Imagine the Spam

Walnut Hills, my old high school, had nude Greek statues in one of the hallways. Did graphic nudity warp my young mind or was it something else? One thing that I couldn't help but notice is that the guys weren't well endowed back in the day.

My only other real input about the average length of a penis was from letters to Penthouse's forum which put the normal penis at approximately 11 inches. This made me feel tremendously inadequate--I was almost half an inch shorter than most.

I haven't spent a whole lot of time on it but later I guessed that the teeny Greeks were the result of prudish sculptors, trying to de-emphasize something they couldn't realistically entirely remove.

I couldn't be more wrong. Tiny Greeks were the equivalent of the American foot-long.

A passage from Aristophanes sums up the most desirable masculine features: "a gleaming chest, bright skin, broad shoulders, tiny tongue, strong buttocks, and a little prick."

Greeks fought wars to prove who were the shortest.

Here's a full explanation.

If the Greeks had e-mail, what would clutter up their in-boxes? "Shrink your penis," "Have the smallest one on the block," "She'll need to invent the magnifying glass!"

In one of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, he states that the average penis is five and a half inches long. I guess the nice thing about modern America and ancient Greece is that nobody wants to be just average.