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The Case for Upsizing
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Do the “male enhancement” pills from late-night infomercials really supersize a man? Daniel Nester—the man who tanned his way to happiness—inches his way to the answer.
It’s late at night and I’m watching an unidentified woman in a tight, blue mini-dress tell a middle-aged man named Frank that “size matters.”
“I know it matters to me,” she says as she leans forward, her brown curls cascading over an ample décolletage. “But what’s kind of interesting is that some studies show that as many as 60 percent of women are not fully satisfied by the size of their partner.”
One subject did report a “strange, random erection at gym” on Day Six while “watching the Alex Rodriguez press conference.”
Welcome to the lowest common denominator of infomercials, the one that says, “Your dick is small, and you don’t even know it.” A foundation-shaking statement for a red-blooded male at any moment in history, but especially right now. We’re weathering an extended period of emasculation, with the recession gutting men from the workplace at a faster rate than women. We’re mortgaged to the hilt, downsized, bubble-popped, and credit-crunched. The dream of an exurban McMansion and an impractically large automobile is crumbling before our eyes.
Which is why we sit up and listen when the woman in the blue mini-dress, former Miss Hawaiian Tropic and Britney Spears backup dancer Bridgetta Tomarchio, tells us there’s still one part of the American Dream within reach: “A product out there called ExtenZe that can increase your size.”
The manufacturer of ExtenZe claims more than 460,000 customers have bought in the neighborhood of 250 million pills. Recent campaigns tout the ExtenZe drink, and infomercials in front of the Playboy mansion feature “ExtenZe Girls” dressed in cheerleader outfits. Response, a trade magazine that covers the “direct-response ad” industry, ranked ExtenZe as the seventh-most popular campaign in 2008, beating out the Ab Rocket and the Dual Action Cleanse.
As a former hack medical journalist, I wanted to find out if ExtenZe really works. I bought 120 pills on eBay, recruited 12 thirty- and fortysomething overeducated white males, and mailed each of them a 20-inch tube filled with ten ExtenZe pills, a foot-long ruler from Staples, an informed-consent form, a survey, and what I called a Boner Diary. I advised each patient to try to have an erection each day for ten days, directing them to the YouPorn, Victoria’s Secret, and American Apparel websites. Armed with an official-sounding name, the Watchful Analysis of New Growth, we were in business.
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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Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
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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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