Chavez Perez - Respect: everything a guy needs to know about sex, love, and consent

Is my dick normal? is the most common question guys ask when they go to the youth clinic. They look at their penis and compare it with the others in the locker room. Then they worry that maybe theirs looks odd. And theyre right; every penis looks odd because no two are exactly the same.

In most cases, guys are relieved to find out that their penis is perfectly OK. If youre concerned about your penis, you can go to the youth clinic and get checked out by a professional. But right now were going to have an initial run-through of what a normal penis may look like.

Pull down your shorts and well go through the different parts of the genitals, starting with the penis. If youre not circumcised, youll have a foreskin covering the glans (head), but the amount of foreskin varies. In some guys the foreskin goes beyond the tip to form what looks like a trunk. Others have a shorter foreskin, so you can see the tip of the glans. The length of the foreskin makes no difference in any regard.

Some guys have a tight foreskin that hurts if drawn back. In such an instance it is worth having a doctor examine you. Sometimes a tight foreskin is due to ageyou just have some growing left to do. In other cases, the foreskin may need a bit of help in the form of a special cream, for example.

Think about something that turns you on. This causes blood to flow down, making the penis grow in width and length; it gets harder, rises up, and gets warmer. It may also become redder.

If you hold your erect penis in your fist, you can feel that its harder on the top, the side nearest your stomach. The underside and the glans are softer. The urethra runs through these parts, which have to be softer so the tube doesnt get squeezed. You can feel with your fingers that the erection continues all the way into the perineum, the area between the testicles and anus.

When you look at your erection, youll notice that it is curved and off at an angle. The thickness is also uneven. No penis is entirely straight or regular, not even when soft. In the past, mens trousers used to be tailored to the lean. The tailor would ask which way the gentleman dressed, whether the penis hung to the left or the right, and would adjust the trousers accordingly.

On the edge of the glans, by the urethra and the frenulum (banjo string), you might see little bumps that may be white. Over half of guys have these. The bumps tend to appear in puberty and are called penile papules. Some guys are concerned when they find these and think they have some sexually transmitted disease or pimples, but the papules are entirely harmless and cannot be removed with medication or soap.

If you ate a burger and fries every day, fat would collect in the body and it would make your thighs fatter, for example, but your penis wouldnt get thicker, because there is no fat layer under the skin of your dick.

The absence of fatty tissue makes it easier to see things under the skin of the penis. Veins show more clearly. There may also be bumps that stand out. These bumps are either hair follicles or sebaceous glands that lubricate the skin.

The penis has more pigment than many other parts of the body, so it may also be slightly darker. The pigment can be unevenly distributed and make the penis look splotchy.

On the penis there is a kind of ribbon that runs all the way from the banjo string at the top, down along the penis and perineum, ending at the anus. This ribbon can vary in its appearance and is almost invisible on certain guys. The ribbon is whats left of a seam that joined together the genital area when you were in the womb.