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men who return for even more enlargement. One surgeon gave up penile cosmetic practice after a new patient, who’d already had four operations elsewhere, came to him for a fifth, presenting for examination a penis as wide as it was long – ‘a dick’, the surgeon said, ‘like a beer can’.
    According to Masters and Johnson, so insecure are men on the subject of their penises that most at some time in their life are likely to suffer from feelings of inadequacy – a size syndrome known as body dysmorphia, common among bodybuilders. Like the anorexic, the dysmorphic looks in the mirror and sees a distorted image: a body or body part that is not as it is. In the throes of penile dysmorphia men are quite capable of believing that the 18-inch appendage once claimed by the porno magazine model Long Dong Silver, or ‘Mr Torpedo’, and the 15-inch one sported by Dirk Diggler in the film
Boogie Nights
, are not confections in latex. Scott Fitzgerald was someone temporarily in an extreme state of the condition in Paris in the 1920s when he asked fellow novelist Ernest Hemingway to lunch because he had something important to ask him. Fitzgerald was nervous and avoided addressing what was worrying him. Finally, at the end of the meal, he blurted out that it was ‘a matter of measurements’. Zelda, his wife, had said that he could never make any woman happy, because of ‘the way I was built’. Fitzgerald, who had not slept with anyone else, didn’t know whether what she said was true. As he wrote in
A Moveable Feast
, the Paris notebook published after his death, Hemingway took Fitzgerald to the gents, assured him on examination that he was normal, and advised him to have a look at the statues in the Louvre. Fitzgerald wasn’t convinced; the statues might not be accurate. He was not convinced by Hemingway’s assurance that ‘Most people would settle for them.’ He wasn’t convinced even after Hemingway dragged him down to the museum to see for himself.
    Forty years later, by then an impotent alcoholic whose creative juices had dried up, Hemingway blew his brains out. And how good his reassurances to Fitzgerald were could be questioned after his friend and fellow novelist Sydney Franklin was quoted as saying, ‘I’ve always thought that his problem was that he was worried about his pincha [penis] . . . the size of a 30/30 shell’ – about the size of a little finger. The bullfighting, big-game-shooting lifestyle appears to have been over-compensation for under-endowment.
    For many of the three men in a hundred who are statistically said to be under-endowed (that is, below the 5–7-inch erectile median ) – and the one man in a hundred unfortunate enough to suffer from what the medical profession insensitively terms a ‘micropenis’, a penis that achieves under 2.5 inches – the feeling of inadequacy, even deep despair, dominates their lives. Prince Camillo Borghese, second husband of Napoleon Bonaparte’s dissipated sister Pauline, fled the French court after she dismissed him for being
‘si drolement petit.’
The actor Montgomery Clift was not only tortured by his homosexuality but by a penis that earned him the unedifying diminutive ‘Princess Tinymeat’. Only someone as compulsively confessional as the impressionist painter Salvador Dalí would make public his lack of size. In
Unspeakable Confessions
he wrote:
    Naked, and comparing myself to my schoolfriends, I discovered that my penis was small, pitiful and soft. I can recall a pornographic novel whose Don Juan machine-gunned female genitals with ferocious glee, saying that he enjoyed hearing women creak like watermelons. I convinced myself that I would never be able to make a woman creak like a watermelon.
    Dalí tried to pretend that he did not mind, though the sexually neurotic landscape of his paintings suggests otherwise. His ‘anxiety about the small size of his penis was no exaggeration’, comments Ian Gibson in
The Shameful Life of Salvador