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Where do we go when we die? Are we alone in the universe? Does size matter?
Some things we can never know. But the answer to the last question—according, at least, to the men of r/gettingbigger—is a resounding yes. And jelqing is one of the key ways to achieve it.
Caleb Anthony, 25, a dispensary worker in California, has been insecure about his penis size since adolescence. “When I was younger, I was definitely overweight,” Caleb says. “I was also really tall and I am a light-skinned Black guy, and so it was like things like that. The whole BBC [big Black cock] stereotype played into it.”
In his late teens, Caleb began researching penis enlargement online.
“I was just googling and I was mainly on YouTube, like looking up videos or methods or routines of how to get bigger,” he says.
That’s when the algorithm recommended videos from Hink, a penis-enlargement content creator on YouTube who coaches men on lengthening techniques. Caleb began asking questions on Hink’s livestreams.
“I just started going through his channel and seeing his whole process of everything,” Caleb says. “It showed me how easy and realistic this is.”
In September 2024, Caleb began following Hink’s Enlargement Course, which sells for $100 on his website Peak Male Physique. Caleb began stretching his penis—for 30 minutes, using a penis pump for 20 minutes every day.
In the 10 months since, Caleb says he has grown his penis from six to seven inches in length. He keeps a monthly log of his progress in his Notes app.
“It just definitely increased my overall confidence,” Caleb says. “Not so much about being bigger necessarily, but I looked at it as another form of self-improvement.”
Not only that, but in Hink’s livestream chats and Discord, Caleb feels like he’s part of a community.
“I think for men, because this is something that’s so taboo or private for us, it’s harder for us to really be more open about it,” Caleb says. “Like, hey, this is actually a lot more common than we realize.”
As long as there have been men, there have probably been men who wanted a bigger penis. But in a wellness-obsessed digital era where biohacking is increasingly commonplace, enlargement techniques have become more codified and commoditized than ever. And in the last few years, the online community has been, well, growing.
Today there are 165,000 users on r/gettingbigger, 200,000 on MattersOfSize.com, and 82,000 on r/AJelqForYou. “Jelqing” is a method of manual penis enlargement, or PE, which involves putting your thumb and forefinger in an “okay” position and repeatedly stroking one’s shaft with pressure from base to tip. Its name is derived from the Persian word jalq, which means masturbation. (There are widespread claims online that jelqing originated in ancient Arabia or Sudan, but scholars have found no original sources to back that up.)
Jelqing is the first PE term to rise from the murky depths of online forums and breach the broader manosphere. In 2024, jelqing became a meme in itself on looksmaxxing TikTok and pickup artist YouTube.
“For the longest time, people were told, no, you can’t make your penis bigger, which is a lie,” Hink, who asked to use his online pseudonym, says. “And now people are actually seeing that. And it’s kind of spreading. I won’t say like wildfire, but it’s definitely spreading.”
In PE communities, men share tips, discuss goals, and brag about gains. Dick pics are common. The bond between a man and his PE coach is often close and emotional. And jelqing is just one of many techniques in the PE arsenal: For more length, you can do manual stretches, hang weights from your penis tip, put your member in a spring-loaded extender, or strap it to your thigh. For girth, there’s the vacuum pump.
PE is provincial, with each forum largely following the specific protocol of its moderator-coach-guru. And like any online community, there’s plenty of lore. Hink and his partner BD teach the Hink Enlargement Course on r/gettingbigger, which formed from a schism with r/AJelqForYou. Michael Salvini, a.k.a. Double Long Daddy, created his own website, Matters of Size, after moderators on the OG forum, Thunder’s Place, criticized his new techniques.
(When Azealia Banks leaked nudes of Conor McGregor with weights on his penis in July, the PE community eagerly asked: “is he one of us??” The answer is probably no, according to Hink. The weight’s placement suggests it’s for enhanced kegels, not enlargement.)
The online PE community is broadly skeptical of more invasive methods, which they view as ineffective and needlessly dangerous. Fillers, for example, are a PE technique offered at many med spas. The same hyaluronic acid used on lips and cheeks is injected into the soft tissue of the shaft to add girth. But fillers need to be reapplied every few years, and can lead to a lumpy penis.
“Fillers can also have risks of unsatisfactory results and infection,” says Dr. Michael Eisenberg, director of male reproductive medicine and surgery at Stanford Medicine. “Temporary fillers usually have to be repeated at intervals.”
Plus, the ratio between shaft and head can become distorted, creating a “pig in a blanket,” according to Dr. Judson Brandeis, a California-based urologist who created P-Long, an enlargement program that includes manual stretching.
Even riskier are the surgeries. Cutting the suspensory ligament gives the appearance of a larger flaccid penis, but your erection will point straight down at the floor, Hink says. In its position statement on cosmetic penile enhancement, the Sexual Medicine Society of North America (SMSNA) lists erectile dysfunction, sensory changes, and penile instability as potential complications for suspensory ligament division.
Fat transfers leave a soft slime under the skin, so your erection never truly feels hard, Dr. Brandeis said.
And the Penuma implant, a razor clam-shaped piece of silicone inserted under the skin to add girth, is especially infamous after a report co-published by The New Yorker and ProPublica revealed the technique has left some men disfigured. The SMSNA recommends against silicone implants “except in the hands of experienced surgeons and following a comprehensive discussion of potentially severe complications.”
“Any penile implant has the risk of infection, erosion, and unsatisfactory cosmetic results,” Dr. Eisenberg says.
So who’s doing this?
“I thought in the beginning I was going to get all these kind of creepy guys or weird, insecure guys, but they’re actually really nice and normal,” Dr. Brandeis says. “I get a lot of scientific types, a lot of engineers, a lot of scientists, a lot of tech guys.”
BD, who co-runs Peak Male Physique and moderates r/gettingbigger with Hink, says that their customers tend to be young.
“About 60% are going to be under 30,” BD, who asked to use his online pseudonym for the article, says.
“The mainstream media likes to make us look like we’re these obese dudes that take a break from playing Dungeons & Dragons to tug on our Ds in our mom’s basement while we eat our Kraft macaroni and cheese,” Hink says. “Like, no, it’s just a lot of normal guys.”
What they all have in common is an interest in the world of self-improvement.
“It is a very human thing to want to be better, and the penis just so happens to be an area of concern for a lot of guys,” according to Ben Clark, creator of the Male Hanger weight-hanging device.
Ian, 53, became curious about PE after seeing people boast online. “‘Is it true?’ ‘Can you do something?’ You know, those kinds of thoughts,” Ian, who asked to have his name changed, says.
He says he has since grown his penis from 6.25 to 7 inches. His routine consists of 40 minutes of stretching and 20 minutes of pumping six days a week. “I figure this is part of my overall health,” he says.
Many men in the PE world can point to one moment, often in adolescence, when their size insecurity took root. Around age 15, BD’s friend FaceTimed a girl while they both changed into their swimsuits.
“All I hear on the camera is ‘He’s small’ and giggling,” BD says. “I don’t know if it was about me or one of my friends, but obviously I wasn’t going to ask. And so then the next month or so, I started the PE stuff.”
Ian, a late bloomer in seventh grade, got naked with male and female friends. His penis was smaller and hairless compared to a younger classmate.
“It’s been a slow progression to get over that,” Ian says.
Ben Clark first became curious about PE after renting Boogie Nights on DVD while serving on a Marine Corps base in California. Hink’s insecurity was so severe he struggled to use the urinal at a college football game.
Salvini, founder of Matters of Size, started PE after a girlfriend recounted a past lover bragging about his 12-inch penis.
“She was like, ‘Well, he put a record under his penis. It went across the whole record,’” Salvini says. “And that was like, I was just lost. I didn’t know what to do.”
Of the eight PE practitioners that I spoke to, all of them said watching pornography made them insecure about their penis size.
“You assume that because that’s all you see, that everybody else is way bigger than you,” Hink says. “The actual concept of what is an average size has shifted completely. It’s caused a lot of penile dysmorphia.”
Doctors tend to focus on function, not size, when evaluating a patient. “If you can urinate and you can procreate, you have a perfectly normal penis,” Dr. Brandeis says.
Dr. Brandeis also says that most clients he encounters aren’t small to start with. He estimates that one third of his patients are below average, one third are average, and one third are above average.
The SMSNA notes that “the majority of men seeking augmentation have penile dimensions that fall within normal ranges.”
A cruel irony is that penis enlargement is challenging or impossible for men with the smallest penises.
“If you have a congenital micropenis, you’re not really a candidate for P-Long anyway because you have scar tissue and other congenital issues in the penis,” Dr. Brandeis says. Ben Clark noted that his Male Hanger device requires at least five inches to be worn properly.
If you have enough to work with, the results seem to be there. In a study published in Andrology, a peer-reviewed journal for male reproductive health, Dr. Brandeis’s P-Long program offered an average gain of .8 inches of length and .47 in girth in six months. In a self-directed trial, Hink’s Enlargement Course offered .54 more inches of length on average in six months. Both emphasized the difficulty of collecting accurate data, recruiting participants, and getting funding.
“NIH is trying to cure cancer and heart disease,” Dr. Brandeis says. “They don’t really care about growing penises.”
“In general, the data surrounding many techniques is somewhat limited,” Dr. Eisenberg adds. “There is some data that penile traction devices can improve penile length, but it is mostly done in the context of men with specific conditions” (such as Peyronie’s disease or after prostate surgery).
Within the PE community, the question is rarely “Does this work?” but “When do you stop?” Dr. Brandeis says his patients have stopped his P-Long program when they became dysfunctionally large. In his 30s and 40s, Salvini grew from 6.5 to 11 inches using a program he designed called Suppressed-Restricted-Transposition Theory. It combines Slow Squash Jelqs with stretching and twisting the penis in a device he invented called the LengthMaster. Experienced guys can get three full rotations, Salvini says.
Now, Salvini expresses some regret at going too far. “At 6.5 inches, she’s gonna be very happy with your size,” he says. “You’re at nine, she’s probably not going to want it. You’re at 11, you’re just a fucking walking dildo.”
Caleb, currently at seven inches, has had girls tell him he should do OnlyFans. He says he’ll consider it at nine. Ian stopped before his goal size at his girlfriend’s request. “Would it be great to be bigger? Yeah,” he says. “Does my girlfriend want it? No.”
PE carries other risks beyond going up a pant size. The most dreaded injury among the PE community is hard flaccid syndrome, a chronic, painful condition where your penis stays semi-rigid whether you have an erection or not. It’s not well understood, but Hink believes it’s caused by clenching during stretching, which stresses the pelvic muscles.
BD reports discoloration of the penis from petechiae—small red dots, usually caused by pumping—and hemosiderin staining—dark brown areas caused by red blood cells leaking through the skin.
BD also says that jelqing can damage the pudendal nerve on the top of the penis. Clark says hand-based exercises are more dangerous, particularly in terms of bruising.
“We’ve all got different levels of strength and pain perception,” Clark said. “A good stretch to one guy might be a good stretch, and for two or three other guys might be, ‘Crap, I’ve pulled too hard.’”
“Most risks to penile manipulation or traction devices relate to discomfort [or] redness which typically resolves with time,”Dr. Eisenberg says. But, he added that overmanipulation can cause penile injury and that using these techniques while erect could lead to a penile fracture.
Nevertheless, many men in the PE community appear willing to take those risks in the name of self-improvement.
“This is what the fitness industry was 10 or 20 years ago,” Hink says. “Supplements, creatine, and lifting weights were a fringe community.”
But that’s changing as men become more interested in cosmetic enhancement generally. “This is just one aspect of this looksmaxxing and male optimization era that we’re in right now,” Hink says.
No matter how many inches they add, the real growth, they say, is internal. “For me, it was the gateway to confidence because it gave me at least a little bit of control in my life,” BD says. “I grew my dick. I did the impossible.”