The structure of male submissive sexual fantasies: Male sexual inadequacy
The category that deals with sexual fantasies of small penis humiliation, premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, and sexual ineptitude, and how they intertwine with other kinks.
This is part of a series of essays that collectively survey male submissive kinks. Find the Table of contents here.
Some men eroticize sexual inadequacy, fantasizing about all the ways they can fail in the task of sexually satisfying a woman or at least be perceived as sexually inadequate by her. This category of fantasies pertains to all those shortcomings that make men think women will find them inadequate in bed. Most of these fantasies deal with the principal inadequacy that dominates the psychology of men: not having a penis large enough for the woman’s taste (small penis humiliation). Other fantasies eroticize other inadequacies, such as not lasting long enough for the woman’s satisfaction (premature ejaculation), not being able to achieve or keep an erection (erectile dysfunction), and generally not knowing what to do to please a woman (sexual ineptitude).
Small penis
Some men are aroused by the idea of being humiliated for having a penis that is too small for a woman’s taste. The bare idea that a woman is not satisfied with a man’s penis size is enough to tickle the erotic fancy of some men. Others fantasize about scenarios where the woman overtly humiliates the man for coming up short. In this verbal humiliation, any qualifier of small size is enough to cause arousal: tiny, micro, minuscule, baby dick, shrimp dick, etc.
Men with this kink enjoy it when the woman makes the gesture with her thumb and index finger close to each other, the universal sign that something is small. They also enjoy being humiliated by the woman for their presumed masturbation method: using only two fingers to stroke the small penis instead of using a whole hand wrapped around it as one would presumably do for a penis big enough.
It should be kept in mind that penis size has two dimensions: length and girth. Although penis size is often exclusively associated with length, girth plays an important role as well,1 and it can feed into fantasies of small penis humiliation. For example, a man with a long but thin penis can still enjoy being humiliated for lacking the girth necessary to give the woman sexual pleasure from penetration. The verbal humiliation in this case focuses on the lack of girth with names such as “pencil dick”.
Perceptions
A subtle thing to understand about small penis humiliation is that the man’s penis size in absolute terms and where he stands in comparison with the average in the population does not matter for him to fantasize about his presumed inadequacy in size. Indeed, there are even men with above-average penis size who indulge in sexual fantasies of small penis humiliation.
In these fantasies, what matters is not so much the absolute size or the statistical data, but rather the woman’s preference and her perceptions. This means that as long as the woman says she prefers a penis bigger than the man’s, the kink works, no matter the man’s actual size, and even if he does not actually have a small penis, statistically speaking.
In fact, for some men with average-sized or even big penises, it is a prerequisite in the fantasies that the woman prefer an even bigger size or that she have an outrageously distorted understanding of what the average size of a penis is in the male population. This allows more men with the small penis humiliation kink to identify with the woman’s targeted humiliation.
For example, a woman can say that she only has sex with men who are at least eight inches and that she considers anything below that to be small. She can also say that she thinks the average penis size is seven inches or some such inflated number.2 If the woman in the fantasy is only verbally humiliating men who are, say, smaller than five inches, then men with five-inch penises and above will fail to be humiliated due to the disconnect with reality.
In connection with this, a woman who has a preference for big penises is referred to as a “size queen”. The size queen character can play an important role in fantasies of small penis humiliation, as the man who discovers that a woman he is interested in is a size queen knows for sure that her standards are high and that she cannot be satisfied with an average-sized penis.
Rejection
A common fantasy in small penis humiliation is for the man to go on a date with a woman who is seemingly attracted to him, enough so that she decides to go home with him with the intention of having sex. Once home, however, things take a disappointing turn when the man’s pants come off and the woman discovers that his penis is too small for her taste. With the disappointing new information, the woman changes her mind about having sex, rejecting the man and denying him the sexual access he thought he secured. As such, these fantasies often intertwine with the rejection kink.
The woman can react to her discovery of the man’s small penis in a variety of ways. In some fantasies, she is embarrassed and politely tries to explain that she no longer wants to have sex with the man. Perhaps she does not even feel comfortable telling him the real reason. If she does, she tries as best she can not to hurt his feelings. This subtle humiliation can be arousing for some men.
In other scenarios, the woman is unable to hold her laughter. Perhaps she tries not to laugh in the man’s face but she finds the penis so small that the situation becomes hilarious. She can even apologize to the man for laughing and try in vain to regain her composure, which some men find arousing.
In yet other scenarios, the woman has an angry reaction, blaming the man for having the audacity of thinking he had a chance with her with such a small penis. The woman is not coy about pointing out the man’s inadequacy. He should have known better than to pursue her because she obviously does not have sex with small penises. The woman is offended and, in some scenarios, corporal punishment might ensue, often directed at the man’s genitals.
When aspects of rejection are involved in fantasies of small penis humiliation, the man can be explicitly humiliated for being unworthy of having sex with women because his penis is too small. He can be told that he should abstain from pursuing women and trying to have sex with them because he will never be able to satisfy them.
Reaction
The woman’s immediate reaction in the moment she sees the man’s penis for the first time is an important element in these fantasies—in the sense that it can be the moment in which the man’s arousal reaches its peak. In this initial reaction, the woman can ask questions that seemingly spring from her genuine curiosity but that can be very humiliating to the man.
For example, the woman can ask him if his erect penis is actually erect, under the assumption that such a small penis can only be flaccid. In this case, the woman can still hold out some hope that the penis will grow, a hope which quickly dissipates when the man admits that his penis is already erect.
The woman can also ask if the penis works, implying that it is strange to expect that such a small penis would be functional. She can also ask the man if he had sex with women in the past, insinuating that no woman in her right mind would ever agree to have sex with such a small penis.
In the woman’s initial reaction of shock, she can admit that the man’s penis is the smallest she has ever seen. She can also ask humiliating hypothetical questions about what sex would be like between the two of them, mentally exploring all the ways the man can come up short in bed.
For example, the woman can ask if she would even feel the penis if it were to penetrate her. If she has large buttocks, she can ponder whether the penis would make it past the nates to the entrance of the vagina. If she has big breasts, she can amusingly guess that the penis would get lost between them. She can also hazard to guess that the man would ejaculate too quickly if they were to have sex, an assumption that seems natural to the woman based on the size of the penis.
Expectations
The expectations of the woman can play a key role in fantasies of small penis humiliation. Whereas the size of women’s breasts is readily apparent to men’s eyes before any interaction need take place between the sexes, the size of a man’s erect penis remains a mystery until the woman sleeps with him or otherwise touches his penis during sexual activity. Because of this, the woman has to invest herself with a man to a significant extent before finding out his penis size.
For this reason, some women try to guess based on other traits and attributes. Whether it is noses, feet, hands, height, or musculature, claims of correlations between penis size and the size of other things abound in society. Whole stereotypes have arisen around the attempt to make educated guesses about penis size.3 In internet terminology, women speak of “big dick energy” in referring to a certain manner a man carries himself that supposedly signals he has a big penis.
In the fantasies mentioned previously, the woman can build up these expectations during all the time she spends with the man before going home with him. When the moment comes for him to takes his pants off in anticipation of having sex with the woman, she already expects him to have a big penis based on what she gathered about him up to that point.
In some fantasies, it can be particularly arousing if the woman explicitly states her expectations based on what she observes about the man. She can tell him that she thinks he must have a big penis based on such and such, and that she cannot wait to see it for herself. The more the woman builds her expectations, the more disappointed she stands to be at the moment of truth. The drastic violation of the expectations makes the subsequent humiliation even more arousing in the imagination of some men.
The racial stereotype that black men have big penises can play into this fantasy for those black men who have the small penis humiliation kink. The woman’s expectation in this case is that the man have a big penis based on his race.
Manipulation
Sexual fantasies of small penis humiliation can intertwine with manipulation kinks, most notably exposure and blackmail. In fantasies of the former, the man is exposed for having a small penis. In the fantasies of the latter, the man is blackmailed to keep it a secret.
In fantasies of exposure, for example, after an attempted sexual encounter that takes a disappointing turn, the woman can reveal to her female friends the cause of the disappointment. They can gossip about the man’s small penis and turn him into the subject of laughter and ridicule. The rumors can spread and harm the man’s reputation in the sexual sphere, hurting his chances of dating other women as they all get hold of the embarrassing piece of information.
In fantasies of blackmail, the woman’s knowledge of the man’s small penis is leveraged against him. For example, upon seeing the man’s small penis, the woman can proceed to take photos or videos of it. In some scenarios, the woman makes no effort at a pretense when she captures this material. In other scenarios, she comes up with a stratagem to dupe the man into allowing her to take the photos, perhaps telling him that she wants to show her friends because they would never believe how small the penis is without evidence. In yet other scenarios, the woman secretly takes the photos without the man’s knowledge.
With the compromising material in hand, the woman comes to hold blackmail power over the man. If she shares those photos or videos, he will be exposed and humiliated to the utmost as everyone will know he has a small penis. All the girls will laugh at him and he will never have a chance with them. What is worse, the photos and videos can circulate online, publicly disgracing him and ruining his reputation forever.
The man can beg the woman not to share or distribute the material, to the point where he becomes ready to do anything she wants, hoping he can prevent a scenario that can ruin his life. These fantasies can advance further into the domain of financial domination as the woman can extort money from the man in exchange for her silence, and also into the domain of servility as she can turn him into her servant or slave.
Relationship
Fantasies of small penis humiliation can arise in the context of a romantic or sexual relationship. These fantasies can be pure, in the sense that they do not incorporate other kinks. For example, a man can simply enjoy hearing about his small penis from his female partner while they engage in sexual activity. He can also be aroused by the way she interacts with his penis, from which he gets the sense that the sexual encounter is lackluster for her.
As an example of these interactions, the woman can act nonchalant when performing oral sex on the man, in a way that implies that his penis is so small that a blowjob is very easy to perform and therefore uneventful. The woman can also fail to react during intercourse, implying that her partner’s penis is so small that she does not even feel it. She can also ask the man if he is inside her when they are engaging in intercourse, suggesting the penis is so small that the woman did not know that it was already inside her.
Fantasies of small penis humiliation often strongly intertwine with the cuckolding kink, as the small penis becomes cause for the female partner’s sexual dissatisfaction in the relationship or marriage. Thus, she pursues sex with other men in search of the gratification that her male partner is unable to give her due to his lack of the proper physical endowment. The cuckolding dynamic in this case is strongly focused on the issue of penis size and the woman’s new sexual partners are imagined to have the long sought-after big penises that can gratify the woman’s sexual needs.
Retrospective humiliation
In the context of a committed relationship, a man can be humiliated for the size of his penis in a retrospective way by comparing him with the woman’s previous sexual partners.
In the male sexual psychology, there is a strong desire for the man to be the best sexual partner his girlfriend or wife ever has. A man dreads the prospect that his female partner might have had lovers in the past who could sexually satisfy her more than he can. When a man finds out that this is the case, it is cause for humiliation as he feels himself sexually inadequate and inferior to those other men.
In fantasies of small penis humiliation, the woman’s sexual satisfaction is almost entirely reduced to penis size. Thus, a man can derive pleasure from the humiliation of discovering that his girlfriend or wife had a sexual partner in the past who had a bigger penis. He imagines that, in consequence, she must have been more pleased in bed with the ex-boyfriend than she currently is with him. Such an unfavorable comparison can be eroticized and it can feed into the small penis humiliation kink.
Such a discovery can happen in a multitude of ways. The man can ask about it directly, the girlfriend or wife can inadvertently confess her sexual past, the man can discover photos of the ex-boyfriend’s penis in the woman’s phone, and so on and so forth. All of these scenarios lead to the retrospective humiliation that characterizes these fantasies.
In some scenarios, the comparison of penis size happens indirectly. Instead of being compared to actual past lovers, the man’s penis is compared to the woman’s sex toys. For example, the man can discover that his girlfriend or wife has a dildo larger than his penis. He reasons that she prefers a penis the size of her dildo, which suggests that she is not fully satisfied with his penis and that she probably had past sexual partners with bigger penises, which brings the fantasy directly into retrospective humiliation.
In connection with this, some men derive pleasure from the subtle humiliation of knowing that the woman settled for a smaller penis after enjoying a promiscuous past with men with large penises. In other words, the woman chose the man for reasons other than his sexual prowess. In internet terminology, this is sometimes referred to as “boyfriend dick”. These fantasies also involve elements of retrospective cuckolding.
Chastity, feminization, and homosexuality
In the context of a romantic relationship, fantasies of small penis humiliation can incorporate the chastity kink if the woman decides to lock the penis in a cage as punishment for its being too small. If a cuckolding dynamic is at play, the woman can tease her partner by telling him about her sexual exploits with other men, all the while he is denied access to his penis, prevented from achieving erection by the chastity cage. Thus, the man is denied even the vicarious sexual pleasure to be had from his partner’s stories.
The small penis humiliation kink can also incorporate aspects of feminization. In these fantasies, the woman thinks the man’s penis is so small it might as well be a clitoris rather than a real penis. She can refer to it as a “clitty” in consequence. The man can further be feminized a variety of ways, all springing from the singular basis of having a small penis.
Small penis humiliation can also incorporate the kink of encouraged homosexuality. In these fantasies, the woman thinks the man’s penis is useless in satisfying a woman, so she encourages him to make himself sexually useful in other ways, notably by performing oral sex on other men and becoming the receiving partner in intercourse with them.
Encouragement
In some fantasies, the man is not humiliated for having a small penis but rather the fact is acknowledged and the man is encouraged to masturbate or to have sex without any issue. These fantasies are called small penis encouragement.
A man who enjoys this type of encouragement can be aroused, for example, by his female partner’s appreciation of his penis. She can talk about how much she loves it even though it is small, how she does not care about the size, and so on and so forth.
Avenues for gratification
Some men seek to fulfill their fantasies of small penis humiliation in real life in certain ways that deserve a mention here.
Some men order so-called “custom ratings” from online models that cater to female domination kinks. For this service, the man typically sends pictures or videos of his penis to the model who then records an audio or a video of herself rating it.
Oftentimes, men who order these ratings seek to be humiliated by the model, who is expected to laugh at the pictures of the penis and to say degrading things about the man’s sexual adequacy and ability, which the man can find extremely arousing.
Some men with the small penis humiliation kink like to expose themselves to others, hoping to elicit a reaction of laughter and ridicule that they experience as humiliating and arousing. Some of these behaviors are ethically dubious and some even border on illegality. It should be kept in mind, however, that it is only a minority of men with the small penis humiliation kink that resort to these deviant behaviors.
For example, some men send unsolicited pictures of their penises to women online. The hope here is that the woman will be so offended that she will verbally humiliate the man with the most ruthless insult she can employ: that he has a small penis.
Some men like to expose their small penises on websites and applications where they are matched with random strangers for video chatting. These men are driven by the thrill of catching a surprise reaction of shock or laughter from an unsuspecting female viewer.
Some men expose themselves in real life, for example by going to nudist beaches and purposely sitting near women they find attractive, hoping that the women will eventually notice the small penis and laugh about it among themselves.
Premature ejaculation
Some men eroticize the idea of humiliating themselves by ejaculating too quickly with a woman. This premature ejaculation kink is less known than its small penis humiliation counterpart but it is likewise an eroticization of male sexual inadequacy.
Men with sexual fantasies of premature ejaculation are aroused when they are called certain degrading names by an attractive woman, names that pertain to the man’s premature ejaculation problem such as premie, fast cummer, minute-man, two-pump chump, etc.
Some men go to the length of trying to train themselves to ejaculate faster and faster, seeking to feel ever more pathetic in the eyes of attractive women for ejaculating so fast. These men can fantasize about becoming so sexually inadequate that the mere sight of a naked woman is enough to drive them to climax. The aspect of premature training can involve a game element where a man tries to beat his own record of masturbation time. Such game elements appear in many male submissive sexual fantasies.
Erectile dysfunction
Erectile dysfunction is another important facet of male sexual inadequacy. In fact, it can be argued that it is the most important, since the inability to achieve an erection or to maintain it long enough for penetrative sex means the complete failure of the man’s reproductive strategy. A man can still successfully reproduce if he ejaculates prematurely, he can still have sex with the woman even if his penis is too small for her satisfaction, but the same cannot be said for impotence.
There is some nuance in the matter of erectile dysfunction as it relates to fantasies of sexual inadequacy. If the man suffers from organic erectile dysfunction—meaning dysfunction due to a physiological problem—then fantasizing about his inadequacy—or about anything else for that matter—will not overcome the physiological reality.
This is why fantasies that eroticize erectile dysfunction do so almost always in a situational way, in the sense that the dysfunction only happens in certain situations and not in others. For example, some men with these fantasies enjoy the humiliation of imagining themselves unable to get it up for sex with a real woman and only being able to achieve an erection when masturbating to pornography.
In this context, the man can be verbally humiliated by being called a “pornosexual”, alluding to a supposed new sexual orientation in which the man is solely aroused by pornography. This can intertwine with manipulation kinks, where the man can derive pleasure from being told that he ruined his sex life by becoming addicted to pornography and afflicting himself with the so-called porn-induced erectile dysfunction, rewiring his sexual orientation in the process to exclusive attraction to pornography.
Other scenarios that can draw on the eroticization of situational erectile dysfunction intertwine with the homewrecking kink. The man who is in a stable committed relationship can fantasize about being so infatuated with another woman that he is rendered impotent with his girlfriend or wife, exclusively aroused by the seductress.
Sexual ineptitude
Some fantasies of male sexual inadequacy focus on the man’s presumed or actual sexual ineptitude—that is, his lack of skill and experience in pleasing women in bed. These fantasies often intertwine with the rejection kink.
For example, a man who likes to be humiliated for being a virgin can also derive pleasure from being told he would not know what to do if he were to find himself in the unlikely situation of being in bed with a woman. The woman who humiliates the virgin in such a fashion can laugh at him and ridicule him for his predicted ineptitude.
The woman can also humiliate the man for his actual ineptitude. For example, some men like to be humiliated for being unable to make women orgasm during sex or for never being able to interest a woman in repeating a sexual encounter after a disappointing first performance.
These fantasies of sexual ineptitude can draw on the other sexual inadequacies, such as having a small penis or being a premature ejaculator, but they can also purely pertain to the actual sexual skill of the man, his know-how in pleasing women, and his sexual experience with women in the past.
This concludes a survey of the kinks of male sexual inadequacy. If you think something is missing from this overview, leave a comment and share your thoughts. You can also message me on Substack or on Reddit if you wish to remain anonymous and discuss privately.
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The line art in this essay’s card is by Georgian artist Dorian Chelios.
In surveys, women typically say girth is more important to them than length. See for example Eisenman, Russell (2001). Penis size: Survey of female perceptions of sexual satisfaction. BMC women's health, 1, 1–2.
The most reliable estimate for the average size of the erect penis in the male population is in the range of 5.1 to 5.5 inches, probably closer to the lower end. King, Bruce M. (2020). Average-Size Erect Penis: Fiction, Fact, and the Need for Counseling. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 47(1), 80–89.
For example, a common one these days among some women on the internet is that “tall and skinny” means having a big penis.