‘Never big enough’: inside the booming penis enlargement industry

In a revealing documentary, a looksmaxxing-influenced world where ‘your social capital is tied to your appearance’ has led to more men wanting more

Man’s obsession with his member is a tale as old as time, writ large in sky-scraping edifices, in allusions that flatter (big dick energy) or offend (prick), in the countless artifacts across the ages that venerate male potency – a porn star’s description of Donald Trump’s “toadstool” penis. But it’s the booming intimate wellness industry – AKA the rash (ahem) of fillers, therapies and cosmetic procedures that have come into vogue since the little blue pill rocked the market – that most intrigued Daniel Lombroso, the esteemed documentarian who made his name at the Atlantic and the New Yorker dissecting male fragility.

“A lot of the stories I worked on at those places were kind of fringy subculture and oftentimes adjacent to white nationalism,” says Lombroso, who became aware of the rising demand for penile enhancement procedures while reporting on plastic surgery trends at the New Yorker. “I started calling all these practitioners. But to make an embedded film the way I do, you need someone who’s very open.”

A 2024 study of US Google searches noted an increase in interest in penile-enhancement injections from 2013 through 2022. Lombardo’s 90-minute film, Manhood, puts male self-esteem issues at the heart of the trend on a cold, chafing examination table. Our guide throughout is Bill Moore, a capitalist in scrubs who gives fresh meaning to the phrase bedside manner. We meet him at home, tongue-kissing a pet lap dog while snuggled up under the covers with his male partner. We behold the full splendor of his naked body, nipped and tucked in retreat from the ravages of time and his own unforgiving eye. “Nobody would suspect I’ve ever had anything done!” he says with bracing cluelessness.

We see Moore hawk outpatient penile enhancement procedures from his Dallas strip mall office for $15,000 and $20,000 a pop and tout the lowly glow-ups as career-changing, sex-life turbocharging, depression-curing – whatever patients need to hear to fork over the dough, really. “Everybody wants a boat that’s one foot longer,” one guy says as Moore sticks a long numbing needle into his nether regions. “The boat is never big enough.”

We see many of these patients (though customers is the better word, since, again, Moore is not a doctor), their faces more obscured than their ink-marked private parts. The inclination toward anonymity owes as much to the physical embarrassment Moore’s clientele bring into the room as to the irony of receiving this kind of care from an out-and-proud gay man – the megachurch pastor, the border patrol agent. It’s wild to see Moore act as a machismo whisperer to men who might perceive him as less than masculine, especially as he reflects on the guilt and fear of rejection he experienced before coming out to conservative Christian family members in the deep south (not that his mother having dementia doesn’t help).

Throughout the film, Lombroso manages to point out these and other paradoxes without casting judgment. “I’m not deep in the looksmaxxing world, but part of what Clavicular and those guys understand is that your social capital is tied to your appearance,” Lombroso says. “Does your penis size matter? Probably not. But there are all these stats about the huge percentage of American men who obsess over it, which was foreign to me. And it connects all these other things we talk about – like how many older American men don’t know how to make a best friend.”

None of Moore’s customers embodies male loneliness quite like Ruben, a father of five who is so desperate to enlarge his penis that he moves his family in with an ex to raise money for an enhancement procedure. “I have to sell my house this weekend, and I’m going to Bill after.” Lombroso recalls Ruben telling him in a phone call. “I was like, ‘OK, I’ll be there tomorrow.’ The only way to make a film like this, because I’m in New York and this was in Texas, was to fly out on a whim every time and just capture things as they happened.”

Ruben fills his days listening to Joe Rogan prattle on about the marginalization of manly men and spends nights performing at comedy open mics in bars to crickets – and zero friends in the crowd. His jokes about child abuse are as wince-inducing as the circular logic of upgrading his manhood. He believes it will help protect and provide for his family, even as it fundamentally destabilizes them. “He’s actually a very loving father,” Lombroso says. “A good guy. But he escapes into these worlds like many of us do, and I think eventually it caught up to him.”

Meanwhile, Lana, Ruben’s poor wife, overwhelmed by the succession of shocks his big dick sidequest has imposed on their lives, is pushed ever closer to divorce. “With very few exceptions, almost none of the partners in the movie wanted them to do this,” Lombroso says. “You see Lana kind of against it, but not taking too strong of a stance.”

But the film takes its strangest turn with David, a handsome young man who seeks out Moore’s help repairing the damage from an enhancement procedure botched by another dubious quasi-physician – Victor Loria, a gruff George Costanza-type who brags about growing up in a “connected” family (“We lived the Goodfellas life,” he says, wondering “when are we going to jail, basically”) and keeps a large malpractice insurance disclaimer nailed to his front office wall like Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. Loria is the film’s villain, in case that wasn’t clear.

David seems plucked from a casting call for the reality TV series Botched, a naive keen to hit control-Z after going under the knife too young and, perhaps, steer others away from rushing down that same path. But as his arc unfolds and his OnlyFans porn-acting past is revealed, it turns out he and Moore have more in common than just deeply religious parents who viewed homosexuality as an abomination. They share a bed, too – with Moore’s partner and the dog. That David risks permanent damage from this corrective procedure only heightens the stakes around the throuple bombshell.

Lombroso calls the effort to compel David’s participation in the film “one of the hardest acts of persuasion I’ve ever done. It took the entire film to convince him. We were going to use AI face replacement. But right around the rough-cut stage, when we realized he was the heartbeat of the story, we flew him into New York and showed him – and he loved it. Told his family everything. Now he’s touring with the film. It’s the best.”

Weaving between David’s feelgood story, Loria’s villainy and Ruben’s allegory is Moore – the honest broker who still lulls customers into thinking he’s a doctor, who travels to conferences to show actual doctors how to get in on the male-enhancement gold rush, and who sells his wares as an antidote to all the cosmetic procedures women can get to feel better about themselves. His massive house and impressive car collection speak more plainly to his motives in this space than his riffs to customers about self-esteem or the blarney about posting their post-op results on his company website.

Moore’s company PhalloFill, which specializes in “girth enhancement”, has expanded to 32 locations across the country. He hopes to make the procedure as common as Botox. “Bill tried to get me to have my penis enlarged,” says Lombroso. The thought never occurred. “I said my mom would never forgive me.”

But the great shame in Manhood isn’t that Moore and other practitioners in this charcoal gray area of medicine lavish their customers with patience and empathy. It’s that few see the tender treatment for what it is: gender-affirming care. “That’s why this movie has a very light touch,” Lombroso says. “So many of these things are funny and self-evident, especially to smart viewers. It’s fun to have these tough conversations and not tell people exactly how to feel in every moment.”

Manhood is now playing in select US cinemas with UK and Australia dates to be announced