Charles Atlas is bigger than you

The Importance of Being Bigger: The Online Discourse of Male-Member Outsizing

by Kim Blank

Three inches. That seems to be the magic length — of course, that’s in addition to what you already have.

Then there’s “girth.” Apparently, for the average Dick, Harry, and Tom, that needs to be increased by about 20 percent.

The first time most of us heard the word — girth, that is — was probably in the context of a horse’s midriff. Today, thanks mainly to spam, most of us have encountered the word as it relates to the circumference of a man’s you-know-what. Are there many among us who have not received such an email? If so, then you probably haven’t googled your way much beyond your local library’s online catalogue.

We have to call it a “you-know-what” because it we haven’t quite settled on any one way to signify this peculiar piece of male flesh whose size has become the focus of so much recent e-commerce.

What, then, should we call it? Dick? No, sounds like a friend of Jane, as well as the aforementioned Tom and Dick. Cock? No, odd connection with a-doodle-do. Pecker? No, noisy associations with the rapid-fire banging of a bird’s head. Prick? Too sharp. Tool? Too practical? Member? No, sounds like it joined a club. Rod? No, that’s for catching the big one. Weenie? Too juvenile and bun-worthy. And let’s face it: “penis” sounds plain dorky.

But let’s not beat around the bush.

We all know what we’re talking about here: the consumer culture of making it large. Size matters. The importance of being bigger.

Once upon a time, when pagans and pyramid-builders ruled the world, the thing down there had both naturalistic and omniscient associations with the life force, divine intelligence, and the power to transcend death. Then came an extended dark ages when, despite some scientific interest during the Renaissance, it ran a bad history with Christian guilt and mad monks. Then, of course, there was all that Victorian repression followed by Freudian envy. Closer to our time, some of these bad vibes were countered by grooved-out, how’s-it-hangin’ hippie culture. But then, in the late 1990s, with the arrival of sildenafil citrate, it became reinvented as an object of clinical endurance, capable of leaping long evenings in a single romantic bound, saving manhood, and maybe mankind, from the apparent plague of something called “erectile dysfunction.”

But we very quickly moved beyond the Age of Viagra. There was more to market than just getting it up. Three inches more, anyways. And so, mainly through the internet, the discourse of male-member outsizing began.

Early on, emails urged with simple imperatives: “Enlarge your organ,” “increase your manly powers” or “boost your male confidence.” The language was admirably straight forward: “Get a bigger dick,” “Increase your manhood,” “Become rock hard.” These imperatives, of course, borrowed their discourse from the old Charles Atlas ads in the back of comic books, only now sand was not being kicked in the face of a 97-pound weakling, and this muscle is not really something you could flex at most North American beaches.

As competition among products increased in this growth industry, so did the claims become embellished. Ad writers must have raked though the thesaurus in order to come up with new ways to penetrate your spamblocker and unblock your tiny credit card. We also seemed to be getting yelled at: “Send your sex drive through the roof!” “Supercharge your sex drive!” “Get some serious machinery between your legs!” “Experience explosive orgasms!” “Get a rocket penis!” The question was whether you might require a license to operate such dangerous equipment.

Then there was Wilt Chamberlain factor: “Make love up to 20 times a day!” You would have thought they might have included a day planner to manage your new urge to merge … 9:00/meeting; 10:00/make out; 10:30/conference call; 11:00/make out; 11:30/sharpen pencils; 11:35 make out; 12:00/phone back specialist …

As the impact of these approaches began to dull, the ante was upped and the strategy altered. The premise was to amaze your lover: “Be more than she can handle,” or “Leave your partner breathless.” Then there was, “Your woman will think you’ve had a revolution downstairs!” although the reference was unclear whether this variety of revolution was French, Bolshevik or just Industrial.

The last and sometimes desperate stage of promotion is when the advertisers call upon testimonials about as credible as Michael Jackson’s nose. “She wanted to invite her girlfriends over to see it,” says a guy in one ad, as if it were some kind of new cute pet that you might want to take for walk around the block. Another said, “My penis has been getting bigger for a month now!” But what if it never stops expanding? Does this give new meaning to the Theory of the Big Bang?

Like the slicers and dicers of past, these products have now made it onto TV as talk show infomercials. Women with cleavage as deep as silicone valley and badly dressed sleezoid men who, even when trying to look attentive, seem to be loitering, attempt to speak seriously about the shortcomings of most men. The angle is that every woman needs a man with the large one in order to be fully pleasured, and every man needs one because — well, because he just needs one.

Do any of these pills, patches, herbs, and oils work? Of course not. But since there’s one born every minute — a sucker, that is — the market continues to grow even if the other one doesn’t.

On a personal note, despite being an intrepid researcher, I did not try any of these products. The three inches wasn’t really worth it. Like I told the guys at work, “Hey, what I am going to do with 15 inches?”

On the other hand, we could just use metric, and everyone would be impressed, if not a little confused.

C O M M E N T S
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Kim Blank is a professor of English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia as well as a freelance writer and media consultant.