The penis might be designed to reach for the sky, but anatomically speaking, it is not built to grow. It's not a muscle, but a series of chambers and veins bound by a fibrous sheath -- a marvelous tool, supremely adaptable to changes of heart and climate. It lives in a state of constant flux, responding with ease to the onrushing variables of circulation, comfort and libido.

When a healthy man becomes aroused, two spongy chambers known as corpora cavernosa expand with the flow of blood and press against a smooth-muscle sheath, the tunica albuginea. This is the determinant of penile girth. In P.E. theory, forcing blood into the corpora cavernosa will extend the tunica's capacity over time and ultimately enlarge the penis. So the old-school cornerstone of P.E. is an exercise known as jelqing: gripping the base of the partially erect penis with the thumb and forefinger in a tight OK sign, and pulling upward to the head. Milking yourself, in a sense. In conjunction with various stretching exercises that target the ligaments of the penis and the tunica, jelqing and its many variants form the foundation of a P.E. routine. (A typical beginning P.E. routine, as dictated by Mike Salvini, might include 300 jelqs a day.) According to "Luvdadus," a Southern physician and active P.E.er, such exercises take advantage of the regenerative properties of ligaments, muscles and tendons. "For there to be permanent lengthening," he says, "there has to be some breakage in the covalent bonds of the collagen." This takes a great deal of time; some men report gains in as little as a month, some slave over their penises for a year or more without seeing any significant progress.

The first rudimentary training routines started circulating on the Internet in the mid-'90s, and as more and more men have become part of the conversation and taken up training, more and more exercises are added to the canon. Like theories and comets, they are often named after their discoverers. So a P.E.er looking to add extra girth might work in a set of Uli Squeezes or Horse440 Squeezes, an exercise in which you tourniquet the base of a partially erect penis with one hand, then slide the other hand in an OK grip down from the head. This is done, like any resistance training, in sets of 10 reps. (Due warning: Putting your one and only through the paces can leave you with thrombosed veins and strained ligaments. To avoid the trip to Genital Hospital, P.E. proponents recommend applying heat to your penis for five full minutes before every workout.) The result is perhaps best articulated by "WillB7" of Thunder's Place who tested the exercise soon after "Horse440" unveiled it. "Holy shit!" he wrote. "Tried these horse squeezes last night and my shaft expanded tremendously; it looked like [a] Boa Constrictor after swallowing an elephant." While some message board users are prone to hyperbole, many of them post pictures to back up their claims.

For men to seek such physical extremity is nothing new; a look in any weight room will find a handful of specimens who have transformed themselves into sleek V-shaped gladiators. But even weight lifting was dismissed once as the crazy pursuit of 98-pound weaklings. It needed a champion -- a Jack LaLanne, a Charles Atlas, a Joe Weider -- to codify it, package it, take it mainstream. Mike Salvini wants to be that man for P.E. "I feel like the world should know about it," he says. "It should be a clean, out-of-the-back-alley business." And while spreading the P.E. gospel to a skeptical world is a tremendous challenge for almost anyone, imagine how much harder it is for someone who can't always find the courage to leave the house.

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There's a boyishness lurking in Mike Salvini's face, thanks in large part to eyelashes so long and curled that they almost touch his cheeks when he opens his eyes wide. He sits on his couch in a sleeveless T-shirt and basketball shorts, his slender legs crossed at the knee; their delicateness is all the more surprising in contrast to a beefy torso. Tattoos on both shoulders speak to his wild past as a drunken, howling frontman for a hardcore metal band; he shows you videotapes of an old performance, and you notice a frenzy in his eyes. He was a solidly built man then, in his 20s, and now, at 36, the extra weight he carries in his neck and belly is as much due to the medication he takes (the antipsychotic drug Seroquel) as to the sedentary life of an agoraphobic. His dark brown hair is slicked back into a ponytail. As he explained once in a forum discussion, he keeps it that way because he likes it long, but thanks to the obsessive-compulsive disorder he hates knowing that it's there; the ponytail keeps it off his face and out of his head.

And lord knows there's plenty in his head. When he was 16, Double Long Daddy was a middle-school dropout with a drinking problem. (He left school after the eighth grade because he learned the administrators at his Catholic school had withheld his above-average IQ scores, leaving him to feel like a remedial outcast.) Also, he could not stop changing his clothes. He weighed 105 pounds and so hated his body that he tried to conceal it beneath layer upon layer of fabric. For hours at a time, he'd lock himself in the bathroom, adjusting, tweaking, stripping down and starting over. He had lived this way for years, washing his hands, counting things, dressing for a winter hike even when it was 90 degrees outside.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a tricky beast. You do your best to keep it in check, but the demons keep right on coming, and sometimes alcohol and drugs are the only way to muzzle their insistent whisper. So Mike got high, and he finally stopped -- stopped counting, stopped washing, stopped spending hours in the bathroom. For the next 15 years, he bounced between rehab and relapses, empty bottles and car crashes, painkillers and heroin. He finally cleaned himself up, only to revisit the demons. Lying in bed at night, he'd think of the cable TV remote, 8 and three-quarters inches long. Wait ... no it's not. It might be 7. And though he had measured every item in the house, he'd go downstairs to find the remote and set himself at ease.

Medication (the prescribed kind) helped, but it also killed his hard-on. So Mike was intrigued when he found a Web site that offered to strengthen his erection -- intrigued enough to start jelqing, hundreds of times a day. "After about a month," he says, "I started noticing changes." One day at work he went to the bathroom; when he sat down on the toilet, his penis hit the porcelain of the bowl. He went home and got out the ruler -- he'd gained half an inch. And when he looked at the underside of his penis, he saw a stretch mark that was exactly a half-inch long. It's become his own version of a tree trunk's rings, a personal growth chart that keeps his faith.

Today Mike spends 18 hours a day spreading the gospel of P.E. "I'm submerged in penis," he says with a laugh. "It's my full-time job." He's filmed a DVD of his self-designed exercises -- "Matters of Size: The Ultimate Guide to Penis Enlargement" -- that will be distributed in a few weeks by Vivid Entertainment. His Web site Matters of Size has 40,000 registered users and offers paying members videos, diagrams and one-on-one tutelage over private message and e-mail -- along with softcore pinup shots of his girlfriend Jen, a teacher and former dancer he met in rehab four years ago. (Jen and Mike also stage neo-Vargas photo shoots in their living room. When I visited their home in Western Massachusetts last summer, it was just after noon on a Sunday; Jen was wearing Mary Janes, white knee-high fishnet stockings, a schoolgirl blouse and braided pigtails.)

Mike currently practices P.E. for six hours every day and he's on what he calls his Phase Five Routine, which boasts seven monstrous-sounding exercises like "Slow Squash Jelqs" and "Isolated Compression Squeezes." As big as he's gotten, he refuses to stand up with an erection. When I ask him why, he just laughs: "Oh, I'm quirky. You don't want to go into that part of my mind."

Despite his lack of formal education, a rogue intellect has driven Mike to undertake a number of informal studies on such P.E.-related subjects as penile misrepresentation in pornography and body dysmorphic disorder, an anorexia-like condition that plagues a person with a skewed sense of his or her own appearance. Mike, not surprisingly, suffers from BDD. Occasionally he will reach for a ruler to measure his gains, and end up double- and triple-checking for an hour because he thinks he calibrated incorrectly. At one point, he was measuring himself so often that the chafing edge of the ruler severed his frenulum, the piece of skin that connects the head to the shaft.

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