Penises Make People Happy
Like Pancakes
When I first moved to New York City, there was a restaurant on the Upper West Side that was called Pancakes Make People Happy. It was open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and it served only pancakes. Most of them came as one giant pancake about the size of a personal pizza. They were served straight out of the shallow cast iron skillet in which they’d been cooked. The one I always got had a variety of berries in it, and it did indeed make me happy. We used to go for dinner after a bad day.
Having thoroughly depressed myself and numerous readers with last week’s column about the state of the world, I felt it was my duty to try for happiness this week. So instead of doomscrolling through my news “clipping” services—or more accurately in addition to doomscrolling, because I never miss an opportunity to doomscroll—I simply put the word penis into google and clicked on news. Like pancakes, penises make people happy.
This isn’t an oral sex joke or a suggestion that everyone go eat a bag of dicks. It’s an acknowledgment that searching for “penises in the news” has spit back some of our favorite stories. There was John Penisman the Danish TV show, the explanation of why statues like DaVinci’s David often have such small marble members, the sky penis drawn by pilots, the festival of the iron penis, and the recent discussion of de-dicking.
Today’s stories aren’t all happy, but they all focus on penises, which should at least elicit a few smiles. Plus, I’ve left out the most disturbing one about mechanic from Manchester who had his crushed by a runaway BMW. There’s no need for us all to feel the weight of that car while we’re trying to deal with the weight of the world.
We’ll stick to intact penises (and what comes out of them), at least for this week.
Does Ozempic Make Penises Bigger?
Ozempic and other GLP-1 medications, which have been hailed as miracle weight loss drugs, are known for coming with some unpleasant side effects. Many people experience frequent nausea and vomiting while others complain of diarrhea or constipation or both (which feels contradictory but can happen). Discussions on Reddit, however, suggest there’s at least one side effect that men are not minding.
Ozempdick.
According to men of r/Ozempic the drug that makes you lose weight may help you gain inches. A recent thread was started by user coffeebeardtv who wrote:
I recently measured myself down there and noticed I gained about 1 inch. Now I think people will say it was because of the fat loss, however at the time I measured myself before 4 years ago was thinner (sic). I also bone pressed during measurement before and also this time. Has anyone else noticed this change in themselves?
Others weighed in (dumb pun intended) on their own experiences.
Easyoutcome2978 said:
I believe this is true even my wife has noticed the change down there in me it definitely has that side effect
Itchy-Conference-9283 agreed:
Two and a half months in and I’ve definitely gained length!
And Weatherinfinite38 is really feeling himself inside his newly smaller pants:
After about 7 months on Tirzepatide in my case I gained 1.5 inches in length. Definitely not all from weight loss. It’s going to make people laugh when I say this but I gotta move the thing and tuck it down the side of my leg when I wear pants now and I NEVER had to do that before.
Many Redditors offered theories as to what’s really going on, and I have to hand it to them because these are the same theories that experts are giving their patients.
The first and most likely explanation is that people on Ozempic aren’t actually gaining dick size, but they look bigger because the area around their penis is getting smaller. As some Redditors eloquently put it FUPA—or Fat Upper Pubic Area—is a thing. I’d never heard the phrase, and grammar check would really like me to change it to Fat Upper Public Area, but a quick Google search shows all of the health sites have written about it.
When we gain weight, it settles in a number of areas of the body. One of them is on the mons pubis (for people with vulvas) or at the base of the penis. A lot of fat in this area can obscure the first inch(es) of the penis making it look smaller or even causing “buried penis” syndrome. Lose the weight—with or without GLP-1s—and your willy will reappear. This doesn’t mean your penis actually grew, it just became more visible and accessible which is a positive result in its own right.
As coffeebeardtv and a few of his defenders were quick to point out, this doesn’t explain his situation because he had measurements from his SUPA (Skinny Upper Pubic Area) days. (Nobody thinks that’s a thing, btw.) Moreover, Coffee promises that he used proper technique when he took his pre-weight-gain penis measurements by pressing the measuring tape into the pubic bone. This gets around FUPA issues. He further swears that using this same method today, he is an inch bigger.
This brings us to the second theory shared by experts and Redditors: blood flow. Dropping excess pounds has cardiovascular benefits. It can boost heart function, improve vascular health, and lower blood pressure. All of this makes it easier for blood to flow freely to your penis when you’re aroused which means you can get harder, and harder often equals bigger. Coffee didn’t tell us whether he was flaccid or erect when he measured, but if it’s the latter, this could be the explanation, and he seems to agree.
In his reply to another poster he noted that his doctor had suggested better blood flow as a reason for his increased size, though I doubt the doctor actually said that Ozempic “… could also be unclogging blood vessels down.” Still, Coffee explained that he had underlying health issues including undiagnosed diabetes and heart issues, and he acknowledges that these are the issues Ozempic is really addressing. As he put it, “I don’t think it made more meat out of nowhere lol.”
And this, my friends, is why, even when they are pretty much spot on, we don’t rely on Redditors for our medical information.
Don’t Panic: Men Still Have Plenty of Sperm and Enough Testosterone
I’d be willing to bet that if there were a continual sperm count monitor, RFK, Jr. would want us all to strap one on (even those of us without testicles because he’d probably have a financial stake in the company). He’s been one of the voices warning us that today’s men are less manly than their fathers and grandfathers and using the number of swimmers per milliliter as proof.
In a speech at the end of last month, Kennedy suggested that teenagers today have lower sperm counts than men in their 60s. And a couple of months ago on Fox News he said, “We have fertility rates that are just spiraling. A teenager today, an American teenager, has less testosterone than a 68-year-old man. Sperm counts are down 50%. It’s an existential problem.”
It's only an existential problem—one that threatens our existence—if his stats are right. They’re not. (NBC Health Reporter Aria Bendix did a great job explaining why in this article.)
The idea that sperm count is falling is not a new one. In 1992, researchers published a review of 50 years of studies on sperm quality. They concluded that sperm count had declined 50% between 1938 and 1991. This review was widely cited and became the topic of a Congressional hearing in which a one scientist proclaimed, “every man sitting in this room today is half the man his grandfather was.”
Great sound bite that I’m sure is on an endless loop in the manosphere, but many researchers have questioned the veracity of that review. Some argued that there wasn’t enough data from the early years to make any true comparisons. Others suggested that the differences spotted weren’t real but an artifact of changes in what is considered normal and how sperm quality was measured.
Some of these same complaints were brought up in 2021 when Dr. Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC, published Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race. Dr. Swan argued not just that sperm counts had fallen dramatically in the last half century, but that if they kept going, sperm counts could hit zero by 2045. Most experts felt this was way overstating the problem.
Soctt Lundy, a reproductive urologist at the Cleveland Clinic told NBC News, “… for every paper that you find that suggests a decline and raises an alarm for this issue, there’s another paper that says that the numbers aren’t changing, and that there’s no cause for concern.” He points out that measuring sperm counts can be tricky because they go up and down based on factors like how recently a man had ejaculated, time of year, whether the person is injured or ill. Lundy’s own analysis looked at studies between 1970 and 2018 and found a modest decrease that he claims is not enough to affect fertility rates in real life.
The truth is that declining sperm count is not why are fertility rates are going down. Experts say sperm count has to get really low to become a problem for any who wants to knock up a partner. Our falling fertility rates mostly reflect people’s choices to have fewer or no children. I’d argue that Kennedy and colleagues would do more for fertility rates by making this country a nice (and affordable) place to have and raise children than by worrying about sperm, but that ship sailed with the passage of last week’s morally bankrupt bill that will make life harder for non-billionaires.
There is less debate about whether testosterone levels have gone down over time. They have. Whether a man is 19 or 69, if you compare him to previous generations at the same age, he will likely have less testosterone. Kennedy’s assertions that today’s teenagers have less testosterone than today’s sexagenarians remains false. Testosterone decreases as we age so the teenager will almost definitely win in a head-to-head hormone battle, but Bobby does have a point. (Man, that pains me to write.)
Most experts agree that testosterone rates are going down over time because we are less healthy than previous generations. We eat more, weigh more, and move less. And as RFK, Jr. himself has said, more of what we eat is heavily processed. If he’d stuck to his original agenda of cleaning up our food supply, he might have a solution, but instead he’s f**king with vaccines, hawking wearables, and playing right into the hands the right wing “make men manly again” and “make women pregnant again” crowds.
This opens the door for fake solutions like Tucker’s testicle tanning, supplements, and testosterone replacement which Kennedy says he takes. (FYI: people on testosterone replacement will produce no sperm because it suppresses FSH and LH, two hormones needed for sperm production.) The testosterone-is-dropping-and-men-are-less-manly hysteria also opens the door for No Nut November and other challenges based on the false notion that holding on to your sperm is healthier. From there it’s just a hop and a skip (no jump needed) to the No Fap movement, which is dangerous and highly misogynistic.
The average man today might have fewer swimmers than his grandpa and less testosterone than Great Uncle Abe, but it’s not a sign of a personal health crisis or a species-ending existential one. We’re fine (or as fine as we can be with someone like RFK, Jr. in charge of our health policies).
Runner Lets It All Hang Out, And Wins Anyhow
To say track star Chris Robinson went balls out while running the Ostrava Golden Spike at the Metsky Stadium in Czech Republic last month would not be correct. If you said he went dick out, however, you’d be right on the money.
Apparently, Robison had trouble keeping it in his shorts as he ran the 400-meter hurdles. Those at the event say he was aware of the problem and kept trying to adjust himself as he ran. The commentators referred to it as “constant man-handling going on with the left hand” and were impressed that it didn’t seem to slow him down at all.
It also didn’t work. He finished the race cock-first in full view of everyone. Don’t feel too bad for him, though: he also finished the race first. That’s right, wardrobe malfunction be damned, he won with a time that was just a tenth of a second slower than his personal best.
He’s being a good sport about his embarrassing equipment malfunction. TMZ reports that a number of underwear companies have expressed interest in partnering with him to make sure this never happens again, and the American speedster is game. We may soon be seeing less of him on billboards and in magazines.