PENIS ENLARGEMENT SURGERY

Surgery on the penis is not a new idea. Men have been circumcising and castrating each other for centuries. A seventeenth-century Chinese novel mentioned in G. L. Simons's The Phallic Mystique has a scene in which a doctor who advertises penis enlargement explains his method. The doctor does it by adding slices of erect dog penis. He harvests the dog penis when it's inside a bitch and the dog is about to ejaculate, he says. He slices the dog penis off at the root, cuts it into quarters, inserts the quarters while still warm into incisions in the patient's penis, rubs the whole thing with ointment and wraps it in bandages. Three months later the new organ is ready to go to work, with erections twenty times the size of a normal man's.

In reality you can't augment a penis by slicing it open and adding something else, without also making the owner impotent. Modern penis enlargement surgery, which offers much more modest increases, was developed out of experimental work done by pediatric urologists on infants with congenital defects. The two procedures, one to lengthen the penis, the other to add girth, were introduced to the general public in 1991. In mid-1997 one surgeon estimated that at least fifteen thousand in the U.S. had already had their penises surgically enlarged. Among these men was the comic Flip Wilson, who claimed his penis needed enlargement because he'd worn it down with overuse. In August of 1997 Wilson gave the surgery its first celebrity endorsement when he pulled it out and showed it off to the people in the control booth on Howard Stern's radio show.

Dr. Jed Kaminetsky, a urologist who was the first to perform the surgery in New York City, and who has since stopped doing it, described the odd nature of the practice to me.

"Most of the people who came to me for this surgery had average-size penises. I measured all of them, flaccid and erect, before the surgery, and I photographed them. I had a whole cabinet of photographs. We had to induce an erection so we could measure it. I stocked up on gay porn because over fifty percent of the men who came in were gay. And I had straight porn for the other men. It's much easier for a woman to go buy gay porn than it is for a straight man. I sent my wife.

"A whole series of very macho guys came to see me—Rocky, and Bruno, macho Italian guys. I saw a lot of Asians who wanted the surgery. It just runs the gamut.

"There was one guy who came to me, and his penis looked like a beer can. I don't think he was using it to have sex with anyone. He had already had three or four penile enlargements. He kept having it revised and putting more girth on it. His penis was almost as wide as it was long. It was over six inches around in its flaccid state. He asked me to do more and I had to say no.

"That was one reason I stopped doing the surgery—the patients had too much emotional baggage. Also the results aren't great. The surgery isn't perfected yet, and in the end I didn't feel comfortable doing it or recommending it be done."

Because penis enlargement surgery is not perfected, both the American Urological Association and the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons refuse to endorse it. Medical schools don't teach it and textbooks don't describe it. But there are at least thirty doctors, worldwide, who perform the surgery on an outpatient basis—at a cost of nearly $6,000 if lengthening and widening are done at the same time, and with varying degrees of success.

The standard penis lengthening procedure entails cutting the suspensory ligament that holds the penis at a particular angle to the pubic bone. Freed of this ligament, the logic goes, the penis can dangle farther down out of the body. Surgeons promise one to two and a half inches of increased length, and then prescribe the wearing of weights a few hours every day for several months, to keep the extra piece of penis from retreating back inside.

Extra girth—up to 50 percent more, some surgeons say—can be added in one of two ways. A few years ago surgeons favored liposuction. They would suction fat out of the patient's abdomen and insert it into the penis. This is the same method that is used to add pout to women's lips, and it was invented by the same man who invented lip liposuction. It has the same drawback, too—eventually some of the fat gets reabsorbed, and the procedure must be repeated.

A newer method is the dermal fat graft: The surgeon removes a strip of dermis, or skin layer, from the buttocks or thigh, and sews it into the penis. This is more permanent, but it is also a more complicated operation. Still, it's now the only widening procedure some surgeons will do. Too often when liposuctioned fat is injected into the penis it distributes itself unevenly, forming lumps. Imagine a man who used to worry that his penis was too thin. He has the surgery and now it's fatter, but lumpy. Not only is he embarrassed to have sex, he's so angry he initiates a malpractice suit. In one case I read about the doctor seemed indignant that he was being sued. Nothing was wrong, he said. The patient just needed to massage the lumps vigorously enough, and eventually everything would even out.

Lumpy penis is only one of the surgery's possible side effects. Sometimes the lengthening procedure actually ends up shortening the penis, and usually it decreases the angle of the erection. Either surgery can cause scarring, numbness, blood vessel damage and impotence. It's somewhat safer to have your penis lengthened, wait a few months and then have it widened. But proceeding that way is more expensive—lengthening alone costs close to $4,000 and widening can be as much as $5,000.

Of course, many men have had the surgery without complications, and some of them have been interviewed for magazine articles in which they say they're much happier now. Most likely they're men who had really small penises to start with, for whom an extra inch would be a big percentage gain. As for the rest, according to Dr. Kaminetsky, "You can add length, but not that much erect length, so basically it makes guys look better in the shower. Nobody I operated on was really unhappy afterward. But I don't think it changed anybody's life, I'll tell you that."



Source: The Book of the Penis by Maggie Paley