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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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