Going To Great Lengths
Newcastle Herald
Monday March 31, 2003
AMONG a page of Easter best wishes in this paper on Friday from such businesses as real estate agencies, licensed clubs, chocolate shops and monumental masons one caught my eye.
It was ``have a happy Easter" from the Australian Centre for Penile Enlargement.
No, it's not that the ad raises a taboo subject.
Little to do with sex is now taboo, and for 10 years newspapers have carried prominent display advertisements promising to resurrect the male necessaries for an active sex life.
What has surprised me about those ads is the amount of money spent on advertising, certainly some hundreds of thousands of dollars, suggesting that impotence is a bigger problem than I'd have believed.
Rather, I found Friday's ad interesting because it is about something much more delicate than lack of penile function. It suggests that public acceptability has moved beyond the public promotion of treatments for impotence, a physical condition, to treatments for men's fragile penile egos.
The progression appeals to me.
Well, so do many other progressions. Until recently female mannequins in shop windows, for example, used to have rounded lumps for breasts now they have nipples so erect passers-by are in danger of being poked in the eye.
But back to the progressive penis. (I don't like the word penis. When the word comes up in my house, as it does more often in families with little boys, I pronounce to everyone's disgust except the little boy's: ``There are no penises in this house! The Corbetts have dicks!")
The size of a man's penis has always been, in my experience, a subject of ribald jokes and cautious teasing. Men have any number of responses, such as ``it's not the size of the dog in the fight.".
In the mid '90s the subject went public in a rather novel way with the media's use of the line ``size doesn't matter". That was quickly replaced by the cry of ungrateful women, ``size does matter".
It is still seen on car stickers and tediously often in newspaper headlines.
The women in television's popular Sex and the City regularly discuss the size of their latest man's penis, always relating that to the man's worth sexually and, it seems to men, as a man.
That goes with devastating accuracy to most men's soft underbelly and so it was only a matter of time before entrepreneurial medicine recognised the opportunity.
Be in no doubt that the Australian Centre for Penile Enlargement has recognised that opportunity. It's hardly promoting surgical correction to men with debilitatingly small penises.
The ad and much of its website (www.austcps.com) is offering a service to men who simply want more diameter, more length or both.
The website, which is advertising the services of surgeon Colin C.M. Moore in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, doesn't shrink from the base motivations.
``So if your penis is of average size and you would like to experience a new pleasure for yourself and enhanced sexual enjoyment for your companion, you may wish to consider this operation," it says.
Average isn't big enough!
If yours is below average ``you may wish to have the operation simply so that you can feel normal when, for example, you are in the shower at the gym".
This would make for some riveting television ads.
How's it done? Definitely not for television, but briefly the girth increase involves either the injection or grafting of fat from somewhere else on the body and the lengthening involves the cutting of ligaments at the base of the penis, the website explaining that the ligaments act as ``the guy ropes of the tent".
No mention of guy ropes keeping the tent up.
Now that the business of breast enlargement has gone flat I suppose men's naked susceptibility had to be next.
jcorbett@theherald.com.au
© 2003 Newcastle Herald