All About The PenisPenis enlarging and modification If you have an email inbox you'll certainly
have found that penis enlargement is a popular spamming subject! The millions
of emails and hundreds of sites about enlargement on the internet all testify
to the interest men have in the size of their penis. But aside from the money-making potential of selling men enlargement techniques, the question has to be asked: is it possible to enlarge one's penis? Well, let's deal with this step by step! Do enlargement pills work? No, of course they don't. Read this and this for some insight into why they are advertised so widely. If those links are closed down, just search on Google for "Anatomy of a penis pill scandal". Does surgery work? Maybe, but it can go horribly wrong. Read this to find out the risks: Penile enlargement surgery: risks and complications. Do
traction devices or penis pumps work? Maybe, if you want to risk injuring yourself
beyond all recognition.
Finally, do the oldest methods of all, the
supposed stretching exercises practiced by ancient tribes, known as jelqing,
work? Who knows?
Right, that's enough about enlargement. Over
the centuries, though, men have adorned, worshipped, played with and modified
their penises in all kinds of ways. Here are just a few.
The penis gourd (or phallocrypt) is a
Papuan item of dress. In fact, in some tribes, it's the only item of dress,
serving both as penis sheath, and a handy container for tobacco and money. Like
many traditional items in the tribal way of life the Indonesian government is trying
to stamp it out - and the local tribes who wear it as well, by all accounts,
since their land is rich in minerals. (You might want to contribute to Survival,
a charity which tries to protect traditional tribesfolk.) You might think that a
penis gourd would in some way represent a man's status in the community, or his
social position, and I have read that in some tribes at least, the higher the
social standing of a man, the more upright he would wear his penis gourd. See
a picture. There's a tradition in
some parts of the world of implanting stones or little pebbles under the
penile skin, presumably to increase sexual pleasure for the men's partners. It
seems that modern men have taken up their ancestors' customs, and used such
diverse objects as ball bearings and plastic beads to carry on the tradition. You
may have heard of the Native Australians' practice of subincision, which lives
on today in the outer reaches of the body modification brigade. This was - and
is - the practice of cutting open the underside of the penis along its length,
severing the urethra and opening its channel in a cut along the penis. Why would
a people do such a brutal thing to the most sensitive part of the human body?
It was an initiation ritual, for sure, but a seemingly very brutal one. There's
more information here. It's
clearly very inappropriate to make judgments about a practice that would be regarded
in our society as child abuse when it has such a deep cultural history - and,
moreover, when it's practiced by many Western adults who practice extreme body
modification (BME). As a psychotherapist, though, my concern about Westerners
doing such things is that it represents some very deep hatred or anger about oneself,
or one's sexuality, or worse, of one's penis. Modern
day body modification enthusiasts who have had their genitals pierced offer a
variety of reasons for why they enjoy it, including the appearance, the sensations
during sex, the significance of the ceremony around the piercing (a modern day
rite of passage, perhaps), the rush of endorphins when the piercing happens,
and so on, but I'm still left wondering if piercing or cutting one's penis is
a "good thing"! See some
photos of piercings and so on here. The
question beneath it all is why some men (and women) have such a desire to
change their bodies? We've always been a species that has decorated the body,
that's for sure, so maybe the people who do it today are just following the
combined cultural history of our ancestors.
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