It’s accepted as a truism that we live in a sex-drenched culture. From our pop- and reality-TV stars to our ready access to porn, the suggestion is that, when we’re not working, sleeping or feeding ourselves, we’re banging, thinking about banging, or watching videos of other people banging.

Yet the authors of “Don’t Put That in There” — both pediatricians and health researchers — dispute this with some cold-shower statistics.

For instance, despite the widespread belief that young people are hooking up with reckless abandon, Dr. Aaron E. Carroll and Dr. Rachel C. Vreeman found that about 57% of men and 51% of women aged 18-24 “have not had sex in the last year,” and that “only 36% of men reported having watched at least one pornographic film in the last year,” a finding consistent with other studies.

Here are some other sex myths that the authors debunk.

How big is big?

While the size of the average penis is often cited as six or, say the authors, seven inches, these figures are more conjecture (and, for some, wishful thinking) than science.

One study of 2,545 men on the Internet found that the average penile length, erect, was “6.4 inches, with a standard deviation of 1.2 inches.”

A study of 1,661 American men by the Kinsey Institute set the average as 5.6 inches, and included the finding that “the average size was different based on how the man got the erection,” with those who were made erect by oral sex having longer lengths than those who were measured after manual stimulation.

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