Bigger is not always better

Doctors might disagree. "Personally, I wouldn't want a scalpel near my penis," he said.

"It's ridiculous to think that there is a pill to make you bigger," said Oliver Esperham, the director of marketing at Dr. Joel Kaplan Inc., a San Diego company that makes a popular penis enlargement pump available on the Internet. But bigger may not be better.

Kaplan has been in business for 10 years, Esperham said, receiving 30 phone orders a day. The cylindrical pumps, in manual and electrical models, cost $250 to $600 and are mailed in boxes marked "Aquarium Equipment." Men around the country have filed a flurry of lawsuits against doctors they say botched procedures, leaving them disfigured and in pain, and often with penises smaller than they started with. If the Internet can be used as a gauge of the collective male psyche, plenty of men want abs of steel, more hair and a larger penis. Size apparently matters.

Google, a popular search engine, recently retrieved 119,000 Web site matches for the term "penis enlargement." Many companies selling potions, pills and pumps promise everything from "three inches or more" to "stronger more toned sexual glands." Some diets even claim to increase the girth of the male sex organ. And many urologists perform an operation to enlarge the penis.

The American Urological Association advises men to simply leave well enough alone. The association issued a policy statement in 1994 -- and reaffirms it annually -- denouncing penis-lengthening surgery and another procedure in which fat is injected into the penis to increase girth. A spokesman for the association, Dr. Martin Resnick, said that when the procedures go badly, patients often suffer from painful infections, scarring beneath the skin and deformed erections, and they sometimes wind up with smaller penises.

"Males are always looking for a competitive edge, but this is not it." Esperham said the company had been working with the government to obtain approval to market the device as a penis enlarger.

Herbal supplements offer the promise of quick results without surgery or a pumping device. Companies that sell supplements have come under scrutiny, however, and skepticism about their products' effectiveness is spreading. Penis Enlargement Magazine, a Web magazine that receives 20,000 views a day, recently ran a feature article about the efficacy of penis enlargement pills. After interviewing several users of the supplements, the magazine determined that "enlargement pills by themselves produce dramatic size gains."