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The Case for Upsizing
Several of my subjects dropped out of the study, or chickened out, once they received the pills in their mailbox. (I give them credit for trying—those who initially declined my request, down to the last man, said they couldn’t take ExtenZe because they were “too big already.”)
I was left with data from five guys. Subjects answered questions on a rating of 1 to 5, 1 being “Strongly Disagree” to 5 being “Strongly Agree.” All of the guys selected “strongly disagree” to such statements as “My penis looks up to one inch longer,” “My penis looks greater than one inch longer,” and “My penis looks greater than two inches longer.” In fact, three reported no difference at all in the quality of their erections, and no subject reported a change in their penis size.
In his notes, one subject did report a “strange, random erection at gym” on Day Six while “watching the Alex Rodriguez press conference.” He later attributed this to a “treadmill boner,” the rhythm of workout shorts against a flaccid penis.
Two other subjects reported a “tingle sensation” along with their erections in the first few days, then nothing more. One subject put it best: “The first couple of days, it does send a rush of blood down to the netherworld,” he writes. “So it sorta feels like something is happening. My guess is that they count on people feeling that and then quickly ordering a lifetime supply. Then, on the third day or so, there is no more sensation down there. By that time, though, people will have probably pumped another $150 into the company and will be too embarrassed to ask for their money back.”
Perhaps based on this tingle-then-nothing effect, ExtenZe’s manufacturer, Maximizer Health, has had to cool down many of its claims since a 2005 Better Business Bureau report. No more claiming that 98 percent of men who take the pills experience this performance improvement regardless of age, or that it will increase “that certain part of the male body” up to 25 percent. Do the math: If each dude got the 25 percent benefit the company claims, and we assume that the average erect penis is five inches long, that’s a total of 575,000 extra inches, all thanks to ExtenZe. Recent ExtenZe infomercials feature Bridgetta, simply asking company representative Dr. Michael Nelson if the pill “really works.”
“Our ingredients suggest that would be the case,” Dr. Nelson demurs.
The ingredients he refers to are basically a greatest hits package of herbal supplements that have claimed to increase men’s virility over the centuries: folic acid, zinc, black pepper, ginger, yohimbe, velvet deer antler, horny goat weed, pumpkin, licorice extract, and ho shou wu extract, along with the legal steroids Pregnenolone and Dehydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA.
At a bare minimum, perhaps ExtenZe makes it OK to have erections. All five subjects had at least one erection a day over the 10-day study period, and all had more than one erection on two days or more. Not a statistically significant increase from normal, perhaps, though one subject with a low sex drive noted that “there are few men out there less horny than I was to start with,” and even he was able to get aroused once a day on ExtenZe. This could be attributed to placebo effect, however, or possibly a Hawthorne Effect generated from recording his daily libido in a diary that someone else will eventually see.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
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Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
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Daniel Nester is the author of How to Be Inappropriate, a book of humorous nonfiction. He lives in upstate New York.
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Daniel Nester is the author of How to Be Inappropriate, a book of humorous nonfiction. He lives in upstate New York.
Go ahead, destroy my dreams.
If I had taken advantage of every penis-lengthening offer that landed in my mailbox over the years, would I be able to do cowboy ropetricks with it by now?
GMCaesar, you could probably throw it over your shoulder, like a Continental soldier.
This definitely deserves a "lol"
So you recruited guys to do it and THEN they state they were "too big already." LOL.
BTW, why only "overeducated white males"? What the uneducated or non-whites don't need help?!? Or even the non-educated non-white?
By the way, is it me or does gaining an extra inch or two seem like a drastic change to one's schlong (or I guess, schmekel). It reminds me of all the e-mails I get on extending my penis an extra three inches (ouch!) yet also getting e-mails on how they can take three inches from my stomach (now I know where it goes).
OK, the big dick pills don't work. Science can now turn to vaginal reduction pills. That might work. Or, better yet, during foreplay, women can wear eyeglasses that magnify. I have never met a women with fingers the size and girth of even small penises. And yet, they seem to manage very well on those lonely nights. Just how much do you need for clitoral stimulation?
If all of this crap really worked, it wouldn't be sold on midnight infomercials, or in the back or mens magazines. If they worked, there would be billboards of male enhancement pills, in bright shining lights in Times Square. They would be sold like candy at every drug store, corner store, gas station. Every man would on the planet would be hung like a horse.
It's really too bad the FDA doesn't regulate herbs. If they did, a lot of these false ads would be history along with the multi-billion dollar supplement industry.
And you deserve a lobotomy.
This ExtenZe Company seems like it's been pretty successful - I don't watch much TV, but I used to notice that these infomercials used to only come on wayward third tier networks very late a night. Nowadays though I've been seeing these infomercials on late night CNBC, CNN, and other major networks.
This ExtenZe company is terrible and should be shut down for false advertising, pandering as it does to men's feards about penis size.
I have seen the add and the name of this product is just amazing ..... I wonder how big the focus group was that help select the name .....can you visualize this from a B - movie , the scene is in a dungeon and our Hero is a muscular built Adonis with a small dick and is holding out and the demonic torturer says ...."ve haf vays to make u talk ..ve vill ExtenZepenis and then u vill tell us everyzing" ......infomercials are great and every one has bought something from them at one time or an other they rarely work and end up in the next garage sale or in the case of ExtenZe hopefully down the toilet .....why is there never a product for women like "ShrinkZepussy" ....that might put the ExtenZe team out of business if so many of us Males have such average sized dicks.
Hey, if it weren't for these products, there would be no advertisements on right-wing AM radio. Rush would be out of a job.
This comment has been removed by The Daily Beast's editors.
Should one delay taking the penis enlargement pills until they develop the pills to enlarge the scrotum? I mean, wouldn't it look hideous to have a disproportionate components of your junk?
Ooh, goodie! A Beast sex blog. Love reading the comments.
Does anyone remember the ad that was running forever that showed a guy with a 50 lb. weight tied to his peenie? It was for some product like this, I think.
Anyway guys, lighten up!
Now THIS is the kind of [rock] hard reporting TDB should keep doing.
Why did you need a 20-inch tube for a 12-inch ruler?
Your "test" doesn't pass a basic class in statistics. First, the sample is too small. Second, the required approach is double-blind testing (i.e., one group gets the real thing and the other a placebo). Here everybody gets the pill.
I hope you can get your money back for the samples you bought because you certainly won't get this study published in the New Journal of Medicine.
nodrama- It's a humor piece. The point being; that, of course the pills don't work.
the hell they don't - come on over to my house, mama
Actually, a patient-reported outcome, one without a control and a treatment group, is a perfectly valid way of measuring a drug's efficacy in its initial stages of study. Then again, this isn't a drug--it's a male enhancement pill that's, like, a vitamin.
"pearly penile papules" refers to a skin lesion, not something inserted under the foreskin...
This story was fun but too long. No pun intended.
@nodrama: Well, OF COURSE the sample was too small! That's why it was given the pill!
It is just propoganda, to get us thinking about IT.
It is not the pills that work, it is getting us thinking about IT that get IT to work.
Thank you.
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