Does Size Matter? According to Australian Women, it Does

Most guys have tremendous ego's, especially when it comes to the length of a certain male member. Yup, we've been known to stand in front of a full length mirror calling ourselves "Mr. Big" on more than one occasion. As USA Today reports on the question of whether "size matters" to women, the results have been mixed, until now.

A team led by biologist Brian Mautz, of the University of Ottawa, Canada, in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, suggests that "The big message is that that penis size does matter for attractiveness," Mautz says. "It does interact with height and shoulders though, so it matters more to taller guys that to shorter ones."

In the study, the researchers showed a series of life-size cut-out images of variously-sized men viewed by 105 heterosexual Australian women ages 18 to 53. The women, who stood about 20 feet away from a movie screen to watch and rate videos depicting 343 varied male outlines in a non-aroused state, were told only that the study was measuring "male attractiveness." They also rated taller and more broad-shouldered men as more attractive, as in past studies, but being well-endowed mattered almost as much as height in the new study.

"It was a well-controlled study and the reviewers all agreed with the conclusions they reported." The attractiveness results, however, stopped increasing as fast past a certain length, about 3 inches, the study reports, supporting the idea that the results may have been more a matter of pleasing proportional size in the most attractive masculine shapes, Mautz says. "This is a first-time study, so we should be cautious."