I suppose one of my most entertaining mistakes of the last year was letting the folks at… I suppose one of my most entertaining mistakes of the last year was letting the folks at Hotmail.com know that I’m an 18- to 24-year-old male. If you don’t already know, being in this age group prompts them to assume that you have enough spare libido to keep Vegas lit and air conditioned until Siegfried and Roy are embalmed.

The mad scientists at spam headquarters must be able to recognize a certain sexual frustration in the way that I type when I’m online – a bit faster on the “S” key, perhaps. Anyway, for some reason I receive several orders of magnitude more spam than your average computer user.

Even with my junk mail filters working overtime, every morning still proves to be a time when I can catch an update of J.Lo’s interplanetary, cross-gender, multi-species, necrophiliac sexual escapades, or see what’s new in the penis enlargement community.

Six or seven exclamation points are usually needed to convey the excitement I should feel when I realize I can transform my penis from post-natal rat pup into Vulcan’s stithy “without creams or pills.” I’m no urban planner, but if someone had invented a drug to increase penis size, that stuff would have been in the water before the end of the Clinton administration.

Even though I’m a bit suspicious of penis enlargement e-mail, sometimes a message will catch my eye. Usually, the links that I follow are the most benign. Things along the lines of:

Jason: You are an excellent candidate for penis enlargement!

Click here for the intelligent man’s solution to penis enlargement.

Increase the size of your penis safely and effectively.

It was this last one that particularly caught my attention. If their selling point is the safety of their method, I reasoned, then that means that most methods are pretty unsafe. Well, safety is my middle name, and I wanted to inform myself in case I ever need to counsel some of my less endowed friends. I followed the link, and was sent to a Web page with a preface by a real, actual doctor who was naked except for a stethoscope and a tag bearing the name “Dr. Reginald Biggerstaff.”

The page was full of neat trivia and was brimming with before and after pix. There was one particularly vivid photo-essay that chronicled a brave young man’s struggle from “adequate” to “Apollo 11.” All the while, Dr. Reginald assured me that, like most problems in society, penis size is addressable through diet and exercise. It turns out that you can trump nature with a regimen of penile iron-pumping.

These exercises fell into a few basic categories. “Pulling” (inevitable given the presence of both hand and hard-on), “slapping” (who hasn’t given the occasional?), and “milking” (for me, a bit problematic). On this last one, you’re told to find the appropriate level of vigor. Too little and nothing happens. Too much, and your member may start to resemble Cujo’s teething ring. No pain, no gain, I guess.

Overall, this was a very educational experience. For one thing, I learned that there is a community of men far more proactive about “enhancement” than I. And my brain is now a potpourri of penis enlargement factoids. So if I ever decide to commit to enlargement, or if the government demands that I transform my penis into a tool for extracting security information, at least I’ll have a, er … leg up on the competition.

Jason Castro can be reached at [email protected].