What’s the difference between “ooh” and “aah”?

“Oh, about four inches,” so the joke goes.

The question “Does size really matter?” prevails because of men’s anxiety about how they measure up to other men. For you guys out there who don’t make regular locker-room inventories or conduct Google image searches for pictures of your favorite erections, I asked students on the campus about their size preferences.

After springing questions on girls in nail salons, chiming in on conversations at bars and coaxing answers out of anxious guys, one thing that was clear was sausage size is on a lot of minds.

Generally, girls said they determine their satisfaction with sex by weighing the two components of penis-driven pleasure the same way college admission boards weigh a student’s SAT scores and GPA against the student’s essay: a guy’s performance can be boosted by his penis if it’s a formidable size, and a “good performance” can compensate for absent inches.

Girls who raved about performance agreed a good performance usually entails one or multiple clitoral orgasms. They told me about a variety of unscientific forecasting methods for gauging men’s aptitude for this feat. Some girls believed a guy’s dancing skills reflect his skills in bed. Others held that his ability to stimulate her intellectually presages his ability to anticipate her needs in bed and anticipate how she wants to be touched.

As for the monster itself, the average erect penis is about five to seven inches long, according to the Kinsey Institute of Sex Research. But according to some students, it’s not length men should be concerned about.When it comes to penetration, a group of male engineering alumni I met on the B30 bus from Greenbelt to BWI proposed it was “lateral stretching” of the vaginal tunnel that contributes most to women’s sexual satisfaction. Their conclusion is supported by a 2001 study in which 45 of 50 female University of Texas undergraduates said the girth component of size, not length, was more important. This makes sense because, according to Female Reproductive Anatomy and Physiology by Crooks and Baur, the majority of sensitive nerve endings are in the outer third of the vagina.

But men with small penises don’t really have to fret over it. According to John R. May, a certified sex therapist based in Columbia, penis size is “relatively unimportant because a woman’s vagina expands to the size of the penis inserted into her unless it is a rare exception to the extreme.”

Yet I’ll be blunt: In the opinion of many girls on the campus, proficiency in performance can only make up for so much of a lack of size.

A University of Virginia student, who contacted me via Facebook and wished to remain anonymous, admitted being an unfortunate victim of this preference. Once, he said, a girl who’d gotten a glimpse of his “too-small” member walked out of the room at a party, leaving him high and dry.

Students I talked to invented ways guys might compensate for excessively small size.

Junior electrical engineering major Martin San Juan suggested, “Maybe you should try shaving your pubes to accentuate the size of your ‘love muscle’ – that should make it look bigger, at least.”

In the same breath, San Juan proceeded to insist he’d read this tip in Maxim magazine and was not familiar with the problem himself.

Other tips from students even more reluctant to be named included studying the Kama Sutra or Tantra for confidence.

So guys, the bottom line is don’t worry about the size of your penis, because there’s really nothing you can do about it. If you pick your pants right, you’ll reduce girls to judging you by your dancing, your intellect and the size of your feet. Then, if you choose to get intimate with someone who knows who you really are, you may find you’re a good fit after all – in more ways than one.

Emily Apatov is a junior government and politics major. She can be reached at eapatov@mail.umd.edu.