The Big Little Penis Panic
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“God blessed me in a lot of ways except for one,” Jon, a 30-year-old aspiring actor, tells me one night in April over dinner. “He made me big in a lot of ways, except for the one very important way.”
We are sitting in a booth at an old-school steakhouse in downtown Manhattan, and Jon is opening up to me about his penis. It’s an ideal environment for such a sensitive conversation — all the gray-haired regulars having already headed home with their doggy bags and enough jazz music tinkling through the speakers that the last remaining diners, in the next booth, can’t hear us. Still, Jon is clearly anxious, beginning more sentences than he finishes and, occasionally, when the conversation about his genitals gets especially graphic, letting out an uncharacteristically high-pitched giggle. “So what was I saying?” he asks me more than once. “My dick is small,” he says, once the liquor starts flowing, “and that is disappointing.”
It doesn’t help that people tend to have large expectations about Jon. He is broad, bearded, and very handsome. He also wears leather jackets, drinks whiskey, and, at almost six-foot-six, lords over most rooms he enters. He strikes me as a gentle giant, and his not-so-giant secret clearly weighs on him. We do not talk about his size in inches, because, he explains, numbers make him “check out” mentally. He does not call what he has a micropenis — a rare condition that affects 0.015 percent of males in the U.S. — but a proper diagnosis (generally speaking: an erect penis under three inches) doesn’t really matter. He knows he’s small, as does anyone who’s ever slept with him. “It’s just so disappointing,” he tells me again.
Like probably all men since the dawn of time and measuring tape, Jon has worried about his size for as long as he’s had a sense of his own body. Lately, though, the preoccupation has taken on a new tenor, and he isn’t the only man who feels that way. “I haven’t talked to anyone about this, but I’ve been obsessed with penis size lately,” a friend, a straight guy, admitted to me not long ago. By his own admission, this friend is not especially blessed. He’s five-foot-five, a little stocky, and his manhood, he whispered to me over the phone, is average. “I live in fear of someone saying I have a small penis,” he told me. “There have been so many cultural signals in my life that say there’s something special about having a big penis.”
That’s long been the case for men, but it’s true we’ve never been more comfortable talking about size. In March, a dating coach named Anwar White went viral for a video instructing women how to “catch print”: the art of assessing a man’s penis size through his pants. The TikTok, which has now been viewed more than 8 million times, inspired countless women and gay guys to get online and speak openly about dick size. (“Finally some good fkn science,” wrote one commenter.) Before long, women were catching print on paintings in Versailles and celebrity pap shots of everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Harry Styles (who just this month released an incredibly bulgy music video for his song “Dance No More”). Then there’s No Kizzy Krazy, an influencer on Instagram who regularly racks up hundreds of thousands of views for her man-on-the-street interviews, where she grabs random mens’ crotches and guesses their inch count. (The action gets blurred, but you can pay $5 on Patreon to see the full grope.)
It’s not just attention seekers on the internet obsessing over penis size. Last year at the DNC, Barack Obama used his hands to suggest that the current president is below average. In March, amid the ongoing MAGA crack-up over the war in Iran, Megyn Kelly took to X and accused the conservative commentator Mark Levin of having a micropenis, also giving him a catchy, Trumpian nickname, “Micropenis Mark.” Trump, long teased about his “small hands,” was moved to get involved, Truth Social–ing in support of Levin.
Meanwhile, men are pumping their genitals with filler and “jelqing,” a stretching technique that involves stroking the shaft with pressure from base to tip in hopes of gaining a few centimeters. On a recent episode of Logan Paul’s podcast, the so-called looksmaxxer Clavicular, who was once accused by Drake of having a micropenis, shared that he’s recently started doing “dick-ups”: wrapping a shopping bag filled with books around his wrist and using the weight to tug on his penis. “Your commitment to the game is admirable,” Paul told him. “People are disconnecting from reality — whether it’s from looksmaxxing, social media, dating apps, or porn,” says Evan Goldstein, a Manhattan surgeon whose practice specializes in men’s sexual health. TikTok is filled with young men talking about porn addiction, masturbation addiction, and Viagra use — which has never been more in demand, especially among younger generations, thanks to direct-to-consumer sites like Hims and Ro. In a survey on penis size Goldstein conducted in February, 67 percent of respondents admitted to lying about their size. Notably, Gen Z reported the lowest confidence in their penises. Has there ever been a more anxiety-inducing time to have a small one?
In the U.S., the average penis is about five inches, according to most studies, even though most statistics are contested because men cannot usually be trusted to accurately self-report. The first thing I learned talking to people about size is that no one seems to have a good grasp on what average actually looks like. “Dylan is ten inches,” a friend recently told me in the presence of her fiancé, who balked. “NFL players aren’t even that big. I’m 6.5 on a good day,” he said. A girlfriend, a sexually active Samantha type, recently observed to me that men have gotten so sensitive that you can’t even compliment their size anymore. “They see all these gigantic dicks in porn, and 50 percent of the time if I say ‘Your dick is so big,’ they just get insecure.” Last year, a man screamed “You’re lying!” and left the bedroom when I did the same. Many of the younger men I spoke with told me they’ve only very occasionally seen other men naked in person. “Our reference points are only porn,” says one millennial man. “I’ve never seen my friends’ penises. Or my father’s dick. Or my brother’s dick.” “Men don’t know they’re normal,” says Dr. David Shafer, a midtown plastic surgeon who specializes in penis augmentation. “I have to reassure a lot of guys,” he says. “They come in, and they’re average or above average, but they think that they’re smaller.”
Those who want to change this have several options — fat transfers, ligament-cutting procedures, implants. “Ninety-seven percent of my patients want a bigger penis,” says Amy Pearlman, a urologist based in South Florida. “The question becomes, What are they willing to do for it?” Over the past couple of years, the most popular and least invasive option has been injecting dermal filler, basically the same formula used for lips, into the shaft. The procedure doesn’t add length, only girth, but most men don’t seem to mind. A little can go a long way. Or, as one Manhattan urologist told me, “a centimeter on a penis might be 40 feet on a yacht.” In the past few years, Shafer says he has filled 5,000 men who often keep their work private. “They want to say they’re naturally like that,” he says. “The inquiries come in at two in the morning. I imagine they’re in bed wondering, How can I increase my manhood?”
According to Chris Bustamante, who runs a “girth-enhancement clinic” called Lushful Aesthetics in midtown, the majority of his patients are average size. The men he sees, he says, are rarely seeking to enhance their performance in the bedroom. Rather, they’re simply looking to look bigger — the finance bros in the locker room, the gay guys in their Speedos on Fire Island. Both want to look as packed as Jon Hamm while walking down the street in their sweatpants.
This is one reason Bustamante has started offering scrotum filler. “What guys don’t realize is that most bulge size is not penis related,” he informs me, talking as if bulge size were a serious science. “Bigger balls will contribute to a bigger bulge more than a bigger penis will.” In February, the Prince Faggot playwright Jordan Tanahill told Butt magazine he injected his scrotum with saline. He was pleased with the results, he said. “My nuts grew to the size of a honeydew melon!”
The injectors and the plastic surgeons, all eager to promote the safety of their procedures, none of which are FDA approved, often go to great lengths to stress their patients’ emotional satisfaction. “I see guys break down in tears because it changes their life,” says Shafer. “I treated this one guy this morning, and he said, ‘Doctor, I have to thank you so much. I can wear a tighter swimsuit now. I don’t have to be embarrassed.’” Bustamante makes his work sound like therapy. “Guys in my office feel like they need to overcompensate for not having something there, and they end up being hyperaggressive people,” he says. There are plenty of famous examples: Hitler, according to recent DNA evidence, likely had a micropenis, as did the Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo. Harvey Weinstein “looked like it had been chopped off and sewn back on,” according to one Jane Doe in his Los Angeles trial, and Jeffrey Epstein’s was, according to a victim, shaped “like a lemon,” possibly owing to an overuse of Trimix, an injectable form of Viagra. Unlike those men, Bustamante says, his patients leave his clinic emotionally healed with a “more natural way of perpetuating dominance, this dominant alpha-male persona that begins to come from within.”
It might be a bit of a stretch to imagine that some MedSpa filler can cure men of the shame associated with having a small penis. “It’s something you can’t talk about,” says Stephen Snyder, a sex therapist and relationship therapist on the Upper West Side. “It’s like a low IQ. It just happens sometimes.” In his patients with small penises, he says, he’s observed Napoleon complexes and what he calls compensatory masculinity. Generally, they’re miserable. “You can be the best orange in the world,” he says, somewhat blithely. “But if they want a banana, it’s not going to work.”
Daniel Lombroso, whose documentary about penis augmentation, Manhood, premiered at South by Southwest this year, says his subjects often told him they felt disaffected and disenfranchised — disconnected from a society where they see themselves losing power. “They don’t feel like men anymore,” he tells me. “They’re made to feel like, If only I have a big dick, maybe all my problems will go away. Maybe I’ll be the CEO. Maybe I’ll get a pay raise.” It’s no surprise that many of his straight subjects are also, he says, deeply entrenched in the misogynistic politics of the manosphere. “They almost all have parasocial relationships with the Rogans, the Fuenteses, the Tates, the Claviculars of the world.”
“We’ve seen such a massive political uproar from a lot of men, who’ve become angry and even more misogynistic because they’re being treated how they were treating women before,” says Chris Bustamante. “They’re being objectified how women have been so objectified so candidly and openly for so long, and it doesn’t sit well with them. They can’t stomach it. Men feel that. It’s become even more important for them to stand out in terms of penis size.” When I asked Clavicular recently how he felt about his own penis — he’s been open that he’s only average — he said that “in terms of maintaining a relationship with women, it’s a huge factor. But a girl who’s been run through is going to need a lot more to work with.”
It’s true that in polite society, a group of men sitting around sharing their girlfriends’ tit pix and talking openly about women’s bodies would be, at the very least, frowned upon, but women still have free rein on men’s bodies. “In the past, people would make fun of women. “She’s a dog. She’s a cow. She’s an old maid,’” said Snyder, the sex therapist. “Now, that’s socially unacceptable. But it’s regarded as perfectly fine to ridicule a man.” Over the course of reporting this story, in any conversation I had with a woman or a gay guy about the small penises they’d encountered, we’d eventually erupt into a gigglefest. I heard past hookups’ penises described as “baby carrots,” “pinkie fingers,” and, in one case, a “tiny porcini mushroom.” I was told rumors of at least two broken engagements, one divorce, and several cases of “charity sex” over a micropenis. Almost everyone admitted to having gossiped widely after their encounters. “It is a fun story to be like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve experienced a microdick. Then everybody tosses in their micropenis stories. The owner is besides the point, kind of,” says one Manhattan influencer. Plenty had theories about these men: He had a micropenis, so maybe that’s why his wife has such a massive engagement ring. Maybe that’s why he got so religious. Maybe he overcompensated by founding not one but two companies with nine-figure valuations. Maybe that’s why he was such an asshole. The women could be especially cutting when the men defied their expectations — whether because of their height, race, or career. One woman, a former real Housewife, assumed her hookup’s penis was big because he was a talented DJ. “Men kill us, so we get to talk about their dicks at brunch,” she says.
Still, in almost every one of these confabs I had with someone about some man’s small penis, the other person would eventually express some sympathy for the men and also men in general. “I feel sorry for men. They’re so fucked up, and they don’t have any way to talk about it,” says one woman, a Manhattan mom whom I’ll call Rachel. She was 21 when she met the guy she thought she was going to marry. After a couple of dates, she put her hands down his pants for the first time. “It’s smaller than I expected!” she told him. “I didn’t think it was cruel,” she says, looking back. “I have so much shame about my body and my face and myself, and none of it is considered abhorrent. Society makes a mockery of men who don’t have big dicks or men who are short.” Yet talking about men’s bodies can feel like “women’s reparations,” she adds. “What did you expect when you created this hellscape?”
“I didn’t know how sensitive men were about their penises,” says White, reflecting on the aftermath of his post about catching print. Judging by his DMs, men were broadly furious about the video. But he believes that what those men actually fear the most is losing power. “This trend was about women having more knowledge than they had before to game the system. “I don’t have to sleep with him to know what he’s packing,’” he said. But neither could White help feeling a little bit bad for the men. “I think there’s a hyperfocus on the way we look with GLP-1’s, with plastic surgery, with hair implants,” he says. “Men are going through a lot right now. Things aren’t as stable for them as they used to be.”
Jon says he was in college when the embarrassment first started to set in. One particularly traumatic experience as a freshman still haunts him. He was on a campus bus, standing in the aisle, when he felt a hand brush his crotch. He looked up to see a group of three girls giggling. “I heard one turn to her friends and say, ‘It’s tiny,’” he recalls at dinner, his eyes beginning to water. For years, he repressed the memory. “Even in that moment, I was like, No, that didn’t just happen. If I let that in, it would be …” It’s a sentence he can’t finish. For most of his life, Jon has painstakingly avoided thinking too hard about it. “I dig a hole for myself, and it’s very difficult to get out of that hole mentally,” he says. When I ask Jon if he feels like his penis size has affected his personality, he is quick to answer with an emphatic “yes.” “Maybe I would’ve played D1,” he says completely seriously. Maybe he’d be a bigger actor, like Jonathon Groff.
Hookups and one-night stands are, obviously, fraught. Especially the point of revelation — the first hand down the pants, the dropping of the underwear, the subsequent look on his partner’s face when he feels their desires move from interested to disinterested. “Just thinking about it sends a shiver down my spine. All the blood drains from my face,” he tells me. “It never gets better.” (Among the women I spoke with who’d slept with micropenises, they universally wished they’d been warned in advance: “It should’ve been addressed,” says one. “There should be no surprises when someone gets naked. If you can’t talk about it, we’re not sexually compatible.”) Because of that, Jon rarely hooks up, has never had penetrative sex of any kind, and avoids most “normal” porn. He uses the dating apps but usually calls it quits when the other person asks to meet up. “It’s a downhill, slippery slope after that. It’s a world of potential shame, a world of potential embarrassment,” he says. When he does meet up with people, his anxiety means he can rarely achieve an erection.
Nevertheless, Jon has found it helpful to seek out alternative ways to maintain a happy sex life — fetishes that are not “dick-centered,” such as BDSM. Many men like Jon struggling with their size learn how to adapt their sexualities. Basically, they learn to work with what they’ve got. As Evan Goldberg puts it bluntly: “With small dicks, the question is, What other things can I do to compensate and make me relevant?” Men below four inches, Chris Bustamante agrees, often begin to dabble sexually. Maybe it’s BDSM, or pegging, or a humiliation kink. “It’s a healthy way to compensate sexually for the things they can’t bring to the table,” he says. Several women I spoke with whisper excitedly to me that the micropenises they’d encountered were orally talented. Says one: “He was very giving. He would automatically go down on me. In my mind, I was like, Oh, this is a man who respects women and cares about my pleasure.” (Later, she would give him a nickname: Micropenis Jack.)
Talking to Jon about the harsh realities of his love life, it struck me just how intensely othered he feels. Again and again during our conversation, he describes feeling “bitter,” “resentful,” and “stuck.” Moving to New York and coming out exacerbated the feeling, especially since the gay scene in the city is so centered around the apps, Sniffies and Grindr, where it is not uncommon to see a user write in their bio that they are only interested in “hung.” Jon wishes he could be just another gay party boy at the rave in Brooklyn. “I love the scene and everything. But a lot of the gays there …” he starts. “I would love to do the sex parties, for the validation of being hot and a sexual object, but I’m not …” he says, trailing off again.
What’s harder than that, for Jon, is just talking about it, as he was doing at dinner. He’s so afraid of his secret being revealed that he never does: He’s never told his parents or many of his closest friends. “This is only a conversation I’ve had in my head,” he tells me. “I’m aware that I’m kind of ignoring my problem. I’m not getting help for my problem. I’m letting it control me.”
Our dinner seems freeing. “The more that I talk about this, the less I feel imprisoned,” Jon tells me. “I’d like to wear shit on my sleeve. Especially because I’m so uncomfortable with there being a mystery about me and how I look. I want people to stop looking at me like I’m a tall guy with a huge dick.” Recently, he tried out a new bio on Grindr: “6’6’’ with a small dick, but a great personality.”