The New Yorker:

One doctor’s Promethean quest to grow the male member is leaving some men desperate and disfigured.

By Ava Kofman

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.”

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