You’ve probably heard about the various ways men can increase their manhood. There’s the injection of fat directly into the shaft. There’s also phalloplasty, notable because it involves cutting the suspensory ligament (which supports the scrotum), followed by a six-month weight program for the recovering penis. And now there’s Laurie Straub, a licensed hypnotherapist who says she has discovered a nonsurgical method for penis enlargement. That’s right-nonsurgical. No touching, no massaging, no peeking, either-and no risk at all. Just 12 weeks of hypnotherapy at $200 per session (or a program followed via cassette tape) with the easygoing Straub. That’s all. It’s guaranteed to add an inch to your penis or your money back.

Don’t laugh. It’s called MindQuest, and it works – or so claims her business partner and husband, Greg.

When they met two years ago, Laurie says Greg had a five-inch penis (he says that it was more like five and a half). She says the average erect penis is about six inches long (he says that a study her read concluded that five and a half inches was average). “It took me a lot of years to get comfortable,” Greg says. “But you see the porn movies, the superstars, they got the big guns out.” By the time he’d met Laurie, however, Greg thought he had come to terms with his not having a big gun.

Laurie Straub had already helped women enlarge their breasts through hypnosis, so why couldn’t she do the same with men’s penises?

When the two began dating, Laurie told him about her research on the penis: about how it is not made of muscle but of a soft tissue similar to fat in texture. “Most men don’t know that,” she says. She told him that she had already helped women enlarge their breasts and lose weight through hypnosis, so why couldn’t she do the same with the size of men’s penises? (The secret, Laurie says today, is that your penis starts way up inside of you; there’s another inch, maybe more, that just needs coaxing out.) Laurie urged Greg to undergo the treatment. He hesitated but soon realized that he’d grown accustomed to feeling inadequate, and he wanted to change that.

Greg underwent the treatment. Sure enough, after 12 weeks, he says (and she says) that the treatment added an inch to the length of his erection and almost an inch to its width, “It was awesome,” he says of the results. “I felt like a 13-year-old boy again.” But the “improvements” didn’t stop there. In the year and a half since the two were married, Greg claims to have added yet another inch to the length of his penis, bringing him up to a respectable seven inches, which Laurie “personally” thinks is the perfect size. He also helped Laurie tailor the MindQuest tape program to help end the lifelong anguish of poorly endowed men. “[The therapy] wasn’t really created for men,” Greg says. “There’s no way a woman can know what it’s like the first time a man hits the showers with other men, so we sat down and reworked it.”

Business was slow at first. But then last summer, Howard Stern has an on-air small-penis contest, and he turned the “winner” over to Straub. “He gained an inch in the length and almost an inch in the width,” she says proudly. Today, she sees about five clients a week who all seem to believe a bigger penis will result in a better relationship.

For the brave but small man who has finally made the decision to seek Straub’s office. It’s located in an alternative-healing center, which, not surprisingly, looks like a shooting range for skeptics, be they hung or not. Upon entering, one is greeted by the black-and-white photograph of a dove flying over a waterfall. A glance around the reception area elicits the feeling of disarray one gets when surrounded by New Age kitschiness, as if at any given moment a pair of roosters could come bobbing down the hall.

Beyond the office of the homeopath and the massage therapist and the scream therapist is the small office of Laurie Straub. The vinyl black couch has a puncture or two in it. And the walls are as scuffed up as a toddler’s bedroom’s.

Straub, however, is a relief. Outfitted in a sharp black and brown checkered suit that perfectly matches her auburn hair and soft brown eyes, the long and lean Straub doesn’t match one’s expectations of a penis hypnotherapist. With her easy smile and Louisiana drawl, Straub looks more like a hot high school teacher.

“I’ve been very shy and conservative my whole life,” she insists, further debunking the fantasy. “I taught etiquette for years. I taught nice teenage girls how to use the right fork. That’s why it’s so comical that I’m doing this for a living.”

Straub and I talk for an hour about the treatment and other men’s penises before we get around to mine and how to make it larger in just one session. “The mind controls the body,” she says. “You probably won’t get any growth out of one session. But you’ll definitely get movement.” “Movement” would be fine, I’m thinking, but then what if it really worked? I’d be packing some serious heat, the kind a totally dazzled girl might tell her girlfriends about over lunch at some swanky café.

Straub puts on New Age music and sits me down in a chair covered in an old silk tapestry. We go through fairly standard relaxation exercises: a blue cloud moves over me, she says, relaxing me, lulling me, causing my stress to temporarily disappear. Then she starts rubbing my temples. To be honest, I smirk at the idea of hypnosis. But when Straub tells me to hold my hands out in front of me and asks if I can feel the magnets pulling them together, I am surprised to report that yes, yes, I can! We then move swiftly to the “bathtub” sequence of the therapy. “You’re naked in a tub, and the warm water feels so good, so relaxing,” she says. Then the water starts swirling and twirling around your penis, and you feel some movement, she intones (I do). Not sexual excitement, she adds, but a different kind of movement. Straub loses me for a moment before getting to the point. “You feel your penis getting longer and longer and wider and wider,” she says again and again. She keeps repeating it, and I keep trying to think it. Longer and longer and wider and wider – my penis. The water continues to swirl and twirl, and Straub continues to chant, and I must do everything in my power not to smile.

In Straub’s defense, I am too much of a skeptic for her treatment to work. She told me that I’d be getting an unusual amount of movement in the following week and that it would be easy to write this article. While I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about my penis, it didn’t seem to move any more than it usually does. But writing this article was the breeze she said it would be, so go figure. But there are those guys out there wandering miserably through a wilderness of self-doubt. For these men, that extra inch is the elusive key to the city. And for these men, Laurie Straub believes she is the last resort: “If I don’t help them, who’s going to?”