How a doctor’s two-decade quest to grow the penis is leaving some men desperate and disfigured.

Do articles about medicine go in the Science community? Seemed like the best place for what I thought was a really well written article about this niche subject matter.

… Kevin said that he had undergone five surgeries with Elist, including two upgrades, a revision and a removal, and his penis no longer functioned.

Still, Kevin had always found the surgeon to be caring, if a little preoccupied. “He reminded me of Doctor Franken­stein — the intensity of him wanting this thing to come to life,” Kevin told me. It sounded strange, he acknowledged, but before each operation he’d been filled with excitement. “You just feel relieved that you’re fixing something,” he said.

At an appointment earlier this year, Kevin said, Elist promised to fix him again with a sixth procedure, but one of the surgeon’s assistants discreetly advised against it…

  • Griseowulfin@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    The New Yorker hosting of this article was posted over in c/Humanities. As for where it should go, it’s really a tossup. Articles about medicine can really fit the science or humanities category quite often as medicine is a bit of both.

    I’m going to paste my comment from that other post (there wasn’t really a ton of discussion over there). https://beehaw.org/post/791579

    The whole realm of manhood is plagued by the issues of size, sadly. I’ve always been skeptical about cosmetic surgery in general, because I feel lots of decisions are driven by dysphoria and dysmorphia, and sometimes with a lack of proper psychiatric counseling in such a way that consent for the procedure isn’t truly informed. Even in cases where someone may have a benefit from the procedure, I think the variance of outcomes, the side effects, and the rough healing process is often understated. Quite honestly, our technology in this area of plastic surgery isn’t all that good.

    That said, in regards to penis size in general, pornography (for the most part at least) has done a number on the male mindset on their size. Given the social equivalence for many men between size and masculinity, this causes a lot of grief for guys, leading to men who feel unable to conduct relationships due to their perceived lack of endowment. Then online, there’s many dangerous magic pills like jelqing, surgery, vacuums, etc. that take advantage of this loneliness and anxiety to extract money from them, often leaving them worse than where they started, in terms of physical ED, deformity, and pain.

    Culturally, I think there’s a lot of shaming of men’s bodies, in the same way that society holds expectations of women for their body characteristics, skin texture and color, personality, and dress. Innocent comments like “big dick energy” and insulting people we dislike by exclaiming that they are underendowed puts a notion that bigger is better, and men are most easily going to find comparison in a skewed dataset, that is, in the photos exhibited online in porn. Ultimately, Dr. Elist is taking advantage of his patient’s anxiety for his own gain, then convincing them the answer is “one more revision” or “it looks fine to me”, with animosity towards his patients who wish to speak freely with others about their experience, especially if it isn’t a glowing approval of him and his product.

    • Dee@beehaw.orgOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Weird, when I go to humanities pretty much all the posts are gone. Probably a Lemmy glitch?

      • Griseowulfin@beehaw.org
        1·
        1 year ago

        make sure you have English selected as a language. The posts you don’t see have been marked as “English”, and lemmy hides everything that isn’t tagged as a language you want to see (Default is “unspecified”, which is what mine fall under.)

        • Dee@beehaw.orgOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          I’ll give it a shot, thanks!

          It’s the sorting method I was using, in case anybody else had that issue. If you select “Top Day” it will only include posts from the past day and not continue to list the posts throughout the history in descending chronological order like you might think it would. Just an FYI.

    • Dee@beehaw.orgOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      As for where it should go, it’s really a tossup. Articles about medicine can really fit the science or humanities category quite often as medicine is a bit of both.

      That’s what I figured, thank you.

      As for the rest of your comment I pretty much wholeheartedly agree. Especially the bit you mention “with a lack of proper psychiatric counseling in such a way that consent for the procedure isn’t truly informed.” As a trans person that was the part about this article that kind of spoke to me/hit home. I often see people talking about how all you need to do is get the surgery and everything will be fine. But lately I’ve seen that attitude in online spaces change to be more cautious which I’m happy for. I personally know two fellow trans people who went forward with surgery options too quickly and regret the decisions. I’m currently working towards that goal but have a lot of self work to do before I go under the knife (if I do eventually go that far, I might not).