Book Report: “The Genius Guide to Penis Pride” by Dick Johnson

Very light on penis pride and heavy on insidious misinformation and poisonous thinking about penises and manhood.

After this post about practical ways to stoke or begin to explore Penis Pride, someone pointed me toward a book that seemed like it might be right up my ally. The Genius Guide to Penis Pride is available all over the internet as both a physical book and an easy to download ebook/Kindle book published by Xlibris.

But boy should you read about it first, before you fork over real actual dollars, to see if it stands up to such a promising title. If you’ve got a bad feeling about that being the case, you’re probably not new here.

But if you are new to my blog, let me say that I don’t jump at the chance to speak negatively about things. I don’t like giving bad reviews or lecturing people about their behavior. But sometimes, I encounter something that isn’t simply bad on its own merit, but could potentially be harmful to others without some kind of disclaimer or second opinion.

Such is the case with the Genius Guide. Authored by someone (who has no website or social media accounts, despite calling himself a “life coach”) referring to himself only as “Dick Johnson,” the ebook version weighs in at a shockingly light 55 pages. Really more a pamphlet than a book at all, but still somehow 19 “chapters” long.

It’s worth noting at the outset that, aside from terrifyingly bad medical and psychological advice, this book is riddled with typographical and grammatical errors, the likes of which will seem unfathomable to anyone who has ever used Word for more than 5 minutes. Clippy would never stand for this.

The book also includes a disclaimer of sorts (buried curiously within the copyright page) which states it “is for entertainment purposes only. The author insists that nobody attempts any of the acts contained therein.”

Nowhere else is the book presented as a joke or entertainment, and in fact the author goes out of his way to insist that it is indeed deadly serious, encouraging people (who may have skipped over the copyright page, as people tend to do) to engage in all sorts of harmful, weird, and shame-exacerbating behaviors in ultimately futile attempts to make their penises larger.

Worse still, retailers have the title listed under categories like “Gender Studies,” and “Men’s Health.”

*Deep Sigh*

Let’s take a look, shall we?

A cure for a “syndrome” you never had before you read this book

Readers might recognize early on that they are in for a bad time and/or a strange sales pitch when the author begins things by setting up a “syndrome” from which he once suffered and has now recovered (and you can too!), based on his perception of his own penis:

I am not only the author of this book. I am also a former sufferer of what I call “small penis syndrome” or SPS. So if you suffer from SPS, or would just like to reap the benefit of an increase in size to your member, you have already conquered the first step by reading this book. Get ready to have a long dong….And if you already have one, get ready for it to be longer, and dongier.

The Genius Guide to Penis Pride, Page 8

Despite not ever describing what SPS is, what the diagnostic criteria might be, or why it’s even a problem (let alone a whole syndrome) to have a small penis in the first place, he immediately goes on to promise a foolproof solution: his book!

By page 11 of that book—we’re already somehow in chapter four!—Johnson is outlining techniques which promise to strengthen and enlarge the “muscles” of the penis so you can, I guess, take more pride in it.

Beginning with a maneuver called “the tug,” he curiously describes his own penis as containing “connective tissue” and “muscles:”

The goal here is not to pull so hard as to cause discomfort, but to pull on it just enough to expand the connective tissue and penis muscles for growth.

The Genius Guide to Penis Pride, Page 11

Here’s the thing though: no matter what this guy thinks is happening in his own dong, the shaft of your penis doesn’t have muscles. That’s not how penises are constructed.

Your penis isn’t an arm and it doesn’t have muscles

For our discussion here, the penis can be described in three basic sections: the Root, the Body (or shaft), and the Glans (or head).

The root IS, in fact, connected to some musculature (the ischiocavernosus and bulbospongiosus, specifically), but is located in the perineal pouch of the pelvic floor, and is not visible externally. No matter how much tugging you do, these muscles won’t make your penis bigger.

Neither the Body of the penis, nor the Glans contain anything that could be misconstrued as muscle fiber, and cannot be improved, enlarged, or otherwise enhanced by pulling or any other kind of “exercise.”

There are also two ligaments (the suspensory and fundiform ligament), which serve to attach the penis to the surrounding tissue. While some surgical procedures propose “enlarging” the penis by severing the suspensory ligaments, allowing it to hang more dramatically, this doesn’t often produce the hoped-for results and also won’t make the body of the penis any larger or more pronounced.

Maybe he doesn’t mean “muscles,” per se

For a few pages I gave Johnson the benefit of the doubt and assumed he was using the concept of “muscles” more generally, perhaps even as a metaphor of some sort.

But by chapter 5, he begins to explain how to literally make the muscles of the penis stronger and larger through hypertrophy (the overall enlargement of an organ or tissue due to the increase in volume of its component cells), the way a bodybuilder would increase the size of his biceps by doing exercise which prompts the growth and development of new cells and additional muscle fibers.

But the “muscles” he’s attempting to enlarge via hypertrophy are, in reality, only the Musculus bulbospongiosus, which is not a visible part of the external penis, but rather is connected with the inside end (the bulb) of the penis, and attaches to the pelvic floor muscles, in order to control urination and ejaculation, and assist with erection.

While it is reasonable to assume that exercise of this muscle group is generally beneficial for a number of reasons (particularly as we age), in no universe will any amount of bulbospongious contraction-and-releasing result in your visible penis getting any larger. Not if you did it 100 times a day, not if you took steroids or growth hormones, not ever.

One of the reasons I assume this book is “illustrated” with poorly lit homemade photos of someone (presumably the author) jacking off bananas, instead of anatomical diagrams showing what bodies actually look like, is that even a cursory glance at the construction of your dong is going to show you don’t have any muscles to exercise there.

Describing tugging on your dong as “very similar to when a bodybuilder goes to the gym and performs exercises to make the biceps, or any other muscle grow” is not just misleading. It’s patently (and demonstrably) false. And weird. Even if your boner were bound in striated muscle tissue, pulling on it isn’t going to cause that tissue to grow. If you saw someone in the gym endlessly tugging on their arms in an effort to “make the biceps… grow” you would know immediately that something was wrong. That’s not how muscles work.

It definitely won’t help in an area where there aren’t muscles.

Many men are saying the Genius Guide makes arguments like our former president

Red flags abound in this text, but none so red as the Trumpian phrase turn of “many people are reporting…” It’s a way for a lazy arguer to make something seem commonly understood or obviously factual without requiring any sources. Or, you know, facts. And it’s a technique that is artlessly sprinkled throughout this tome. As in this passage about—I guess?—learning how to control your penis with your body:

Many men who often partake in the practice of the squeeze and stretch find that they have fewer problems with erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, and report to have fuller feeling erections. This makes sense, because as the muscle grows and gets stronger, the body becomes more in control of the penis.

The Genius Guide to Penis Pride, Page 14

It’s like many people are saying these days: men who read this blog find that they’re more and more attracted to anthropomorphic animals with oversized and endlessly stimulated genitals and report stronger and fuller erections when they see them. This makes sense because we have a lot of that here, and just saying things makes them true.

Gimme a break.

Jelqing is just masturbating with purpose sorry not sorry don’t write to me

Chapter six outlines jelqing, a practice the author finds “so controversial,” he “almost did not include it in this book.”

At the risk of drawing the ire of the whole of the LPSG forums, I’m here to tell you that jelqing, like everything else this guy would have you try, is bunk. Often attributed vaguely to “the middle east” as a way to polish the idea with a patina of ancient mysticism (despite it being absent from Arabic dictionaries), jelqing as a concept is literally just a bastardization of the Persian word for masturbation, jalq, combined with the word for “hit” or “play” (as with a musical instrument),zadan (جلق زدن).

It might be ancient, and it’s possible it originated in the middle east. But jelqing is ultimately just aggressive masturbation. Sorry about it.

“I have no problem with the Middle East, but they do not have the best track record when it comes to penile practices to say the least. That is why much caution should be used with jelqing, as well as any other technique that originates from this part of the world.”

The Genius Guide to Penis Pride, Page 16

Yikes.

If you’re a practicer of traditional jelqing you learned online somewhere and believe it’s offering you some kind of benefit, by all means, go wild. But seriously reconsider incorporating this guy’s “groundbreaking research,” through which he has allegedly “perfected this art,” into your routine. I’d trust a random penis enlargement forum before I’d listen to Mr. Johnson.

What’s the point of all of this really?

I already said I don’t take joy in talking negatively about things. I would so much rather use this space and time to share stuff that makes me hard and brings me joy. But guys like this Johnson fellow deserve to be corrected and ridiculed. Not because, if he started out with one, he definitely STILL has a small penis, since none of these tricks or techniques will make a damn bit of difference.

But rather because he’s doing the very thing from which he claims to be rescuing men: shaming. This whole book is an attempt to profit off of individuals by reassuring them that they are broken. And that the keys to fix these broken or insufficient parts are buying things and doing exercises. Potentially causing serious, possibly permanent, harm to themselves in the process. It’s a display of callousness and cruelty masquerading as “help” and “care.”

In the later chapters of the Genius Guide, the author suggest that readers: “belt” (really corset) the abdominal area just above the penis in order to “train” that area to become smaller and make the penis appear larger; keep their penis from “atrophy” by trying to get an erection as many times as possible throughout the day; never wear briefs to bed because they will stop your penis from growing overnight; wear shorts with a hole cut out for your dick and balls when you sleep so that you can better “funnel the blood into the area that isn’t covered” by the shorts; and consume a variety of penis-growing foods ranging from garlic to red wine to beets.

If this sounds scattershot, it is. This isn’t medical advice. It isn’t ANY kind of advice. It’s a con artist regurgitating things he’s found on internet forums in order to hit the minimum word count for Xlibris self publishing. Because he wants to take advantage of people who already experience negative feelings and shame about their bodies and genitals.

This book ultimately contains no path to pride, only more shame

In the summary, the author includes several “testimonials” attributed to his satisfied “penile coaching” clients. No mention is made of the manner in which these “coachings” took place, nor are names given or even invented. These testimonials run the gamut from proclaiming the author has “a lifetime of penis knowledge” he’s ready to share, to “this man literally saved my life.” But curiously each testimonial contains the same grammatical and typographical errors found in the rest of the text, so perhaps best to take them with a grain of salt.

Oddly, in the last pages, the tone shifts from the earlier “you have a syndrome” to a more uplifting “[y]our penis is quality. Your penis is sufficient. Cherish your penis.” And that’s kind of the whole thing here, isn’t it, Dick? The whole thing you haven’t been doing for 55 pages.

-t

The Genius Guide To Penis Pride by Dick Johnson

Publisher: ‎ XlibrisUS (November 8, 2018)
Language: ‎ English
Paperback: ‎ 50 pages
ISBN-10: ‎ 1984564684
ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1984564689
Dimensions: ‎ 6 x 0.13 x 9 inches