A year-old study noting that gay men’s perceived penis size affects their sexual position preference—top or bottom?—was trotted out recently by conservative groups as an example of how the government wastes taxpayer dollars. But in actuality, the study turned out to be rather important, wasn’t funded by taxpayers and had little to do with gay sex positions.

ABC News cites the Traditional Values Coalition and a couple of others for helping make weiner-size headlines (thanks!), by quoting president Andrea Lafferty as saying that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) signed off on the study when actually it didn’t directly fund it at all. The NIH did provide a “training grant for research into AIDS and HIV prevention for the study's lead author, Christian Grov.” Among Grov’s findings were that men who perceive themselves to have bigger penises are also more likely to have viral STDs, and Grov said these higher rates may be due to improper condom fit, breakage and irritation. So the one-size-fits-all condom approach may not be the best for sexual health.

So penis sizes and position preferences were not the real focus of the study but because we know you now want to know, men who think they’re bigger more likely to identify as tops. Gad Saad ran a similar fun-to-read study in Psychology Today in March 2011.

But I know how the alarmists feel. I love finding reasons to talk about sexual habits and penises, too. Penispenispenis.