Ladies, has that cute guy you’ve been checking out started keeping his hands behind his back? Or wearing baseball gloves – on both hands? Or, if he’s Italian, has he been effectively rendered mute? If you answered “yes” to any of these, I think I know why.

A team of Korean urologists has supposedly found a direct correlation between the length of a man’s fingers and that of his … well, you know.

Dr. Tae Beom Kim, a urologist at Gachon University in Inchon, Korea, and his colleagues claim to have found that the ratio of the length of a man’s index finger to that of his ring finger may reveal the relative size of his wedding tackle. The lower that ratio, the longer the manly member may be, the researchers wrote recently in the Asian Journal of Andrology.

Dr. Killjoy – I mean, Dr. Kim – and his team studied 144 men over the age of 20 who were undergoing urological surgery for conditions that do not affect the length of the penis. (Do us a solid, doc, and list the procedures that do.)

One team member (yes, I know I said “member;” grow up, already) carefully measured the lengths of the index and ring fingers on the subject’s right hand before surgery. A second team member then measured penis length immediately after the subject had been anesthetized.

The length was measured both when the penis was flaccid and when it had been stretched as much as possible. “Stretched length is thought to correlate to erect length,” the team wrote. “Ouch,” they did not add.

If the findings are accurate, they put to rest the conventional wisdom that the length of a man’s penis can be accurately deduced from the size of his nose, the length of his feet, or the fact that he drives a Hummer.

This is not good news for us guys – I mean … uh … those guys – who got shorted on the finger-ratio thing. And there’s not much they can do about it, either; their little (and I do mean little) secret is right out in the open. And while women can wear padded bras, good luck finding padded gloves (not that I’ve tried, mind you).

Although these conclusions may sound like a cock and bull story, they may be legit. Several earlier studies suggest that the finger-length ratio is determined by prenatal exposure to both testosterone and estrogen. And if that exposure affects finger length, then why not that of other manly extremities?

Anyway, this news has made me more than a little self-conscious so, if you wave at me, don’t be offended if I just nod back.