Daniel Lombroso’s new documentary Manhood features the tantalizing subhead, “Inside the secret booming world of penile enhancement,” and while a full review will follow, I think most readers will have three primary questions.
1. Is Manhood coy regarding its depiction of its subject matter or is it brazen?
Manhood
The Bottom Line
Very gnarly and admirably non-judgmental.
Venue: SXSW Film Festival (Documentary Spotlight)
Director: Daniel Lombroso
1 hour 31 minutes
Manhood is not coy. Manhood contains a whole lot of dicks. Manhood is not a documentary that you should ever consider watching on an airplane or with elderly conservative relatives. I would say it’s a bad movie to see on a first date, but I don’t know you or your taste in significant others. It’s absolutely a movie that Travis Bickle would go to on a first date, if that helps. Oh and probably it’s not a good movie to watch while eating — not because penises are necessarily good or bad accompaniments for a meal, but because enhancement means surgery and surgery means needles and surgery means botched surgery.
2. Is Manhood‘s approach to its subject matter earnest or is it jokey?
There are places in Manhood that will make you laugh, sometimes nervously and sometimes unabashedly, and you will probably find yourself laughing at some of the people in the documentary, because you are mean. The film is not opposed to the occasional piece of puerile humor, like introducing the Dallas skyline exclusively with the decidedly phallic Reunion Tower. But Lombroso is as non-judgmental as one could possibly be regarding this subject matter. You may laugh, but it won’t be because the filmmaker is passing overt judgment. That’s a level of maturity I would not possess, but one that I am capable of respecting a tremendous amount.
I’d add that you can simultaneously laugh at and find sad truth in this observation from one doctor: “I can fill your penis with filler, but I cannot fill the hole in your heart.”
3. Assuming that Manhood approaches “the secret booming world of penile enhancement” as one that is impacted by masculine insecurities brought about by our culture, does Joe Rogan get blamed?
Yup! Manhood is nonjudgmental toward its participants, but that doesn’t mean there is a complete lack of judgment. Joe Rogan and the manosphere podcasts, their advertisers and their guests are treated as perpetrators in an epidemic for which having a big penis is seen as a solution. A finger is pointed in that direction. No finger is pointed precisely at pornography or certain conservative religious groups, but they’re presented as additional sources of anxiety.
So have I told you everything you need to know? Manhood is a documentary about a subject that will produce much uncomfortable giggling, but it is not a sniggering documentary. It’s a documentary that basically says, “Here is a thing that is happening and here is a clear-eyed glimpse at how and why it’s happening, but what you do with that information is up to you.”
It left me with questions — some extremely important — and frustration at multiple things that go totally unaddressed. But it’s a movie with a whole lot of dicks that is capable of prompting conversations that go well beyond issues of length (not functionally altered by current surgical procedures) and girth (very much functionally altered by current surgical procedures, but not always in the ways you want) into serious contemplations of what it means when pundits refer to a crisis of masculinity.
Lombroso chooses to focus on three people:
Bill Moore runs the AdvancedYou clinic out of a strip mall in Dallas. It appears to do Botox and body sculpting and to have various chambers that freeze and relax you. But for the purposes of the documentary, their major service is penile enhancement — specifically the PhalloFill program, which is itself enhanced with something called a PhalloSleeve, which Bill has patented.
Ruben is one of Bill’s clients. A father of five who only began enhancing as he approached middle age, Ruben is an aspiring stand-up comic and a huge Joe Rogan fan. His partner says that she didn’t ask Ruben to get these enhancements and she says they make no difference to her, but Ruben insists, multiple times, that she loves it and just doesn’t want to say so. It’s hard to explain why Ruben is doing this, but he likes change and he notes that the world is full of ways that women can alter their appearances, but the same isn’t true for men — therefore he compares what he’s doing to breast augmentation or a BBL.
Then there’s David, who lives in Miami and comes from a very religious Christian family. David, who hasn’t told his family he’s gay, has a very graphic OnlyFans page with half-a-million subscribers. It’s hard to explain why, but David went to a Miami doctor for an enhancement procedure and it was botched. He has now turned to Bill for help that may require expertise that Bill does not possess or provide, though Bill is happy to help in various other ways.
If you have an image in your head of the type of person going in for penile enhancement, neither Ruben nor David is precisely what you’re imagining, nor are their motivations precisely what you’re imagining. Bill is probably closer to what you’d picture as the slick-talking proprietor of the operation. Then you see the parade of on-camera urologists who lament how enhancement technology has fallen into the hands of charlatans, but who then gladly work with Bill, who boasts about the amount of aesthetic work he’s done on himself, claiming nobody suspects (which we all surely do).
There’s an effort here to combat expectations, though we briefly meet a bunch of Bill’s other patients, who conform more to stereotypes. But our featured characters? They’ve all been chosen and edited for backstories that make them worthy of sympathy, even if many viewers may fall short of feeling empathy. Ruben seems brainwashed by one corner of the media, David by a different corner and I guess it’s up for grabs on whether Bill is brainwashed or brainwasher. The point is that male fragility is a thing amplified by the current moment.
Manhood is sometimes more interested in freaking you out with the quantity and quality of penises — the first “graphic imagery warning” comes 23 minutes in, at which point most viewers will say, “But what were we getting before?” — than going deep (or in some cases even shallow) on, for example, the bigger questions of gender and sexuality raised by the procedure.
Many of my other unanswered questions are logistical, dealing with legality, certification and qualification for spas and clinics, doctors and clinicians. As in, I don’t completely understand, procedure-wise, what Bill Moore can or cannot do and why he can or cannot do those things, what training he has and whether that’s something we should be concerned with. We definitely should be concerned about the doctors who botch procedures like this, but David’s legal recourse is glossed over. Plus, Bill does several jaw-dropping things in the documentary that sure seem questionable, but are they or should they be?
Mental health options, from a professional perspective, are discussed, but not nearly enough.
But maybe Manhood is, more than anything, about legitimizing all serious conversation on this topic and, in establishing that validity, it opens the door for more documentaries in this sphere. That’s worthy, but just remember: Don’t watch Manhood on a plane.