A to Z of Sexual History: J - Jelqing. Everyone needs a bigger dick, right?

I don’t have a penis, but if I did, I would want it to be big. Size definitely does matter, and all men know it. This is why jelqing has always existed and will always exist. It has come to mean all manner of enlargement techniques; most commonly, manually tugging on the penis in a semi-state, which frankly just sounds a bit like half-hearted masturbation without the pay-off.

At a certain age – in the same way many girls will squat over a mirror to discover that mysterious Netherland – boys will cross swords with a stationary-set ruler and measure their manliness. If you’ve fallen short of your full six inches, or are just genitally greedy, jelqing is your only option – unless you want a surgeon to cut out the portion of your penis safely tucked inside your body. No? Okay, so this is what the average jelqing routine consists of, which hasn’t varied much throughout history, aside from the Get Fit jargon, that is.

Penile "workouts" are based around a daily jelq session of around 20-30 minutes. Start with a penis "warm-up" involving a bath or hot towel applied to the penis. This increases the blood flow, preparing the penis for a good jelqing. Lubricant should be used, as should an "OK" handgrip to encircle the base of the penis, which is then milked, moving towards the head and forcing blood toward the end of the penis. Sounds suspiciously like jerking off. For jelq safety, it should be performed at 45 percent to 75 percent erection. "Advance" jelqing happens at 95 percent, but never at full erection, as this is dangerous. Jelqing should stop if you become too erect or might ejaculate. After around 100 to 200 jelqs, warm-down again with a bath. Enthusiasts say you can see results after just several months.

Jelqing is thought to have originated in early Arabic civilisation where fathers would prepare their young sons for sexual relationships by teaching them this penile massage. Sometimes kids performed it on younger siblings. However, some people, cynical bastards, say jelqing is a recent invention, a practical joke which has developed a life of its own. Fuck those people though.

Another technique in penis stretching involves hanging weights on the end. It causes the cells in the penis to split and then reform at the expanded size. Anthropologist Margaret Mead reported Polynesian men in early 19th century stretching their dinks using a woven sleeve made of plant fiber similar to a Chinese finger trap. The dink was inserted into one end and a rock or other heavy object was hung from the other end. The Sadhus, the skinny scary holy men of India, and males of the Cholomec tribe in Peru also used weights to increase their length stretching their dicks to up to 16 inches, creating a flaccid frontal tail. Obvs, you can’t get a hard-on once you’ve done that.

There have been other methods used to increase the size. The injection of substances into the genital skin to cause penile enlargement is a common phenomenon in many cultures. In the 16th century, men of the Topinama tribe of Brazil allowed poisonous snakes to bite their penises in order to enlarge them (how they coaxed the snake to be so precise is a mystery though). The Dayak tribe in Borneo – in an effort to emulate the endowment of the Sumatran rhino – used to surgically insert a palang (a metal rod or bone) horizontally through the dick, as well as beads inside the skin.

With the dawn of the industrial age, jelqing went mechanical. The earliest patent dates back to 1911. Unsurprisingly, however, these metal and leather dick-screw machines proved to be unpopular because they were cold and uncomfortable to use. In 1959, Freddie W. Sell invented and patented the first manual penis pump called The Erector. I’m skeptical, but in recent years, studies have shown penis-stretching devices are effective. In 2008, a study published in the British Journal of Urology concluded that after six months using a penile extender for four hours a day, the 15 men involved gained an increase of 2.3cm when flaccid and 1.7cm when erect.

For the last two decades, surgeons have been chopping up man bits in the name of bestowing mighty girth. Lengthening surgery involves cutting the ligaments that hold the penis to the pubic bone and pushing forward a portion of the penis that normally sits inside the body. Thickening usually involves a liposuction technique – injecting fat into the penis from another part of the body. However, the vast majority of patients are disappointed, left impotent or, worst of all, dead. In 1994, a Miami aesthetic surgeon, Dr Ricardo Samitier Jr. (AKA Dr. Lips), was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to five years in prison for the death of his patient Claudio Martell, who bled to death while undergoing penis-enlargement surgery to surprise his wife. He should have stuck to jelqing.