‘Manhood’: Daniel Lombroso’s Film Inside the Penis Enlargement Boom

Documentarian Daniel Lombroso's new 90-minute film Manhood opens in select US cinemas this week, taking viewers inside an industry where a strip-mall procedure in Dallas costs $15,000 to $20,000 a session.

The film's central figure is Bill Moore, who is not a doctor. He performs outpatient penile enhancement procedures from his Dallas office and runs PhalloFill, a company specializing in "girth enhancement" that has expanded to 32 locations across the United States. Moore hopes to make the procedure as common as Botox.

A 2024 study of US Google searches documented rising interest in penile-enhancement injections between 2013 and 2022. Lombroso, who built his reputation at the Atlantic and the New Yorker, noticed the trend while reporting on plastic surgery at the New Yorker. "A lot of the stories I worked on at those places were kind of fringy subculture and oftentimes adjacent to white nationalism," he says. "I started calling all these practitioners. But to make an embedded film the way I do, you need someone who's very open."

Who is Bill Moore?

The film introduces Moore at home, kissing a pet lap dog under the covers with his male partner. His body, the film shows, has been nipped and tucked extensively. "Nobody would suspect I've ever had anything done!" he says.

Moore pitches his procedures as career-changing and depression-curing — whatever patients need to hear, as one customer puts it with a nautical metaphor. "Everybody wants a boat that's one foot longer," the man says while Moore administers a numbing injection. "The boat is never big enough."

Moore's clients, their faces more obscured than their ink-marked bodies, include a megachurch pastor and a border patrol agent. Lombroso captures the paradox of Moore — an out gay man from a conservative Christian family in the deep South — acting as what the film renders as a machismo whisperer to men who might perceive him as less than masculine. Moore also travels to medical conferences to show actual doctors how to enter the male-enhancement market, and his large house and car collection speak to his motives more plainly than his self-esteem patter, the film suggests.

What does the film say about male loneliness?

Lombroso frames the trend around self-esteem rather than anatomy. "Does your penis size matter? Probably not," he says. "But there are all these stats about the huge percentage of American men who obsess over it, which was foreign to me. And it connects all these other things we talk about — like how many older American men don't know how to make a best friend."

The film's clearest case is Ruben, a father of five so determined to enlarge his penis that he moves his family in with an ex to raise money for the procedure. "I have to sell my house this weekend, and I'm going to Bill after," Lombroso recalls Ruben telling him by phone. Ruben listens to Joe Rogan on the marginalization of men and performs to empty rooms at comedy open mics. "He's actually a very loving father," Lombroso says. "A good guy. But he escapes into these worlds like many of us do, and I think eventually it caught up with him."

Ruben's wife Lana, worn down by the strain, moves closer to divorce. "With very few exceptions, almost none of the partners in the movie wanted them to do this," Lombroso says.

Who is the film's villain?

The film's strangest thread follows David, a young man seeking Moore's help repairing damage from a botched procedure performed by Victor Loria, a practitioner who brags about growing up in a "connected" family — "We lived the Goodfellas life" — and keeps a malpractice insurance disclaimer nailed to his office wall. As David's story unfolds, his OnlyFans past emerges, and it turns out he shares a bed with Moore's partner and the dog. The throuple revelation raises the stakes around a corrective procedure that risks permanent damage.

Lombroso calls persuading David to appear on camera "one of the hardest acts of persuasion I've ever done. It took the entire film to convince him. We were going to use AI face replacement. But right around the rough-cut stage, when we realized he was the heartbeat of the story, we flew him into New York and showed him — and he loved it. Told his family everything. Now he's touring with the film."

What is the film's real argument?

Lombroso's sharpest claim is that the empathy Moore lavishes on clients amounts, in effect, to gender-affirming care — something few in the industry would name as such. "That's why this movie has a very light touch," he says. "So many of these things are funny and self-evident, especially to smart viewers."

Lombroso declined Moore's own pitch to undergo the procedure. "Bill tried to get me to have my penis enlarged," he says. "I said my mom would never forgive me."

Manhood is now playing in select US cinemas, with UK and Australia release dates still to be announced.