Country boys got it going on, puberty study finds

It’s the plot of a thousand adult movies and one film classic, “Midnight Cowboy”: A naïve country boy goes to the city and makes lots and lots of female friends thanks to his farm-fed beef. Fantasy? Maybe not. In the December issue of the journal Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, Bulgarian doctors report results of a 6,200-boy survey showing “a modest though significant difference … with respect to penile size between urban and rural populations.” Country boys were born with longer ones and the disparity continued as the boys grew. By the time the boys turned 19 -- considered the age of full maturity -- the country boys had a mean length of 9.72 centimeters, which sounds more impressive before the conversion to 3.826 inches (about the length of a string bean). The city boys measured 9.29 centimeters, or 3.657 inches. The purpose of the study was not to measure size, but to establish a baseline set of data for tracking male puberty onset. Those measurements are typical for the average man, said University of North Carolina adjunct professor Marcia Herman-Giddens, although she wondered how the researchers managed to examine the boys for testicle size and penile length. “I cannot imagine it would be easy,” she told me. “I am conducting a boys’ puberty study right now and it’s been a challenge getting permission.” And the Bulgarian exam wasn’t exactly subtle. “The stretched penile length in the flaccid state was measured with a rigid tape from the pubopenile skin junction to the top of the penis … under maximal [yikes!] but not painful [phew!] extension. The penile circumference was measured at the base of the penis … with a measuring tape. For obese males, the abdominal adipose tissue [body fat] was shifted manually to one side to measure penile length and circumference.” The docs measured testicle size using an orchidometer, a medical device that's a necklace of egg-shaped beads of ever increasing volumes. You just hold one of the beads up to Mr. Lefty or Mr. Righty and eyeball it. It’s possible, Herman-Giddens said, that embarrassed rural boys with smaller units opted out leading to skewed results. Or perhaps the racial makeup of country boys in Bulgaria is different from urban boys, or maybe the country boys -- and their parents -- eat better. Maybe the difference is related to chemicals in the environment. All three variables can affect size. However, aside from the smart-alecky joke payload, this sort of research is important. As Herman-Giddens’ groundbreaking research into girls’ puberty in the U.S. has shown, not only can abnormal development of the genitals indicate disease, but puberty ages are shifting. It’s vital to find out why. Find The Body Odd on Twitter and on Facebook.