‘Masculinity’ review: A documentary that takes a graphic and compassionate look at the wild world of penis enhancement

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Daniel Lombroso’s new documentary Masculinity It has an exciting subtitle, ‘Inside the booming secret world of penis enhancement’, and while the full review will follow, I think most readers will have three basic questions.

1. Do Masculinity Is he shy about portraying his subject or is he rude?

Masculinity Not shy. Masculinity Contains a large collection of dicks. Masculinity It’s not a documentary you should consider watching on a plane or with your elderly conservative relatives. I’d say it’s a bad movie to watch on a first date, but I don’t know you and I don’t know your taste in important people. It’s definitely a movie Travis Bickle would go to on his first date, if that helps. This is probably not a good movie to watch while eating, not because the penis is necessarily a good or bad accompaniment to a meal, but because enhancement means surgery, surgery means needles, and surgery means botched surgery.

2. Do MasculinityIs his approach to his topic serious or is it joking?

There are places in Masculinity It will make you laugh, sometimes nervously and sometimes shamelessly, and you’ll probably find yourself laughing at some of the people in the documentary, because you’re mean. The film doesn’t skimp on some occasional puerile humor, such as presenting the Dallas skyline exclusively through the phallic Reunion Tower. But Lombroso is not as judgmental as one could be on this subject. You may laugh, but not because the director is making an explicit judgment. That’s a level of maturity that I can’t possibly have, but it’s a level that I can respect tremendously.

I’d like to add that you can both laugh and find the sad truth in this remark from a doctor: “I can fill your penis, but I can’t fill the hole in your heart.”

3. Assuming so Masculinity Approaching the “thriving underground world of penis enhancement” as a world influenced by the male insecurities created by our culture, is Joe Rogan to blame?

Yes! Masculinity He is non-judgmental towards the participants, but that does not mean there is a complete lack of judgement. Joe Rogan, the Manosphere Podcast, advertisers and their guests are being treated as culprits in an epidemic to which having a big penis is seen as the answer. The finger points in this direction. Fingers are not specifically pointed at pornography or some conservative religious groups, but are presented as additional sources of concern.

So have I told you everything you need to know? Masculinity It’s a documentary about a subject that will cause a lot of uncomfortable laughter, but it’s not a laugh-out-loud documentary. It’s a documentary that basically says, “Here’s something that happens, and here’s a clear glimpse into how and why it happened, but what you do with that information is up to you.”

It left me with questions – some very important – and frustration over multiple things that were never addressed. But it’s a film with a great cast of people capable of sparking conversations that go far beyond issues of height (which is functionally unchanged by current surgeries) and girth (which has largely been functionally changed by current surgeries, but not always in the ways you’d like) to serious reflections on what it means when critics point to the crisis of masculinity.

Lombroso chose to focus on three people:

Bill Moore runs the AdvancedYou Clinic out of a mall in Dallas. It apparently uses Botox and body sculpting and has different rooms that freeze and relax you. But for the purposes of the documentary, their main service is penis enhancement — specifically the PhalloFill program, which itself has been enhanced with something called PhalloSleeve, which Bell has patented.

Robin is one of Bill’s clients. Robin, a father of five who has begun to step into his persona as he approaches middle age, is an aspiring stand-up comedian and a huge fan of Joe Rogan. His partner says she didn’t ask Robin to get these enhancements and says they don’t make any difference to her, but Robin insists, several times, that she loves them and doesn’t want to say that. It’s hard to explain why Robin does this, but he loves change and notes that the world is full of ways women can change their appearance, but the same doesn’t apply to men – so he compares what he does to a breast augmentation or breast implant surgery.

Then there’s David, who lives in Miami and comes from a very devout Christian family. David, who has not told his family he is gay, has a very graphic OnlyFans page with half a million subscribers. It’s hard to explain why, but David went to a doctor in Miami for a touch-up procedure and the procedure was a failure. He now turns to Bill for help that may require expertise that Bill does not have or offer, although Bill is happy to help in various other ways.

If you have an image in your head of the type of person who intends to undergo penis enlargement surgery, neither Robin nor David are exactly what you imagine, nor are their motives exactly what you imagine. Bill is probably closer to what you imagine as a smooth-talking operation owner. Then you see the parade of urologists on camera who lament how augmentation technology has fallen into the hands of charlatans, but then happily work for Bill, who brags about the amount of aesthetic work he’s done on himself, claiming that no one doubts it (which we all certainly do).

There is an effort here to resist expectations, although we briefly meet a group of Bill’s other patients, who conform more to the stereotypes. But our special personalities? They’ve all been selected and edited to have backstories that make them worthy of sympathy, even if many viewers won’t feel sympathy. Robin seems to have been brainwashed by one media outlet, David from a different angle, and I think it’s up for grabs whether Bill has been brainwashed or brainwashed. The point is that male fragility is something that the present moment amplifies.

Masculinity Sometimes he’s more interested in scaring you than the quantity and quality of his penis — the first “graphic imagery warning” comes after 23 minutes, at which point most viewers will say, “But what were we getting before?” – rather than delving deeply (or even shallowly in some cases), for example, into the larger questions of gender and sexuality that this procedure raises.

Many of my other unanswered questions are logistical and deal with legality, certification and qualification of spas, clinics, doctors and clinicians. As it is, I don’t quite understand, in terms of procedures, what Bill Moore can or cannot do and why he can or cannot do these things, what training he has had and whether this is something we should care about. Sure we should be concerned about doctors botching such procedures, but David’s legal recourse was overlooked. Additionally, Bill does several amazing things in the documentary that certainly seem questionable, but are they or should they be?

Mental health options are discussed, from a professional perspective, but not enough.

But maybe Masculinity It is, more than anything else, about legitimizing all serious conversations about this topic, and by establishing that validity, it opens the door to more documentaries in this area. It’s worth it, but just remember: don’t watch Masculinity On a plane.