Dick is destiny

Last summer, during a residency in upstate New York, I drove to Clermont State Historic Site on the east bank of the Hudson and sucked a forty-something’s eight-incher on a soggy, deserted trail. Like most eight-inchers, it wasn’t actually eight inches. But he’d blown past the gentleman’s half-inch, the span by which gay men on sex apps tacitly allow and even encourage each other to exaggerate our endowments, not to mention our heights, knowing that all parties stand to gain from this modest magnification. I’m not a size queen and I don’t mind being lied to. Under the right circumstances I quite like it. Deceive me, please. Make it hurt. But this man had crossed beyond the bounds of the rules governing shared fictions. Our encounter revealed an inordinate disconnect between the facts and his assimilation and communication of them—and thus, I thought, hinted at the deep reserves of denial within him, perhaps a fundamentally warped perception of the world. More importantly, he’d disappointed me.

After I wiped his cum from my lips, I took selfies by the river, changed my Instagram profile photo to the one I liked best, and sat on a bench, where I noticed mud smeared on my knees. Who was the forty-something? His delusion, his insecurity, had they once moved someone? Had they moved me? I lacked context, and in a moment I’d clean away the last scraps of our time together. But I had my own history, a substrate across which feeling crawled. I began to reminisce about Tex, the man I half-dated between my musclebound DJ boyfriend and my twink photographer boyfriend. Tex was also constitutionally neurotic about his penis. But Tex had never disappointed me; he valued precision.

Annie Ernaux: “There is something extraordinary about the first sight of the other’s sex, the unveiling of what was hitherto unknown. So that is what we’re going to live with, live our love with. Or not.”

In the fall of 2017 I saw Tex’s dick for the first time for the second time. He came to my apartment, where I tugged down his black basketball shorts and watched his dickhead smack his bellybutton. I wore a look of stock shock: eyebrows raised, mouth agape. Imagine a gif looping. Imagine me a cartoon drooling. We hadn’t had sex in a month or two; we’d been fucking other people. I loved him. 

“Has your dick gotten bigger?” I asked. 

He laughed. (His dimples). He nodded. On his phone he showed me two photographs of his penis, side-by-side, taken a month apart at the same angle and with the same transparent blue ruler laid atop his erection demonstrating his gains: ¾”. He told me about a website called Thunders Place (tag line: “The big penis and mens' sexual health source, increasing penis size around the world”) where he’d learned the art of penis enlargement, or PE. He sat beside me on the bed, wrapped his pointer finger and thumb around the base of my semi, connected them to form an “ok grip,” as it’s known in the biz, and then stroked slowly, pushing the blood up until his hand reached my head and he released his grip. He smiled.

“It’s called jelqing,” he said. We got off.

Dick is destiny. It’s the true measure of a man, the hidden quality that supersedes and explicates the visible body and the articulated mind. A monster on a short king, a micro on a giant: the misfit member reveals the hidden truth about its owner: what he is, finally. Or, dick is an appendage on a person that means nothing beyond itself and that, regardless of its dimensions, may find another person pleased to hold it, to take it, to cage it, to ignore it, to worship it, to humiliate it, to pray for it. Dick is something else or in between. Dick hangs in the air, demanding interpretation—or, at minimum, attention. 

On Thunder’s Place, and subreddits like /ajelqforyou and r/gettingbigger, it’s like a bicep: a feature of the body overburdened with signification that one can modify through training. (Other constituencies opt for surgical interventions). Along with progress reports by individual users and forums dedicated to specific enlargement devices and methods—extenders, hangers, creams—Thunder’s Place features informational posts describing risk and safety accommodations, color-coded graphs tracking acronymized stats (BPEL = bone-pressed erect length; EQ = erection quality), and high-flown metaphorical musings on the adventure of PE: “You scramble and then climb, stretching one hold as you reach for the next. A realization dawns that this is much higher than you were expecting. The air is sparse and cool as you reach the peak.” 

By and large these are online communities with the same routines and customs as many others. Members support, applaud, and query one another; disagreements spark inter- and intra-forum fighting; accusations of fakery and profiteering create ruptures; a “safe space” allows for the discussion, honest and not, of a subject, like Star Wars or looksmaxxing, that it’s embarrassing to admit preoccupies you. The difference is dick: in averring that you want to change it, you confess that what you have isn’t enough, that you’re shallow, or that an unhealthy self-obsession dogs you; you confess to knowing that our culture would view your desire as a pathology or weakness and that you, belonging to our culture, will likewise feel the need to defend yourself. “It’s totally normal by the way and for what it’s worth I’ve never gotten any complaints and in fact guys and that one girl that one time have been into it an above-average amount I’d estimate” is the sort of breathless sentence you might conjure when assuring the forum reader (and yourself) that you—unlike the other internet enlargers—are enough. 

I didn’t know any of this at the time. It was Tex’s business, his neurosis, and the results turned me on. Two months later, Tex broke up with me, ostensibly because our pseudo-relationship had fizzled, but also, as I soon discovered, because he had secretly started dating someone else. In the wake of what I considered Tex’s betrayal, I preferred, for a time, to cultivate my abjection. It made me shake with want. I had been left; I had been replaced by a guy self-described as “hung” in his Grindr profile. And I liked it. 

Not to be wanted, to be discarded, to be deemed unworthy of knowing the true reasons for my dismissal—and to know that some man like me but more (or so I imagined) was receiving the attention Tex had rescinded from me—to feel my dick growing in the space of my abandonment, spraying, immediately regrowing, the process repeating: alone in my bed, I liked it. I cried and came, again, again. Tex’s big dick fetish, our sundering: together, the phenomena spurred a perverse erotic awakening in me, as well the discovery of a hitherto unrealized penchant for confronting The End and its devouring pain with explosive pleasure. My want infected my wound, grew there. There are, presumably, worse ways to cope. 

The intensity ebbed as the weeks passed; I began to move on. I was disappointed by my elasticity, by the force and pace with which I was snapping back into shape, erasing his imprint on my person. I wanted my wound back; it preserved our link, kept the gap between us from expanding infinitely. So, to stay close to Tex, I decided to learn how his sausage was made. I visited the forums. For a month I’d find myself methodically pulling on my dick in the shower, carrying lube into the bathroom I shared with three roommates and jelqing, setting calendar reminders labeled “exercise” to remind myself which days I’d dedicated to growth and which to rest. If I couldn’t have Tex, I could share his neurosis, his symptom; I could feel what he’d felt and tremble at the fantasy that I understood what had driven him to alter himself, to hurt me. Did he derive satisfaction from the urge to overcome his limits? Was I one of those limits? Something to transcend or lop off so he could become more? And what had Tex become to me? An alien who’d left my world, whom I thought I saw glimmering in the sky, and in relation to which I yearned to navigate the strange expanse of my desires and fears? Soon I would lose sight of him completely. I would give up his neurosis, come to feel myself worthy of love by frequenting the gym instead of methodically touching myself. But I wouldn’t stop thinking about it.

We can rationalize or situate penis enlargement as a tactic for reducing abjection, for kindling gender euphoria, for facing the starkness and brevity of life—its dissatisfactions, its coldness, its gradual shrinkage toward nothingness—with the wish, tragicomic or healthful, for more, always more. The proof of positive change is semi-hard won and warm to the touch. Toss aside the sterile language of personal growth, the development of the grindset self as an optimizable brand. Become larger; reach further, toward and into the other. Hang weights on your dick or pump it. Never settle for dribble; kegel so you spray. Commit hours of life to heating, stretching, jelqing, and examining your genitals. Compare your practice to a gym routine, in which you also play with weights, stretch, pump, and suffer to expand your muscles or diminish your waistline. It gets better; it gets bigger. 

Feel yourself; feel good about yourself; look into the eyes of your satisfied lover and feel the hope of yes and more and don’t stop until, suddenly, another perspective occurs to you, scorning the cult of infinite growth as rapacious, sacrificing anything—the green world, the inhabitable future, you—for the accumulation of more, more, more—which is to say for always increasing numerical values. Sigh that digits lay luridly atop the physical world: worth and wealth distort perception. Diagnose yourself dysmorphic, disordered. Then reject this premise and endeavor to grow again. Oscillate between these and other poles as you stare down at your pole, at an image of it on an iPhone screen, at the needful response it inspires from a person on an app you might one day meet. Don’t. Don’t, and then do. Dismiss the entire enterprise as constitutive of body fascism. Laugh it off. Muse that an inch can be greater than a mile. There are many ways to live and to think about living, and these too can be cultivated.