Unless you go looking for it, it’s easy to live in the dark as to what other types of dicks are out there. In fact, all sorts of shapes and sizes of dicks can be handed to you at birth in the Great Dick Lottery — bent dicks, double dicks and inside-out dicks chief among them. But for some, those dicks come with serious problems, so let’s take a look at all the types of difficult dicks together…
Penile/Testicular Agenesis
What It Looks Like: Penile agenesis is the absence of the shaft altogether, so it looks like a smooth bump with a wrinkly scrotum hanging below. In testicular agenesis, it’s the opposite: A shaft and no balls.
What It Does: Men with penile agenesis don’t produce the reproductive hormone 5aDHT at any point in their lives, and thus, they fail to mature through puberty.
The Fix: Without male development, a urinary tract cannot successfully form. So, penile agenesis is treated at birth by surgically redirecting the urethra to enable successful urination. The surgery ends there, leaving the patient sans genitalia, since a working penile transplant — one that restores reproductive function — has yet to be successful. That said, Andrew Wardle, a British man born without a penis, might soon be the first recipient of a bionic penis using skin nerves, and blood vessels from his arm.
Diphallia
What It Looks Like: One dick, plus another dick right next to it. Some diphallic men may have two penises of normal size, while others may have one or both that are small or malformed.
What It Does: Though you could be considered “ambidickstrous,” diphallia does come with a handful of other downsides, including increased risk of spina bifida and a higher mortality rate due to infections in the more complex renal and colorectal systems. There is one reported case of a dude with two functioning penises and very few complications, and his (extremely NSFW) AMA on Reddit is 10,000 percent worth your time.
The Fix: As the above case of two full-sized, functioning penises is very rare (and even the man in question went through a few corrective surgeries), most often the secondary, non-functioning penis is simply removed in order to prevent any future problems.
Webbed Penis
What It Looks Like: Picture your ballsack not ending at the base of the shaft, but instead extending down the shaft toward the head, not unlike a turkey’s wattle.
What It Does: Nothing. A webbed penis is often asymptomatic, but many will opt for surgery for purely cosmetic reasons.
The Fix: Much like a circumcision, the excess scrotum skin is trimmed away and reattached to the base of the penis.
Peyronie’s Disease
What It Looks Like: Instead of aiming straight like an arrow, or even curving just a little, the penis will dogleg severely left, right, up or down in the middle of the shaft.
What It Does: Affecting roughly 5 percent of the male population — and often due to injury or trauma later in life, rather than something men are born with — Peyronie’s disease can cause extremely painful erections and, in some cases, make sexual intercourse impossible. Scar tissue and lesions also can build up on the penis, causing chronic inflammation and more pain.
The Fix: A gamut of oral and topical treatments are offered, though the results are mixed at best, while corrective surgery is considered a last resort. However, in 2012, Collagenase clostridium histolyticum — an injectable enzyme that breaks down the stiff collagen causing the curvature — was approved by the FDA to treat Peyronie’s disease. It’s the first and only biologic therapy offered for the condition.
Penoscrotal Transposition
What It Looks Like: Imagine your penis and scrotum get flipped, or that your scrotum is basically anywhere but where it should be — i.e., directly under the shaft.
What It Does: Though extremely rare, a penoscrotal transposition can come paired with gastrointestinal abnormalities.
The Fix: A series of surgical operations done during infancy called the “Glenn-Anderson technique” fixes both the cosmetic appearance and function of the penis.
Hypospadias
What It Looks Like: In most cases, you’ve got a normal-looking penis, only the pee-hole is in the wrong place, e.g., at the bottom of the head, or in severe cases, along the side of the shaft.
What It Does: Affecting nearly one in every 250 men at birth, hypospadias is the result of an under-developed urethral plate, where the urethral opening is not surrounded by glands. In other words, your pee-hole simply isn’t where it should be, which will result in “spray.”
The Fix: Hypospadias is fixed with a relatively simple operation known as the tubularized incised plate, or “TIP” repair, which moves the urethral plate to the end of the glans, fixing both the appearance and the function of the penis.
Chordee
What It Looks Like: Unlike Peyronie’s disease, where the shaft is bent in the middle, chordee is a condition in which only the head bends upward or downward.
What It Does: In mild cases, chordee is merely a cosmetic issue — you just have a tilted helmet. In severe cases, chordee typically accompanies the aforementioned hypospadias, which brings its own problems to the table.
The Fix: Most successful operations on chordee happen between the ages of 6 months and 18 months using either a Z-Plasty (a plastic-surgery technique to align scar tissue with natural folds in the skin) or a tunica vaginalis flap repair (a penile-lengthening procedure that removes the excess scrotal web to enhance phallic length, thus straightening out the head).
Microphallus
What It Looks Like: Exactly what you’d expect: An abnormally tiny penis.
What It Does: A microphallus is caused by an infantile hormonal or testosterone deficiency, and can lead to a condition called Hypergonadotropic hypogonadism that may result in delayed or absent puberty, low libido and infertility.
The Fix: If caught early, testosterone and growth hormone treatment in infants has proven very successful in treating a micropenis. However, in adults, penile enhancement surgery is seen as a last resort.
Buried Penis
What It Looks Like: A normal-sized penis buried below the flab of stomach fat.
What It Does: There are two forms of buried penis, depending on how it develops. Primary buried penis syndrome is a result of penile tissue dysgenesis, where tissue either pushes or holds an otherwise normal-sized penis back into the pubic fat pad. Secondary buried penis syndrome is caused by either obesity or a radical circumcision in which the shaft skin is mistaken for foreskin, and scar tissue forms to pull the shaft back into the pubic fat pad. In either case, men may have trouble urinating, UTIs are prevalent and the skin covering the head of the penis may become inflamed. In some instances, men may be unable to get an erection, and if they do, it may be painful.
The Fix: If not resolved on its own as the child ages, surgical intervention — depending on the form of buried penis — is necessary. Among many possible surgeries, the operation may remove scar tissue or detach the ligament that attaches the base of the penis to the pubic bone to help unbury the penis. In the case of obesity, if losing weight naturally isn’t an option, a “tummy tuck” or liposuction may resolve the situation.
Quinn Myers
Quinn Myers is a staff writer at MEL. He reports on internet culture, technology, health, masculinity and the communities that flourish within.
