After the authors of "Super Freakonomics" belittled the Indian male in a chapter about condoms, medical researchers here have said he can still hold his own in the world.
The authors, US economist Steven D Levitt and
journalist Stephen J Dubner, had inferred from an Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) study that Indian men are less endowed than men in other parts of the world.
They said "...60 per cent of Indian men have penises too small for the condoms manufactured to fit WHO specs". They also said for two years "more than a 1,000 Indian men had their penises measured and photographed by the scientists."
But now ICMR Deputy Director General, Dr R S Sharma, says the authors had not factored the entire research findings before jumping to the conclusion. Instead, they had referred only to a small data sample collected by one of the
researchers from his centre, Maharashtra.
"The claim made in the book 'Super Freakonomics' is based on the statement given to a website by...Dr R R Shinde, the head of PSM department at KEM Hospital, Mumbai ...(but)
the statement... can't be considered as an average data of an Indian man," says Sharma.
The research had begun in July 2001 to help the government understand why most Indian men say no to condoms.
One of the notions was that the condoms could be oversized. To test it, the researchers had decided to line up men from all states, and measure them from base to tip in their viagra
mood. Since the number of experts needed for the "sensitive job" could not be found, the test was conducted only on 1377 healthy men from Delhi, Punjab, Bihar, Orissa, Assam, Maharashtra and Karnataka.
The job entailed "measuring length and circumference of an erect male penis" through the internationally recognised Strip Method.
Among others things, the study found that the sizes varied from state to state, and hence, deriving a standard average length from the data was not possible. Though the study did indicate that the average size of an erect penis in
the sampled states is smaller than the international size, the specification could not be stretched to include the entire country.
In fact, "an all-India study (was recommended) in the report submitted to the ministry of Health and Family Welfare in 2005" to overcome the lacunae, says Sharma.
"Super Freakonomics", which did roaring business in the world selling these and other kinds of freaks and oddities, had sold some 30,000 copies here in 2009 according to distributors Penguin.
Size "is a sensitive issue... (and) men relate it to their ego," says Sharma. The issue is so sensitive that, contrary to what "Super Freakonomics" claims, the men who volunteered for the test were not even photographed.
Sexologist Prakash Kothari is not biting on that though.
Size may boost a man's ego, but it has nothing to do with the performance in bed, he says. "Larger the better is Godzilla logic."