"My God, when I saw that pole of Sonny's for the first time and realized he was going to stick that into me, I yelled bloody murder. After the first year, my insides felt as mushy as macaroni boiled for an hour. When I heard he was doing the job on other girls, I went to church and lit a candle."
— Sandra Corleone, The Godfather
When it comes to the size of a man's private parts, it's often thought that "bigger is better", especially in the bedroom. Often the same is said about women and breasts. However sometimes, just as with breasts, having a larger package can prove problematic. The reason is usually at least one of the following.
- Regardless of personal preferences, someone's nethers can only stretch and fit so much; if a guy's penis is too big for his partner's orifices, then intercourse will be awkward, physically painful, or even outright impossible.
- It assumes that intercourse is all there is to sex, thereby demonstrating certain failures of knowledge and imagination. Most women are unable to climax solely from vaginal stimulation and excessive length may prevent them from receiving the additional vulval and clitoral stimulation they need.
- Truly extraordinary size can make it difficult or even impossible to sustain an erection due to blood-flow complications making any degree of performance impossible. That and partners may have a personal preference on the matter because they can be unsettled by the mere sight of it, making sex unappealing and intimidating.
- While size can matter to women, girth benefits them more than length, and both take a back seat to technique because female genitals can accept a reasonable range of 'inputs'. One size does indeed fit all, so long as the "all" knows what they are doing. Remember, Size and skill are not the same things. Just because the erection is big, it doesn't mean you actually know what you're doing.
- Hiding unwanted erections and bulges will be difficult, as it will be embarrassing if the public sees an erection that you can't hide. In other cases, a bulge can be so big that it's difficult to hide under your clothes and people may make some wrong assumptions about you. The Overreacting Airport Security will also go for a pat-down because the millimeter wave scanner detected an anomaly down there.
- Buying clothes will also be problematic since you can only buy a certain size, fit, or brand so it doesn't cause any pain, show bulges, or be uncomfortable for the wearer. Wearing speedos, briefs, and shorts will be impossible if your private parts are too big to fit inside. Remember, the Square-Cube Law can come into full effect if your underwear is too small or tight to contain your erections.
- The male enhancement pills that are advertised online are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and so the side-effects of taking them aren't made clear. Since they aren't FDA approved, taking those kinds of pills is excessively risky and will often do more damage than you think.
- Medically making your penis bigger may seem like a dream come true but the problems outweigh the benefits, as the surgeries will only make it look bigger, not actually make it bigger. The surgeries and injections will only make the penis look bigger at the cost of being functional, as well as looking unhealthy and undesirable.note
Given the usual view towards dick size, this is usually done comedically, such as a subversion to general thought. However, the idea that penis size is best modest has been present in some cultures, like in Ancient Greece where a large dick size was seen as lustful and hedonistic. If big enough, it might even run the risk of an Out with a Bang scenario.
Sub-Trope of Gag Penis and counterpart to D-Cup Distress. The opposite of Bigger Is Better in Bed, when a large package is preferable. Contrast Teeny Weenie, when the lack of size is problematic.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Gender-inverted in Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight!: Misora spends a full chapter worrying that her clitoris is too big. She gets over the issue, but it's still brought up every once in a while: she once brings it up to commiserate with Miya Nekomiya, a pre-op trans woman, after the latter has a Wardrobe Malfunction during a pay-per-view shoot.
- In Chisa X Pon, Chisa's friend Emi mentions that her ex, Taro, was way too big for her; she hardly ever felt anything but pain and had to learn to fake it for his sake.
- Interspecies Reviewers: In the core group of Interspecies Reviewers it's the angel Crimvael who has the largest size (along with some other anatomy), which given his dorky nature he's embarrassed by. Given his job is to review different brothels, the size can prove a hindrance; he is outright refused entry by the fairy brothel because he's too big to be compatible with even the largest fairy.
- Lady Snowblood: Genjiro's entire motivation for his criminal schemes is so he can buy a boat ticket to Europe where white prostitutes won't be scared away by his size (or so he hopes).
- Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: This proves to be problematic for Brief when he has sex with Panty. Because of how large his dick is, it ends up being a painful experience for her. Admittedly part of that was also due to her hymen being restored.
Comic Books
- Downplayed with Vasily "Vas" Vorishkin" in The Boys. He's known as the Love Sausage because of "fifteen inches of sheer dynamite", and is generally chummy and unbothered with his package. However, it still proves problematic as the blood that went to his erection when chasing one of Little Nina's henchmen through a strip club stops him in his tracks. It also looks somewhat awkward in his skin-tight superhero suit.
- The Internship: Emery and Andy's first attempt at sex is aborted when Emery's largeness proves too painful for Andy. As a result, they resolve to start over with Emery on the receiving end.
- Played for Horror in The Punisher MAX: during the arc "The Naked Kill", Frank ends up investigating and hunting down a group of Human Traffickers making Snuff Films. The "star" is Eleventhree, who gets that name from his length while flaccid. When erect, he's so big that he literally rapes women to death.
Films — Live-Action
- Bedazzled (2000): Defied when Elliot makes his fourth wish with a Jackass Genie. Because his third wish gave him a Teeny Weenie as a side effect, he takes care to specify that he becomes well-endowed but reasonably so. He still doesn't end up with the object of his desire because the fourth desire is a reality where he is gay.
- A plot point in A Chinese Torture Chamber Story: the protagonist has such an impossibly large penis that no woman will have sex with him. He's also a very nice guy, so he refuses to force his arranged wife to take it. Eventually, the size of his genitals and what happens to them are the single most important plot point. It's a very weird movie.
- In-universe example; Full Metal Jacket has a Vietnamese hooker not wanting to have sex with a Black Marine because she's worried it's too big for her. He demonstrates it isn't.
- Lady Snowblood: When the blackmailer Genjiro reveals his gigantic penis, the reaction from Oyuki, the title character, is not adulation, but horror. He is aware of the implications of his large penis, noting that one that large will usually cause the receiving woman serious pain. (In the manga, it was made clear that Oyuki was a lesbian.)
- In Magic Mike XXL, Big Dick Richie's arc revolves around the fact he can't find a woman who can handle his, well, big dick. He laments that as a result of his huge penis, he hasn't had actual sex in months. The culmination of his arc is meeting a MILF who can handle said big dick.
- Gender-inverted in Mean Girls. A girl mentions she got in the Burn Book for "lying about [her] virginity" since she uses jumbo tampons, but she claims it's really an unfortunate combination of having a naturally wide vagina and heavy flow.
- In the Van Wilder sequel, one of Taj's dorm mates is apparently eleven inches. While women are certainly interested, the guy himself mentions that getting an erection causes so much blood to flow away from his head that he has trouble thinking or speaking.
Literature
- Earth's Children: The Ice Age travelogue cum Romance Novel uses this to characterize the male Love Interest. He learned early that his size could prove uncomfortable to his partner, and he has spent his life having to hold back. Part of the justification for Ayla being his One True Love is her Unique Protagonist Asset of having sufficient, err, capacity to receive him fully.
- The Godfather:
- Subverted by Sonny Corleone, who finds a Distaff Counterpart in Lucy Mancini, a woman whose vagina is also overly large. When Sonny's wife finds out he's cheating on her, she's actually relieved that she doesn't have to have as much sex with him anymore. This plot is Adapted Out of the movie except for a brief Continuity Nod that shows Sonny's wife visually describing to some friends the size of his equipment.
- Also played straight in the book in that Sonny's excessive size negatively affects every other sexual relationship he has other than Lucy. As noted above, his wife is actually relieved that he's cheating on her since that means she won't have to have sex with him as much...though she does start to complain after he's neglected her too much and too long in favor of Lucy, so the sex can't be that bad. It even mentions that when he visited "houses of ill fame" in his youth, even "the most hardened and fearless putain" would demand double payment. As for Lucy, her "overly large vagina" isn't simply a size variance but the result of a weakened pelvic floor, which prevents her from enjoying sex with any man who isn't as well-endowed as Sonny and which needs surgical correction lest it leads to even more serious medical problems in the future.
- I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream: The sadistic supercomputer AM turns the vain Benny into a hideous ape-like creature to mock him. One of the additions was giving him an enormous member, as part of making him primeval. While Ellen doesn't seem to mind, as AM forcibly changed him from being a gay man this is yet another sadistic mind game.
- In the classic Russian erotic poem Luka Mudischev by Ivan Barkov, the title character is a sexually-frustrated Impoverished Patrician whose 14-inch-long penis denies him any kind of romantic liaison, at least, until an equally frustrated merchant widow takes an interest in him. Unfortunately, Luka's tool immediately proves too much even for her, leading to both of them suffering rather ignoble deaths.
- Njal's Saga: At Hrút's departure from Norway, his (now ex-)lover Gunhild curses him to "never be able to enjoy the love of that woman in Iceland on whom [his] heart is set". Back in Iceland, Hrút marries his fiancée Unn but finds that whenever he is in bed with her, he gets an erection so large he cannot have intercourse with her. Unn finally divorces him because of their inability to consummate the marriage. Hrút has no troubles of this kind in his second marriage.
- The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong: Whereas in the original version of Proud Immortal Demon Way played Bigger Is Better in Bed straight, Shen Yuan mocked the author for his "elementary school-level" understanding of sex. When Shen Yuan as Shen Qingqiu has sex with Luo Binghe, the latter's large size and inexperience make the experience very painful and unpleasant. This is part of the lesson that a man with a large penis and no sexual experience might not be automatically good at sex.
- Sirena Selena: The title character is well-endowed. As a drag performer, it means a struggle with "tucking", to preserve the illusion.
- In the horror novel Slimer by John Brosnan, the shapeshifting monster assimilates a rapist and, in that personage, kills another character by raping them to death with a giant penis.
- Space Beasts: This is one of the reasons that most interspecies couples are human boy/humanimal girl. Bill, for example, is a little nervous about having sex because of a particularly bad Bedmate Reveal he suffered in his past (he got drunk and accidentally killed his partner). Kate also reminisces about a very well-endowed Shetland Pony Humanimal and the troubles she had with him, which makes Ichabod (who remembers Marzipan making an offhand comment about Ichabod's penis size) rather alarmed. Bill tells him not to worry.
- These Words Are True and Faithful: Not only has Ernie often been denied sex precisely because he is so well-hung but also, as a secondary character points out, his large penis does nothing for his emotional maturity.
- Whateley Universe: An in-universe sex manual for superhumans mentions that, due to the wish-fulfillment aspects of the Exemplar powerset, some individuals develop to a Gag Penis size, which together with Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex issues can lead to risks of harming their partner.
Live-Action TV
- In Brockmire, Matt Hardesty would regularly boast about the size of his penis, and would occasionally show it off. Later, when he's dying of cancer, he confides in Jim that he's never fully been inside a woman. Many like to try, but he just can't fit it in there.
- A Patient of the Week in Nip/Tuck (played by Misha Collins) is a yoga instructor who wants a penis reduction surgery because he's addicted to fellating himself. He's lost jobs, couldn't maintain relationships and tried every other option he could think of, but could never suppress the urge. He wants it small enough that he can't reach his own mouth anymore.
- In Sex and the City, Samantha briefly dates a man with this issue. He purposely seeks Samantha because of her reputation for being sexually adventurous, but this proves too much even for her.
- In Testees, two slackers make money by testing new drugs for a pharma company. The pilot episode sees one of them take a pill that causes him to massively enhance his penis size... to the point that he needs a blood transfusion to get an erection.
Mythology And Religion
- Classical Mythology: Values Dissonance time: in classical Greece, All Women Are Lustful and it's up to the men to control both parties. Having an oversized penis was often characterized as signalling a lack of said control and being a slave to lust. The god known for large penis size, Priapus, was a comical figure and ironically impotent, and the well-endowed satyrs are depicted as primitive beings often distracted by their own sex drive. While centaurs had typical sizes for their horse bodies, the large members of their horse bodies were seen as another indicator of their rowdy, lustful nature.
Podcasts
- Kakos Industries: In early episodes, Kakos Industries's C.E.O. Corin Deeth III updates his shareholders on the Adult Entertainment Branch's work on a penis enlargement cream. The cream is extremely effective, with Corin noting that it becomes too large for any orifice, prevents anything but sweat pants from fitting, and also requires more blood than a human man is capable of providing in order to stiffen in the first place. Despite this, Corin at one point reports that multiple men were in line for a second treatment. The whole thing comes to an end in episode 12, "Peter Wood", when a man falls into the vat of the penis enlargement cream. The fiasco causes the Adult Entertainment Branch to be shut down and the penis enlargement cream discontinued.
Video Games
- In Summertime Saga, this is an attribute of the Main Character and gets him a lot of attention, some of which he might prefer not to have or would seek to opt out of. For one thing, the bulge is hard to conceal in situations where this is inappropriate, and this can cause embarrassment. It also results in his sexual objectification, as some "dates" see not so much teenage boy as a penis with a teenage boy attached.
Visual Novels
- Played for drama in Nukitashi. When Junnosuke was younger and still living in Seiran Island, some of the classes were about seeing each other's naked bodies. He got bullied and ostracized over his unusually large size and it left him with psychological trauma. To this day, he detests his thing and the idea of showing it to anyone.
Webcomics
- Zig-zagged in the good-natured NSFW webcomic Cheer by Forview. Two girls are having sex with a boy who, if hand measurements are anything to go by, is packing something like 8-10 inches. At first, the more experienced girl is very impressed by it, expressing surprise that a white boy could have one so big. But when she tries to actually ride it, she's brought to tears by the discomfort. Then they find a way to compensate for the extra length, and she declares the experience "my new favorite thing". The other girl, who is bigger, doesn't need as much help, but still needs the boy to be "super gentle" with "the last inch". As the strip goes on, they don't bring it up as much, possibly because they've figured out what does and doesn't work. However, the more experienced girl does mention that, although she does like it a bit rough and doesn't mind getting a bit sore, she's encountered boys too big for her before, and her response has been to "endure it, then put them on the BJ-only list". Overall, the boy's large penis is treated as a complication to work around, not a source of extra pleasure.
- Happens twice in Grrl Power :
- The first is when Major Hiro accidentally does a full frontal
revealing his... generous equipment, making Sydney wonder how it works out.
- The second is more direct where waif-ish Sydney is having a Huge Guy, Tiny Girl problem with her space boyfriend who apparently measures 15 inches.
- The first is when Major Hiro accidentally does a full frontal
- Oglaf: A rather absurd example in "The Yoke" when a proposed "cock tax" causes all the well-endowed people to rebel and demand an end to their oppression, which includes "pleasuring size queens" and cock puppet shows, which are Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
- Something*Positive: Jason is stated to be well-endowed enough that some of his past girlfriends refused to have sex with him. Fortunately, his eventual wife Aubrey has no problem with it.
- Virgin vs. Chad: Both Chad and his even better counterpart, Thad, are portrayed with sizable bulges, Thad's being even bigger, as one of the ways they're manlier and cooler than the Teeny Weenie Virgin. However, Lad, being an exaggeration of Chad to the point of being grotesque, has an unnaturally and inhuman-sized bulge. This typically prevents him from even having sex and is so heavy he's sometimes depicted needing to carry it with a wheelbarrow, and along with unwieldy muscles it's one of the ways he's depicted worse than the Virgin despite being further on the Chad scale.
Western Animation
- In an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Carl uses the enlarge function of Frylock's shrink ray to give himself an absurdly large penis, to the extent that he asks Frylock for a wheelbarrow to carry it out, and giant STD crabs start jumping out of it and flooding the house.
- In the Inside Job (2021) episode "Project Reboot", Andre discovers an Alternate Timeline in which he gets to have a horse penis. He then discovers that having a penis oversized for human orifices makes it, ironically, impossible for him to have sex.
- In the South Park episode "Erection Day", Jimmy has a nightmare that he has a giant boner at the school talent show. Everyone in the audience mocks him because of this.
- Cyril Figgis from Archer is apparently well endowed, measuring in at twelve inches. A reveal of his search history shows that he's been looking to have it reduced and it's implied that he's not that good in bed.
