Penis shape: straight, tapered or bottle

Cocks come straight, tapered, wider at the base, fuller in the middle or topped by a mushroom head. How common each one is, nobody has ever counted

Line up ten erect cocks and you will not see ten cylinders. One gets thinner towards the head, one is thick at the base like a bottle, one bulges in the middle, one carries a head much wider than the shaft. Porn has names for all of them, and the internet has percentages for all of them too. The percentages are made up.

That is the honest starting point of this chapter. Shape is the most visible thing about a cock after its size, and nobody has ever counted the shapes properly. What does exist are studies that measure thickness at more than one point, which prove that taper is real and normal. The rest is description, and description is what we can do.

The five shapes

Every name below is informal. No anatomy book uses them, and most cocks sit somewhere between two of them.

The straight cock is the one in diagrams and on condom boxes. The tapered one is the most talked about on forums, usually by men who worry they have it. A cock that is wider at the base looks thicker from the side than it feels in the hand, while one that is wider in the middle gets the reverse reputation. The mushroom is less about the shaft than about the head, which has its own chapter.

Nobody has counted them

Search for how common a tapered cock is and you will find confident numbers: a fifth of men, a quarter of men, base at least fifteen per cent wider than the tip. Follow those numbers back and they lead to clinic websites and to each other, never to a study. There is no paper that photographed a few hundred erections and sorted them into cylinders, cones and bottles.

Science has measured cocks in many inventive ways. A team in Israel measured the length along the top and the underside separately, and the circumference at the base and at the tip, soft, stretched and hard, in 55 men given an injection to get an erection. That proves the thickness at the base and at the tip can be measured and compared. The abstract, however, does not say how big the difference usually is, and nobody has turned those measurements into shape categories.

So the best data on shaft shape amount to this: it varies, a bit of taper is ordinary, and anyone quoting you a percentage is guessing. It is not a satisfying answer, but it is the only true one.

Where the tape goes changes the answer

Shape matters for anyone comparing numbers. Studies that measure girth do not agree on where to wrap the tape: some measure at the base, some at mid-shaft, and some at both ends. On a tapered cock, the base and the tip can give different numbers. That is one reason girth figures from different studies do not line up perfectly.

The reference value doctors use, from the large King's College review, is an average erect girth of 11.7 cm4.6 in. A tapered cock can be above that at the root and below it near the head, and still be perfectly average overall. The girth chapter and the guide on how to measure explain the method: mid-shaft, fully hard, tape snug but not squeezing.

Shape and condoms

The one practical place where shape bites is the condom. The popular claim is that a tapered or bottle-shaped cock makes condoms slide or pinch. It sounds plausible, and no study has tested it.

What has been studied is size. In a survey of 463 gay and bisexual men in New York, those who reported bigger cocks were more likely to find standard condoms too tight, to struggle to find one that fits and to have one break. Girth, in other words, matters for fit, and shape is simply girth that changes along the way. If a condom is tight at the base and loose near the head, the base is the number to size for, because that is where a condom that is too tight hurts and where one that is too loose lets go.

What gay men like

Here the data run out completely. There is no study asking gay or bi men whether they prefer a straight, tapered or bottle-shaped shaft. The closest thing is a small conference study on head shapes rather than shafts: 74 people of every orientation looked at seven shapes of prosthetic glans, and the same two came out on top in every group, regardless of sex or sexuality. The shapes are labelled only with letters in the published abstract, so it tells us more about agreement than about taste.

Which leaves the reader free to like whatever he likes. A tapered cock is easier to take at first and fuller further in; a straight one is predictable; a wide base gets noticed at the end of the trip, not at the start. None of this needs a study, and none of it has one.