A culture obsessed with hard dicks and soft men.
There’s a new kind of self-care on the rise, and it has nothing to do with skincare or journaling. It’s about your dick.
Or rather, his.
Lately, I’ve been watching men, online and off, spiral into something weirder than fitness and more obsessive than skincare. They call it male enhancement. Not just to get hard, but to stay hard, grow longer, and feel stronger. It isn’t about porn addiction anymore; it’s about optimization.
And no, it’s not only the older guys. There are twenty-somethings spending money on cock rings and stretching routines the way others buy adaptogens or cold plunges. Wellness with a stiff purpose. Performance is everything now. Not just for sex, but for self-worth. The modern dick has a job to do, and it better not fall short.
Scroll through Reddit long enough and you’ll see it. Gooning forums. Edging trackers. Supplements with names like Vigor XL, HardMode, Shockwave Therapy for Peak Male Performance. There’s a full vocabulary now: semen retention, penis yoga, jelqing, hung culture, TRT micro-dosing. Dicks aren’t appendages anymore, they’ve become hobbies.
And the numbers prove it. Market research from Polaris projects the global male-enhancement industry will reach twelve billion dollars by 2030. Twelve billion, for pills, pumps, patches, surgeries, and devices designed to soothe the oldest fear there is: being average.
And yes, there’s Hims. The wellness brand for guys too embarrassed to walk into a pharmacy but desperate to fix what’s not working. Hims sells generic Viagra, and yes, it works, if you’re dealing with erectile dysfunction. If the blood flow's the issue, sildenafil will help. But if the problem is shame, pressure, or you believing that your dick needs to be a brand, that’s a different medicine.
They offer more than pills. Gummies, supplements, vaguely titled libido boosters. A whole performance starter pack for men who think their dick needs a morning routine. And the truth? Some of it’s backed by science. A lot of it’s backed by fear.
You can’t heal a wound by branding over it. And that’s what most of this is, branding your insecurities as self improvement. The pills help you get hard, but they won’t help you feel enough. That’s the part Hims can’t ship.
Most men don’t say it out loud. But scroll TikTok and you’ll see them hint at size the way women once hinted at waistlines. Quiet flexes. Sweatpants shadows. Then come the comments: What’s your stack? Your routine? Your source?
This is body dysmorphia with a new face. Like everything in wellness culture, it runs through the same dirty pipeline, insecurity, profit, performance anxiety, and the endless fantasy that you can become a better version of yourself if you just try hard enough. Or, hard longer.
Let’s not pretend this appeared from nowhere. Porn helped. So did capitalism. So did the comparison. We know what women went through with thigh gaps and waist trainers; now men are tracing their own path of quiet self-loathing.
Only this time, it’s attached to masculinity, not vanity. These aren’t guys trying to look good — they’re trying to measure up.
Some go deeper: surgery, filler injections, even risking nerve damage for half an inch. In one study from the International Journal of Impotence Research, men who underwent phalloplasty, medical term for penis enlargement, reported mixed satisfaction and high stress, even regret.
We rarely talk about that part.
We don’t mention the shame, the injury, the mental fallout. We don’t say how many men in their twenties already use Viagra off-label, or how many believe sex isn’t good unless they last an hour, bend her five ways, and finish with a pop shot fit for a browser tab. When every orgasm turns into a performance review, something breaks.
It’s exhausting. Lonely, too. You can hear it between the lines, in the forums, in the breathless way they describe “progress,” as if their cock were a stock they’re tracking. They call it discipline and self-improvement, but what they really want is relief.
And then there’s actual dick health, not the TikTok kind, the real kind. The kind ignored because men are too embarrassed to ask why it curves weird or goes numb after a cock ring. Erectile dysfunction. Peyronie’s disease. STIs. Nerve damage from overuse. It’s not sexy, but it’s real. The penis isn’t a machine; it’s tissue, blood flow, sensation, hormones. You can’t keep beating it into submission and expect it to serve you like a soldier. Yet men are conditioned to believe if it’s not hard, they’re broken. So they push past pain and fear, chasing the myth that longer or harder means better. It doesn’t. It just means more risk when you don’t know what you’re doing.
Somewhere, a man is tugging at himself at three a.m., stretching toward the future, hoping to feel like enough. Somewhere, a boy is screenshotting porn stars in Telegram groups, asking, “Do you think I’m close to this yet?”
I don’t say this with scorn. I say it with concern. I’ve seen what performance does to sex — how it shrinks it, flattens it, turns your pussy into a mirror where he measures his worth.
This isn’t pleasure. It’s panic.
And maybe the saddest part: most of them never ask what we actually want. They’re too busy becoming what they think we need. But I don’t need a dick that can deadlift. I need a man who can listen. Who can be soft without apology. Who can look at my body without making it a milestone.
So before you pump it, pull it, pop a pill, or sign up for surgery, ask who you’re trying to impress, me, or the version of you that never felt like enough.
If your dick needs healing, it won’t come from a bottle.
It might start with letting go.
Roux writes about sex, power, and intimacy with sharpness, humor, and a refusal to look away.
