A massive penis please. That’s most guys’ answer to a question many of us have at least thought about before: what part of your body would you like to surgically improve, and how?
I remember when there was a rumour went round that Peter Andre had undergone plastic surgery on his abs to make them as pristinely popping as they were in the Mysterious Girl video, and I remember even then, as an eight-year-old boy barely aware of anything except strawberry laces and Arsenal goalkeeper kits, thinking: “Why did he do that when he could’ve got a massive penis instead?” Since growing up, I’ve thought about penis enlargement, in a vague “I’d like to learn another language one day” kind of way. As a man who has seen porn on the internet, it’s hard to escape two things: the size of the performers’ penises and the penis enlargement ads displayed on the side. You can’t help but think: “Do I need to have a veined saveloy for a penis?” These festering fixations have consequences far beyond mutilated genitals. Suicide is the biggest cause of death for men in the UK under 49 The insidious, eternal fear for a man is that the size of your penis or sexual prowess will be mocked. You can call a man fat, ugly, unfashionable or any number of appearance-based insults and he’ll find a way of turning it into a positive. But for some reason, if you mock the size of the thing he uses to have sex, you belittle what it is to be a man. And it seems I’m not the only one who has thought about penis enlargement surgery, with warning coming from doctors in Papua New Guinea that there is a “nationwide problem” with men agreeing to have their penises injected with substances such as silicone and cooking oil in an attempt to make them bigger. Advertisement“I have seen five new cases every week for the past two years, and these are the ones that have come forward for treatment. We don’t know how many of them are out there,” said Akule Danlop, a surgeon at Port Moresby General hospital. “I saw seven today.” And it’s not just a Papua New Guinea thing. A study of 50,000 UK men and women done by the University of Sheffield revealed that 45% of men would like a larger penis. Between 2013 and 2017, members of the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery carried out 45,604 penis enhancements worldwide. A strange fact about these surgeries, which usually cost in the region of £5,000-7,000: they don’t actually affect the size of the penis when erect. These are purely aesthetic procedures, carried out for their effect in the changing room rather than the bedroom. As with breast or bum enlargements, they tend to be for the psychological wellbeing of the person in question. In that sense, it seems like penis enlargements are bringing the genders closer to a dystopian kind of equality, where we all fix confidence problems by paying for expensive and complicated surgery. Like women, men are now suffering in their pursuit of the ‘perfect’ body Barbara Ellen Read moreIn the western world at least, women have had to deal with objectification for centuries, to the point where it has created an unhealthy culture of insecurity and image-based value. Now it seems that men are struggling with similar insecurities. In Papua New Guinea, they are dealing with these feelings in private, turning to black-market “penis enlargement pills” and dangerous DIY surgeries to fix what they see as a problem looming over their masculinity. These festering fixations have consequences far beyond mutilated genitals. Suicide is the biggest cause of death for men in the UK under 49. Another statistic from the University of Sheffield study of penises: 85% of women were satisfied with their partner’s size, with research showing that when it comes to sex, women are far more interested in whether men were romantic, tender and sensitive to their desires. As described in Blake’s A Poison Tree, internalising anger and insecurity only helps it grow and become harder to control. There is something quintessentially male in our willingness to favour injecting ourselves with cooking oil or undergoing painful surgery over actually talking to someone about the size of our penises. The cliched truth is if that we listened and talked more about it, we could all save ourselves a lot of trouble. • Tom Usher is a freelance writer Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/16/penis-enlargement-surgery-masculinity-papua-new-guinea
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