Race & size meta-thread

B_lisasdong

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FOR THE LAST TIME, THERE IS A SIZE DIFFERENCE IN RACES, it's just that it's NOT THAT BIG A DIFFERENCE. Black guys on average are just a tiny bit bigger, and white guys on average are just a tiny bit bigger than asian guys. But that's just average! You can easily find a japanese guy bigger than a black guy.

End of story. can we stop this!???

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!.

In my opinion, this persists so virulently because so many people are so motivated to deny it altogether.
 

basque9

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Haha. Yes, ff, it's easy to fall off track here.
Thanks for the reminder.
BTW, your tact at all points amazes me.

At the risk of being off topic, it needs to be said: Rubi, you have the exciting lilt of a poet to your prose...surely, writing is your muse!:smile:
 

fortiesfun

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What isn't a cultural construct?

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's get back to the discussion of race.
Just a quick reminder that the subject here is NOT race, though that is discussion (in relation to penis size) is alive and well in many locations including over at this thread.

The subject here is the meta-topic about why "race and average penis sizes" has such enduring sociolo-mythic power. In other words, why do so many people care so passionately about this?
 

fortiesfun

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Source: "Race Differences in Behaviour: A Review and Evolutionary Analysis"
by J. Philippe Rushton, Dept. of Psychology, University of
Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5C2
in "Journal of Personality and Individual Differences"
Vol. 9, No. 6, 1009-1024, 1988.
519-679-2111 661-3685

According to a paper by J. Philippe Rushton, the average size for erect
penises is:

Group --------Length -------Diameter
Orientals -----4 - 5.5" -------1.25"
Caucasians ---5.5 - 6" -----1.3 - 1.6"
Blacks -------6.25 - 8" --------2"

Okay, it has taken me a couple of days to find the time to go the library and pull this paper to read it thoroughly. Before the results, a couple of notes.

Rushton is a rather controversial publisher who has a strong theory about racial evolution in which he asserts that along a number of parameters the three races he recognizes (Black, Caucasian, Oriental (his terms)) consistly line up in that order.

Here is some of the press notices for his book length elaboration of the above article, which he quotes himself on its jacket:

“(An) incendiary thesis....that separate races of human beings evolved different reproductive strategies to cope with different environments and that these strategies led to physical differences in brain size and hence in intelligence. Human beings who evolved in the warm but highly unpredictable environment of Africa adopted a strategy of high
reproduction, while human beings who migrated to the hostile cold of Europe and northern Asia took to producing fewer children but nurturing them more carefully.”
---Malcolm W. Browne, New York Times Book Review
“Rushton is a serious scholar who has assembled serious data. Consider just one example: brain size. The empirical reality, verified by numerous modern studies, including several based on magnetic resonance imaging, is that a significant and substantial relationship does exist between brain size and measured intelligence after body size is taken into account and that the races do have different distributions of brain size.”
---Charles Murray, Afterword to The Bell Curve
“Describes hundreds of studies worldwide that show a consistent pattern of human racial differences in such characteristics as intelligence, brain size, genital size, strength of sex drive, reproductive potency, industriousness,
sociability, and rule following. On each of these variables, the groups are aligned in the order: Orientals, Caucasians, Blacks.”
---Mark Snyderman, National Review
“Rushton’s Race, Evolution, and Behavior...is an attempt to understand [race] differences in terms of life-history evolution....Perhaps there ultimately will be some serious contribution from the traditional smoke-and-mirrors social science treatment of IQ, but for now Rushton’s framework is essentially the only game in town.”
---Henry Harpending, Evolutionary Anthropology
.
“This brilliant book is the most impressive theory-based study...of the psychological and behavioral differences between the major racial groups that I have encountered in the world literature on this subject.”
---Arthur R. Jensen, University of California, Berkeley
That is a pretty accurate picture of his book, and it is also gives you a good sense of who his supporters are. For those who don't know these quotes come from the who's who of controversial race scholars/academic outsiders.

This article is easily available in abridged form on the internet, but if you google it you will get something like ten times the number of hits for articles which attack it for everything from data manipulation to poor math skills. It is an enduring subject of controversy.

Now the result:

Rushton actually makes only glancing reference to penis size in his article, or for that matter in the book length expansion of it. He absolutely does postulate that penis size, like everything else, lines up with Blacks as largest, Whites in the middle, Orientals the smallest. (His terminology.) However, I can find nothing like the chart that superlarge reproduces anywhere in the journal article or in the book. (IF you read superlarge's post he doesn't actually say this chart is from this article, by the way, but since it is sourced I took it for granted.) The only thing in the book that approaches measurements for the races is a prose note that condoms have a width of 49mm (sic) in Asia, 52mm in North America and Europe, and 53mm in Africa, which is not sourced.

In other words, Rushton suggests that the only difference in Blacks and Caucasions is that they sell condoms with one millimeter, though surely he meant centimeter, of difference in their girth. (He notes a larger difference, still less than a half inch, between those and orientals.)

Please note, before anyone writes and accuses me of smearing superlarge, that I am not suggesting he mislead us on purpose. I have my own extensive experience with finding citations in secondary sources, especially on the internet, which don't check out when you go to the original. I suspect that someone just made that chart up, but once that has happened once, it can easily proliferate.
 

D_Gunther Snotpole

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The only thing in the book that approaches measurements for the races is a prose note that condoms have a width of 49mm (sic) in Asia, 52mm in North America and Europe, and 53mm in Africa, which is not sourced.

In other words, Rushton suggests that the only difference in Blacks and Caucasions is that they sell condoms with one millimeter, though surely he meant centimeter, of difference in their girth. (He notes a larger difference, still less than a half inch, between those and orientals.)

Why would Rushton not mean one millimeter, Doc?
That's what the condom stats suggest: 52 mm vs. 53 mm.
 

fortiesfun

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Why would Rushton not mean one millimeter, Doc?
That's what the condom stats suggest: 52 mm vs. 53 mm.
Well, I'm not great at metric systems, but I get this conversion:

55mm = 2.1653543 inches

Isn't that a remarkably small width, for the largest condom size? (Even assuming that it should be doubled it would still be too small for even an average sized man, wouldn't it?)

Of course, I realize on reflection that 55cm is even less plausible, but the measurements struck me as odd.
 

fortiesfun

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I commend you on your research. Yes, "an article" is mentioned. So, is it valid data? Is it his? A search brought it up many times. Here's a couple:

Health

Groups » health » Codom misfits: Penis length among different races on Sulekha Groups

Are Dr. Hu and Rushton connected in some way? There seems to be a jumping around in who receives credit for it.
I actually couldn't make any sense out of the chart in the first of those articles. I'm not sure where it comes from, or even what it means. It seems to be quoting statistics from other sources, but where those are published still remains elusive.

The second one of those actually speaks for itself:

"Many cultures have a persistent urban legend that the penis size of some minority groups is larger than the norm. In the United States,
the minority group chosen is African-American. This appears not to be
supported by anything other than anecdote. Fanon covers this subject
in some detail in "Black Skin, White Masks", and tends to agree that
this is a myth -- a conclusion that he backs up with statistics. On
the other hand, Philippe Rushton has published statistics claiming
otherwise (Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective,
1995).
As I have mentioned, however, when I check Rushton I see only the one small claim about penis size backed up by a statistic about condom sizes, not penis measurements. I notice this article does not reproduce any statistics, either. As I noted in my first post, Rushton does say that he believes penis sizes vary with race, along with intelligence, body size, secondary sexual characteristics, onset of puberty, etc, but I see no indication that it is on the scale of anything like that reproduced in the original chart. In fact, even Rushton seems to find differences of only a millimeter in girth. (And one of his persistent critics notes that may have been a matter of him rounding measurements for African condoms up, while those of US condoms were rounded down.)
 

D_Gunther Snotpole

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Well, I'm not great at metric systems, but I get this conversion:

55mm = 2.1653543 inches

Isn't that a remarkably small width, for the largest condom size? (Even assuming that it should be doubled it would still be too small for even an average sized man, wouldn't it?)

Of course, I realize on reflection that 55cm is even less plausible, but the measurements struck me as odd.

For width (diameter, no?), 2.12 inches would be reasonable; for girth (circumference), it would be small.
I wonder if we have a confusion here.
 

D_Gunther Snotpole

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When I check Rushton I see only the one small claim about penis size backed up by a statistic about condom sizes, not penis measurements. I notice this article does not reproduce any statistics, either. As I noted in my first post, Rushton does say that he believes penis sizes vary with race, along with intelligence, body size, secondary sexual characteristics, onset of puberty, etc, but I see no indication that it is on the scale of anything like that reproduced in the original chart. In fact, even Rushton seems to find differences of only a millimeter in girth. (And one of his persistent critics notes that may have been a matter of him rounding measurements for African condoms up, while those of US condoms were rounded down.)

This lines up with my impressions of Rushton.
 

pavement

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I didn't bother to read the thread at all. I just saw the title and since I'm sick of this disgusting topic, I posted. I tend to post the exact same thing in all threads of this topic.


I'm suggesting nothing. Just conveying a scientific fact.

However, since you ask, I do believe that size myths are part of racist agendas generally.
but what I note is lack of reasoning for it being a myth.
 

fortiesfun

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For width (diameter, no?), 2.12 inches would be reasonable; for girth (circumference), it would be small.
I wonder if we have a confusion here.
Ah, the penny finally dropped. Diameter makes sense.

Once I realize that, however, I remain shocked that anyone would postulate a difference in penis sizes based on a difference of four hundredths of an inches in condom sizes. That seems pretty far fetched that we could even see that with the naked eye, so it hardly explains the persistence of the myth. (Notice how I gently but firmly tried to undo my own damage there, and sought to move us back to the original subject.)
 

hmg

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Funny, I thought IQin the United States had to do with closeness to Canada
(North Dakota does remarkable well in the stats)