A study that examined the effect a gay man’s penis size has on his sex life — backed by the National Institutes of Health — has come under scrutiny by a group claiming the agency is wasting tax dollars at a time when the country is trying to control its debt.
“This country is broke and we cannot spend money on this kind of stuff,” said Andrea Lafferty, president of the Traditional Values Coalition which drew attention to the report as part of a six-month investigation into NIH grants for examples of “institutional waste.”
“We’re broke as a nation. If liberals want to fund this, they can do it from their own coffers,” Lafferty said, desperately trying to spin the discovery — and blame — on the Obama White House.
But the 2009 study was funded through a 2006 grant issued during the George W. Bush administration.
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The research, titled “The Association between Penis Size and Sexual Health among Men Who Have Sex with Men,” began in 2006 and surveyed 1,065 gay men. Among its key findings: Those gay men who felt they had small or inadequate penis sizes were more likely to become “bottoms,” or anal receptive, while gay men with larger penises were more likely to identify themselves as “tops,” or anal insertive.
Another discovery from the research: men with smaller penises were more likely to be psychologically troubled than those with larger genitalia. The goal of the study was to understand the “real individual-level consequences of living in a penis-centered society.”
The National Development and Research Institutes, which received the money from the NIH to conduct the study, has received taxpayer funding since 1985 for “behavioral science research on drug abuse, AIDS, and crime,” and the penis study reportedly fit into that category.
