(Well, yes, it’s all about penises — with photos, but not of penises, and some plain talk in street language — so not to everyone’s taste, and you should take that into account.)
The background, from my 1/26/16 posting “Huge News For Men!”, reporting on a GQ story. The story’s lead-in:
An enterprising L.A. surgeon [James Elist] has invented a silicone penis implant [the Penuma], which, because we’re sure you have a frient who’ll want to know, costs 13 grand and can nearly double your size. Amy Wallace grills the good doctor on how it works – and asks a few of his satisfied customers (and their mostly satisfied wives) how it’s working.
The story notes that the implant adds length, but even more girth. From my posting:
The girth thing is important. A number of women report dissatisfaction with male partners who have long but slender penises — pencil dicks, in the vernacular — which fail to stimulate their clitorises. The Penuma is designed to fix this problem.
(#1) James Elist (photo from his Erectile Dysyfunction Help Center site)It’s also designed to alleviate the feelings of inadequacy (and shame) so many men have about the length of their penises; it’s often been noted that half or more of American men believe that their penises are significantly smaller than average (the mean for erect adult penises is about 5 inches), which of course cannot be an accurate assessment of the situation. Instead, many men judge a penis to be of adequate length only if it is in fact notably long, at least 6 inches (for men in porn, 7 inches or more is the expected length) — so men with entirely average penises judge them to be inadequate, and men looking for male sex partners judge entirely average penises to be unacceptably small in a partner
(#2) The Penuma (photo: YouTube / Dr James Elist)
Critique. Amy Wallace’s old GQ piece simply takes Elist at his word, including his assessment of his patient’s (and their sexual partners’) satisfaction with his device. This turns out to have been a grave error, according to a recent New Yorker article by Ava Kofman: in print 7/3/23, “Measure for Measure: On the frontiers of penile enlargement, competition for patients grows cutthroat”; on-line 6/26/23, “The perils and promises of penis-enlargement surgery: One doctor’s Promethean quest to grow the male member is leaving some men desperate and disfigured”.
From which we learn that Elist is in fact a con man on a massive scale (also combatively litigious; he is no doubt suing Kofman now, and will probably sue me for writing this posting).
The beginning of Kofman’s piece:
They wanted it because they’d just gone through a bad breakup and needed an edge in the volatile dating market; because porn had warped their sense of scale; because they’d been in a car accident, or were looking to fix a curve, or were hoping for a little “software upgrade”; because they were not having a midlife crisis; because they were, “and it was cheaper than a Bugatti Veyron”; because, after five kids, their wife couldn’t feel them anymore; because they’d been molested as a child and still remembered the laughter of the adults in the room; because they couldn’t forget a passing comment their spouse made in 1975; because, despite the objections of their couples therapist, they believed it would bring them closer to their “sex-obsessed” husband (who then had an affair that precipitated their divorce); because they’d stopped changing in locker rooms, stopped peeing in urinals, stopped having sex; because who wouldn’t want it?
Mick (his middle name) wanted a bigger penis because he believed it would allow him to look in the mirror and feel satisfied. He had trouble imagining what shape the satisfaction would take, since it was something he’d never actually experienced. Small and dark-haired, he’d found his adolescence to be a gantlet of humiliating comparisons: to classmates who were blond and blue-eyed; to his half brothers, who were older and taller and heterosexual; to the hirsute men in his stepfather’s Hasidic community, who wore big beards and billowing frock coats. After he reached puberty — late, in his estimation — he grew an impressive beard of his own, and his feelings of inadequacy concentrated on his genitals.
None of Mick’s romantic partners ever commented on his size, but his preoccupation had a way of short-circuiting the mood. He tried several kinds of self-acceptance therapy, without success; whenever he went to the bathroom, there it was, mocking him. “Like an evil root,” he said of the fixation. “It gets in there and grows like a tree. But I think everybody has that on some level about something.”
It wasn’t until the spring of 2019, when he was thirty-six, that he came across something appealing: a silicone implant shaped like a hot-dog bun which could be inserted just under the skin of the penis to increase its girth and flaccid length.
The device, called the Penuma, had been invented by James Elist — a silver-haired urologist who has been described on TMZ as “the Thomas Edison of penis surgery.” Elist’s procedure was touted as reversible, and, according to a rapturous article in GQ, more than a thousand men had already undergone it. It was also, as far as Mick could tell, the only genital enhancement on the market to have received the blessing of the Food and Drug Administration.
Then it all goes downhill, in the worst possible way. Eventually he has the device removed (against Elist’s injunctions against consulting any urologist other than him) and is still recovering sensation in his penis. A truly appalling tale. (On the net you can find a huge number of bitter complaints about men’s experiences with Penuma.)
Me and my (little) dick. Now for some personal commentary, much of which I’ve exposed in a variety of earlier dick-size postings, but will summarize here.
First, most American adult men have an erect dick in the range from 5 to 7 inches. That’s just a fact. I am at the low end of this scale, at 5 inches, so I was mocked as a kid for having a little dick, and in my negotiations for sex with other men was frequently rejected (even as a receptive partner) because of my dick size. (Yes, the male psychology here is complex.)
On the other hand, I managed without trouble, on the very first try, to fuck up a kid and then to have mutually satisfying insertive sex with both women and men. Some of my male sexual partners were in fact delighted with my dick, saying that it was big enough to be satisfying, but not so big that it was difficult to accommodate; my husband-equivalent, who had a dick at the upper range of normal, was nevertheless outrageously fond of my dick. Sounds good to me.
In exchange, I was entirely happy servicing a dick in my size range. (Probably unavoidably in our culture, I have pretty much classic sexual fantasies about taking gigantic thick dicks — but those are fantasies; in real life I found really big dicks uncomfortable to handle, for a variety of reasons, and had to devise alternative schemes for getting my partners off.)
The 5-6″ range, not too thick, is in fact a genuine sweet spot for me.
All that is good news. I am comfortable with my dick, which has served me well since I fell into really powerful early puberty at the age of 10, 72 years ago, and continues to provide me with essentially daily jack-off pleasure even now. (I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I have a very high sex drive. Not everyone’s way, by any means, but it is mine, and I take it as it comes.)
Nevertheless, I’m not immune from the baleful effects of that history of taunting and those rejections: I can be humiliated, even now, by taunting and rejections, by being impelled into reliving the shame of getting pegged as a little-dick faggot.
Still, for the most part, my feelings about my little dick are just like my all my feelings about the person I am (including being a faggot, being forbiddingly smart, being empathetic, being irrepressibly analytic, being playful, and much more: I am as I am (stunningly different in many ways from others) and have to negotiate with the world on my own terms.
July 9, 2023 at 9:34 am |
I’ve likely shrunk a bit from 7.5-8″, but I’m the sole proprietor and don’t really care. My favorite oral has always been 4-6″, a real treat.