The News for Penises, 1/26/16 edition.
In the February issue of GQ magazine (pp. 80-83, 119), this feature article:
Heavy phallicity from the outset: the symbolic cactus, the U of Huge made into a penis icon (complete with urinary meatus, aka piss slit). The lead-in:
An enterprising L.A. surgeon [James Elist] has invented a silicone penis implant [the Penuma], which, because we’re sure you have a frient who’ll want to know, costs 13 grand and can nearly double your size. Amy Wallace grills the good `doctor on how it works – and asks a few of his satisfied customers (and their mostly satisfied wives) how it’s working. (photos by Andrew B. Myers)
In a box on p. 82, under the heading “The Bionic Manhood”:
It comes in three sizes…: Dr. Elist’s Penuma is a silicone implant that encircles about 80 percent of the shaft, leaving an opening to allow for expansion. The implant adds length, but even more girth.
… and takes less than an hour: After getting stitched up following the 45-minute procedure, patients can get up and walk out of the office. But no sex for three to six months. The Penuma needs time to settle in.
The girth thing is important. A number of women report dissatisfaction with male partners who have long but slender penises — pencil dicks, in the vernacular — which fail to stimulate their clitorises. The Penuma is designed to fix this problem.
It’s also designed to alleviate the feelings of inadequacy (and shame) so many men have about the length of their penises; it’s often been noted that half or more of American men believe that their penises are significantly smaller than average (the mean for erect adult penises is about 5 inches), which of course cannot be an accurate assessment of the situation. Instead, many men judge a penis to be of adequate length only if it is in fact notably long, at least 6 inches (for men in porn, 7 inches or more is the expected length) — so men with entirely average penises judge them to be inadequate, and men looking for male sex partners judge entirely average penises to be unacceptably small in a partner
A note about the GQ approach to these issues, which is socially very conservative. The article talks only about men and their wives, as if men and women have sex with one another only within the bounds of marriage, and as if men don’t have sex with one another. But surely in the real world people in these other sorts of relationships might desire a Penuma for themselves or their partner.
Then there is the fact that the Penuma is a silicone implant, and as with other types of implants, there’s a significant chance of things going wrong: the implants can leak, become unattached, and so on. A number of patients have had their Penumas removed.
Finally, there’s the question of the name. The pen– part is obviously from penis, but I haven’t found an account of where the –uma comes from. From pneuma ‘the vital spirit, soul, or creative force of a person’?
