is a staff writer at MEL. She covers all the soft sciences like psychology, sex, relationships and parenting, but since this is a men’s magazine, occasionally the hard ones. Formerly at Jezebel.
