...To other points you've brought up, I really don't believe at all that she was trying to be hurtful or make a power play...
Fair enough. Of course I don't know her, so I can only make assumptions. My suspicions are aroused for a number of reasons.
First of all, is the fact that you are in no way average. Different people might disagree about the particular merits of this or that survey, but there is sufficient data from different surveys out there that are consistent enough to conclude with reasonable confidence that 7" NBP is far from average in the general population.
Second is the fact that it's an incredibly tactless thing to say in the early part of a relationship. I agree that many men obsess over penis size far more than women do and have a skewed conception of the importance women place upon it. However I find it difficult to believe that any woman who has not spent her entire life being raised by a pack of wolves far from human civilisation is not aware of how important it is to many
men - and especially not if she's been posed a direct question.
I'm therefore puzzled as to why any woman would not show some tact in a situation where any sensible person would realise the subtext of the conversation, even if she genuinely believed you were average.
If your version of the conversation is accurate, then it seems that you gave your girlfriend a compliment (in a particularly vulnerable situation) and then related a compliment you yourself had received from a previous partner. Her response was not to
agree with that compliment and boost your confidence,
but to subtly undermine it's credibility ("oh, all women say that" or somesuch). However it didn't end there. You asked a question in a manner and a context in which anyone with any sensitivity would realise was likely to be have been posed for a certain amount of reassurance (the male version of "does my bum look big in this" writ large essentially) and
again she undermined you.
Now I can't say whether or not she intended to
deliberately undermine you, but I still can't understand why anyone would say something like that in that situation. If you'd been together for a long time and she knew for sure you were a man who placed no importance on the size of his penis, that would be one thing. However that doesn't seem to be the case, unless you had prior conversations and deliberately misled her into believing that you couldn't care less about penis size.
It's not as if mine is an outlandish theory. As I say, many men claim to have had partners who try to undermine them in an identical way - women on this forum have even admitted to doing so.
Flip it around for a second. You're lying in bed with a girl you've known for much less than a year. She starts a conversation by offering you an unsolicited, reassuring compliment about something that many men are unsure about, in the same way that it's claimed many women worry about how they taste "down there"
"wow you've got a big dick".
"I prefer p***y (ha ha)".
"I've been told my p***y feels fantastic".
"all men say that - it's a bit like saying "you're really hot", or "you've got a particularly gorgeous body"
"Wait, don't you think I've got a particularly gorgeous body?"
"No, it's just average in my experience"
Good luck with that, is all I'll say.
I'm afraid I still have a hard time believeing that she could have been totally oblivious to the potential consequences of her words, unless, as I say, you deliberately misled her into believing that your penis size never even crosses your mind.
Again - it's
possible that she believed your penis is average. For one thing people are notoriously bad at accurately recalling things they aren't particularly focussed on (which is why uncorroborated eye-witness evidence is often unreliable) so she might have an exaggerated memory of the size of her former partners. I still don't understand why she would say something like that though - it's just as insensitive as the tongue-in-cheek comment I made that clearly uspet Melbourne girl.
It's also possible that her comments were totally innocent. However you yourself admit to having "love goggles" on at the moment. It doesn't hurt to be a little careful for a while.