Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement
Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement
How a doctor’s two-decade quest to grow the penis is leaving some men desperate and disfigured.
Do articles about medicine go in the Science community? Seemed like the best place for what I thought was a really well written article about this niche subject matter.
... Kevin said that he had undergone five surgeries with Elist, including two upgrades, a revision and a removal, and his penis no longer functioned.
Still, Kevin had always found the surgeon to be caring, if a little preoccupied. “He reminded me of Doctor Frankenstein — the intensity of him wanting this thing to come to life,” Kevin told me. It sounded strange, he acknowledged, but before each operation he’d been filled with excitement. “You just feel relieved that you’re fixing something,” he said.
At an appointment earlier this year, Kevin said, Elist promised to fix him again with a sixth procedure, but one of the surgeon’s assistants discreetly advised against it...
The New Yorker hosting of this article was posted over in c/Humanities. As for where it should go, it's really a tossup. Articles about medicine can really fit the science or humanities category quite often as medicine is a bit of both.
I'm going to paste my comment from that other post (there wasn't really a ton of discussion over there). https://beehaw.org/post/791579
The whole realm of manhood is plagued by the issues of size, sadly. I’ve always been skeptical about cosmetic surgery in general, because I feel lots of decisions are driven by dysphoria and dysmorphia, and sometimes with a lack of proper psychiatric counseling in such a way that consent for the procedure isn’t truly informed. Even in cases where someone may have a benefit from the procedure, I think the variance of outcomes, the side effects, and the rough healing process is often understated. Quite honestly, our technology in this area of plastic surgery isn’t all that good.
That said, in regards to penis size in general, pornography (for the most part at least) has done a number on the male mindset on their size. Given the social equivalence for many men between size and masculinity, this causes a lot of grief for guys, leading to men who feel unable to conduct relationships due to their perceived lack of endowment. Then online, there’s many dangerous magic pills like jelqing, surgery, vacuums, etc. that take advantage of this loneliness and anxiety to extract money from them, often leaving them worse than where they started, in terms of physical ED, deformity, and pain.
Culturally, I think there’s a lot of shaming of men’s bodies, in the same way that society holds expectations of women for their body characteristics, skin texture and color, personality, and dress. Innocent comments like “big dick energy” and insulting people we dislike by exclaiming that they are underendowed puts a notion that bigger is better, and men are most easily going to find comparison in a skewed dataset, that is, in the photos exhibited online in porn. Ultimately, Dr. Elist is taking advantage of his patient’s anxiety for his own gain, then convincing them the answer is “one more revision” or “it looks fine to me”, with animosity towards his patients who wish to speak freely with others about their experience, especially if it isn’t a glowing approval of him and his product.
Weird, when I go to humanities pretty much all the posts are gone. Probably a Lemmy glitch?
This is horrifying. I don't see how you can possibly justify the existence of a procedure that can go so wrong. On the plus side, reading this article definitely makes me feel much better about my own penis size. (In the sense that I'm grateful to have a penis that's normal and functioning.)