13 April 2013 | It's All About Evolution, Baby

It certainly is true that sex sells, especially when it also deals with a man's longstanding neurosis: the size of his penis.

Most people commenting on the study that women do prefer larger penises kept missing the point of the study (which was, ahem, too small a sample of only 100 women) which was **not** about whether women like men with big dicks, but if there was an evolutionary advantage to such a preference. The study never said that women would reject men who don't measure up, and that's because women don't go around measuring a man's penis to determine if he'll be a good mate. The study indicated in straightforward fashion that penis size is one of the factors and not the most important one because after all, like I said, a woman can judge faster by seeing a man's shoulders and chest and obviously how tall he is well before he ever is naked in front of her.

Still, in the end, we're pretty much just slaves to evolutionary behavior. Whether we know it or not, a woman's choice of a mate is probably not really her own (there goes free will) but hardwired responses and impulses that are looking for one thing and one thing only: a successful mate that might produce successful offspring. It's all about survival, baby, and no matter how comfortable we are in the First World, our evolutionary impulses are about survival.

So a man with big shoulders and a broad chest may set the evolutionary engines more on fire than the size of a man's penis because after all, those shoulders and chest signal he's successful at providing. Seriously, when is the last time you ever heard of a woman staying with a good-for-nothing bum because he has a large member? Me neither.

But still, like I said, sex sells and so does playing off people's sense of inadequacy, so the headlines trumpeted the Triumph of the Big Willy, much to the dismay of just about every man outside of the porn industry. Sigh.