Size, tops and bottoms

Big cock, top; smaller cock, bottom. The stereotype shows up in surveys of gay and bisexual men too. What the studies found, and what they cannot tell you

Big cock, top. Smaller cock, bottom. It is one of the oldest scripts in gay culture, repeated in porn, on apps and in jokes. The surprising part is that when researchers asked gay and bisexual men, the script showed up in the data too. What it means is another question, and the answer is less fixed than the stereotype.

What gay men say about their own size

The largest study is a 2010 survey of 1,065 men who have sex with men. Asked to rate their own cock, 7% said below average, 53.9% average and 35.5% above average. That is already a lovely piece of arithmetic: a third of men above average and only one in fourteen below means that a lot of men in the middle are rating themselves generously.

Self-rated size went with more than bragging rights. Men who rated themselves bigger were more satisfied and less likely to admit lying about their size. Men who rated themselves below average scored worse on three measures of psychological wellbeing. Size was not linked to condom use, number of partners or HIV status.

Tops, bottoms and versatiles

The same study found the pattern everyone expects: men who saw themselves as below average were more likely to call themselves bottoms, and men who saw themselves as above average more likely to call themselves tops.

A 2011 study of 429 gay and bisexual men looked more closely. Tops reported bigger cocks and more masculinity than bottoms, with versatile men in between. The researchers also tested six body traits: cock size, masculinity, muscularity, height, hairiness and weight. Only size and masculinity made a difference to whether a man's label matched what he actually did in bed. Height, muscles and body hair, the other usual suspects, did not.

Porn writes the script

Gay porn does not just reflect the stereotype, it sells it. A study of over 6,900 performer profiles on ten big gay porn sites found that listed sizes followed the role almost perfectly: bottoms were clustered between 5 and 6.5 inches, tops listed from about 8.5 inches upward. Those are advertised numbers, not measured ones, but they are the images a lot of gay men grow up with. It would be surprising if they did not shape how men see their own role.

That makes cause and effect hard to untangle. Do men with bigger cocks drift toward topping because of how their bodies work, because partners expect it of them, or because porn told everyone that is how it goes? The surveys cannot tell, and probably all three play a part.

Size in practice: condoms and comfort

Where size clearly matters is in the mechanics. Among 463 gay and bisexual men in New York, those who reported bigger cocks were more likely to find standard condoms too tight, to have trouble finding a good fit and to have had condoms break. Most of them had measured their length at some point, and two thirds their girth. In the 2010 survey, men who rated themselves above average reported more herpes and HPV, even though they used condoms no less than other men. Badly fitting condoms are a plausible reason.

For a top with a big cock, that means taking condom size seriously. For his partners, it means time, lube and patience, which is a better predictor of a good night than any number. Some of the practical side of thickness is in How to suck a thick cock, and the numbers on thickness are in Girth.

What it does not mean

These are averages over hundreds of men, and they are tendencies, not rules. Plenty of men with big cocks love to bottom, plenty of average men top, and most of the men in these surveys were close to average anyway. Roles change with partners, moods and years. The data say that size and role are linked in how gay men describe themselves; they do not say what you should be.

And the one finding worth taking personally is the one about wellbeing: the men who felt small were less happy, even though most of them were probably perfectly normal. Check the real numbers in Length before deciding what your size means.