A controversial yet brave take: Growers get the short end of the stick. Showers (the kind pronounced “show-ers,” not like rainfall) have been unduly celebrated by mainstream culture. We all remember the iconic photo of John Hamm (but if not, it’s the first result when you search for images of “Jon Hamm photo,” so, you’re welcome.) In a society shaped by toxic masculinity and an age-old obsession with phalluses, flaccid penis length has been placed atop a pedestal—and that’s worried some of the growers who come to Manuel Alonso Isa’s urology clinic in Madrid, Spain.
“People will search on Google, ‘Is my penis normal? Is it a normal length?’” Alonso Isa told The Daily Beast. “We as urologists have many patients who are concerned about it, and we realized that the concept of being a grower or a shower hadn’t been studied properly.”
Alonso Isa and a group of urologists from Spain set out to answer a question that few have asked scientifically: Is shower and grower even a thing?
ADVERTISEMENT
That is the (actual) name of their presentation that will be given on March 12 at the European Association of Urology Congress. They concluded that these categories were real, but two extreme ends of a spectrum. Most men, the researchers found, fall into a middle gray area.
Alonso Isa and his colleagues took a slew of measurements from 225 patients who underwent penile ultrasounds as part of unrelated visits to Madrid urology clinics. As part of these ultrasounds, which help doctors see if the penis is working properly, patients are given an injection of prostaglandin to cause an erection.
By measuring flaccid and erect penis length, the researchers could calculate the percent change between the two. They classified growers as people whose penises were over 55.73 percent longer when erect, and showers as those whose penises were up to 30.94 percent longer when erect. Based on this definition, 25 percent of the men in their study were growers, while 24 percent were showers—meaning that 51 percent of men were neither.
A previous study published in the International Journal of Impotence Research classified penises as growers and showers based on whether their erect length differed more or less than 4 centimeters (about 1.5 inches) from their flaccid length. Such a dichotomy doesn’t make sense to Alonso Isa—why would a difference of a single centimeter make a person a grower or shower?
Other than flaccid penis length (showers were on average almost an inch longer than growers), the researchers did not find much difference between the two groups. Age, weight, smoking status, and other health traits were not significantly linked to being a grower or a shower, though Alonso Isa’s group did find that growers tended to have a thinner tunica albuginea—the layer of connective tissue surrounding the penis. Alonso Isa said this finding squares with biology since the albuginea stretches like the surface of a balloon during an erection. Growers’ penis lengths are changing more than showers’, so their albuginea are stretching further.
And no, this research isn’t just a scientific dick-measuring contest, figuratively speaking. Studying the difference between growers and showers actually can inform better surgical practices. Alonso Isa said in a press release that urologists typically see patients’ penises in a flaccid state. It could be helpful to predict whether a patient is a grower or a shower, because “if they grow a lot when they get an erection, it might mean they need a different surgical approach compared to someone who doesn’t grow much,” he added.
At the very least, the research should help quell patients’ fears about their penises. Chances are, they’re normal. Or at least, clinically so—they probably need to work on their obsession with penis size in the first place.
