Also the problem with bonepressing is that people misrepresent themselves by stabbing their guts with the ruler to or jam it under the pubic bone to get a bigger measurement that a "correct BPEL" would give. Now im not saying NBPEL is perfect but with that u can easily tell when someone is not starting at the base.
This is true - I've seen plenty of people who claim that the correct measurement actually starts 2" above the base of your penis, which is ridiculous to anyone who knows what a hypotenuse is.
The correct starting point is the pubic symphysis (
Pubic symphysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ) which, if you're actually measuring from, doesn't let you cheat.
NBPEL is incredibly problematic, since even the same dick measured by two different people will get a significantly different measurement. It won't turn a 5" dick in to a 9", but 0.5"+ is common, which makes it useless for comparison. Truth is, there isn't a hard line tattooed on the base of our dicks we can all measure from without bone pressing. Upcurved and hairy dicks will get a shorter measurement, and downcurved smooth dicks are longer.
Even fatpad isn't that consistently tied to weight. I'm in good shape but easily lose over 0.5" from fat.
This study in Brasil (
Jornal de Pediatria - Penile anthropometry in Brazilian child and adolescent ) concluded that only bone-pressed measurements were reliable as inter-observer variation was too great otherwise.
I did do a NBPFSL once (
http://www.lpsg.com/members/shannonh/albums/poor+quality+photos!/611851-here-im-trying-to-do.html ), primarily just to compare against the Ponchietti study. I have a lot more confidence in the Brasilian study simply because I know we were both measuring the same way.
I'd say bone-pressed matters the most as a measurement, simply because that's the only time a numeric measurement is valuable at all. If it's non-bp, because you care about apparent size, then what good is a number to you? That's a completely aesthetic evaluation. James Deen may be ~7"(
http://www.lpsg.com/attachments/98061d1277999517-measured-porn-stars-0981-jpg ) but he's got a great looking dick and certainly works it well. Most big-dick-fans would prefer him to one of the many malformed, liver-spotted 8"ers out there.