Daniel Lombroso on Men, Bodies, and the Silence in Between

Your last documentary, White Noise, took you inside the alt-right. Your new film, Manhood, follows a penile enhancement entrepreneur and his patients. How did you get from there to here?

I’m fascinated by the strange and terrifying corners of American life. When I learned about a revolution in girth enhancement—and a broader uptick in male cosmetics—I was riveted, and felt it was a perfect vehicle to explore male mental health, body image, and the often malicious influence of social media, porn, and the manosphere. In the patients, who often treated the injection table like a therapy session, I felt a portrait of a pained country emerge—one I hadn’t seen before. At that point, I knew it had to be my second feature-length film.

The film shows men at their most exposed—both physically and emotionally. How did you earn their trust in sharing such vulnerable moments, and how are you protecting that trust now that the film is in front of audiences?

I’m a patient storyteller. Early on, I booked tickets to Dallas several times and simply sat in the waiting room of a clinic, introducing myself to the men there. I’d explain that I was a journalist—previously at The New Yorker and The Atlantic—and that this wasn’t a commercial for them or the clinic, but that I had a genuine interest in breaking the taboos around the male body and male mental health. These men understood the pitch immediately. Many had been suffering in silence for years, and the ones who were ready to break that silence became the film’s main characters.

In Manhood, Ruben spends thousands on injections while his family faces eviction, despite his wife’s reservations. Meanwhile, the penile enhancement industry is booming. At what point does this stop being a matter of personal choice and become a question for public policy?

The body modification space is deeply underregulated, and girth enhancement is one of the most egregious examples. The main practitioner in the film, Bill Moore, is not licensed as a doctor or nurse, yet can legally perform these procedures in Texas—though a new law may change that. His outcomes are mostly positive, at least. The far more troubling cases involve practitioners injecting highly dangerous materials, most notably liquid silicone, which can turn the penis into something resembling concrete. We’ve met or heard from dozens of men who’ve been mutilated by that procedure, many performed by doctors operating with impunity. Because these men are already so ashamed of their size, they’re even more afraid to say that they’ve been botched—most staying silent, until now. We hope Manhood is the beginning of change: more regulation and closer oversight of what goes into men’s bodies.

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