There’s a trend going around right now that is quietly destroying relationships across the Eastern Seaboard.

A girl films her boyfriend during a snowstorm. She asks him, all innocent, “They’re saying we’re getting six to eight inches tonight. That’s not even a lot, right?”

And the boyfriend panics. Every single time. His face does this thing where you can watch his soul leave his body, take a detour through his boxer briefs, and come back worse. He stammers. He hedges. He stares at the snow like it personally outed him. He looks like a man being asked to publicly rank himself on a scale he’d rather not disclose.

These videos have millions of views, and none of them are about precipitation. Every woman watching knows exactly what she’s witnessing: a man performing real-time genital arithmetic while pretending to have a meteorological opinion. His face says snow. His silence says everything else.

I sent one to my group chat and within 40 minutes we were deep into the only conversation that matters. Not the sanitized one. Not the “does size matter” question Cosmopolitan has been recycling since 1987 between grapefruit blowjob tutorials and quizzes about your love language. The conversation where someone says something so specific about a specific dick in a specific position that you laugh until your pelvic floor fails you and then go quiet because she’s completely right. Women have been publicly dissected, waxed, rated, and ranked since the invention of the magazine centerfold. (Present company very much included.) One essay where we talk honestly about dick? Suddenly it’s a human rights violation.

So I called women I trust and asked them to tell me everything. Size. Technique. The positions where it matters and the positions where it is genuinely irrelevant. What they told me was filthy, funny, occasionally architectural, and surprisingly tender.

Does size matter?

Yes. But not the way men have been losing sleep over since the first man looked down in a communal bath and decided his worth as a human being lived between his legs.

Not one woman I spoke to wanted the biggest dick available. A few physically recoiled at anything over eight inches like I’d suggested they sit on a traffic cone. One friend dated a man so large that sex required what she called “load-bearing foreplay.” Twenty minutes of warm-up that wasn’t romantic so much as infrastructural. Like stretching before a marathon you didn’t sign up for. They broke up, not because of the size, but because he moved through the world like his cock was a credential. It was his opening argument and his closing statement and he never bothered developing a middle. He had no curiosity about her body. He didn’t need any. He’d been told his whole life that showing up was enough.

Men like that are everywhere. They treat sex like a monologue. They fuck like they’re performing for an audience of one, and that audience is themselves.

In praise of the average dick

The best sex most of these women described had nothing to do with size. One friend told me about a man who was average on his most charitable day. She said he treated her body like something he wanted to understand. He paid attention to what made her breath change. He adjusted when something wasn’t working instead of just doing it harder, which, for the record, is almost never the answer and yet remains the most popular guess. She said her orgasm was the point of the evening, not a pleasant coincidence that occasionally occurred during his performance.

And a sonnet for the small dicks

The most interesting answer came from a woman who actively preferred smaller. Not tolerated. Not accommodated. Wanted. She said oral sex was better because she could enjoy giving it instead of managing her gag reflex and quietly negotiating with God. She said sex lasted longer because he wasn’t relying on his dimensions to carry the evening. She said he tried harder because he assumed he had to, and that assumption became his entire sexual ethic. His insecurity became his work ethic and his work ethic became her orgasm. She said she’d take that over a big dick with no follow-through for the rest of her life. And I want to be clear about something: the culture gave him that insecurity. Women didn’t. Locker rooms did. Porn did. Every joke ever made about small dicks on a sitcom did. This essay isn’t adding to that pile. Every woman I spoke to was saying the same thing: we don’t care about your size. We care about what you do when you show up.

On positions

This is where inches actually become relevant in a practical, physical, almost engineering sense. Several women said deeper positions with bigger men were a coin flip between good and a trip to urgent care. One friend described doggy style with her ex as “being rear-ended by a Buick with no insurance.” She preferred missionary because she could control depth, which she described as “driving the car instead of being the speed bump.” With average or smaller men, women said they could actually relax. They could be playful. They could fuck like adults having fun instead of carefully managing a situation.

What actually matters, according to every woman I talked to: confidence that isn’t a costume. Curiosity about her body that goes beyond the obvious. Willingness to use hands, mouth, toys, whatever gets her there. The understanding that her pleasure isn’t a footnote to his.

The man panicking in the snowfall video is telling on himself. Not because he’s revealing his size. Because he’s revealing that he thinks his measurements are the most interesting thing about him in bed. That belief, more than any inch or lack thereof, is what makes a person forgettable to sleep with.

Six to eight inches of snow melts by Tuesday.

Six to eight inches of insecurity follows a man into every bedroom for the rest of his life. Unless he figures out that the women in his bed are not keeping score with a ruler. They’re keeping score with their nerve endings.