Marcus has a scrotal sac the size of a small cantaloupe. He’s 57, he’s been at this for over thirty years, and he has absolutely no plans to stop.

The practice is called ballmaxxing, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: inflating the scrotum with fluid until it reaches sizes that have no business existing on a human body. The most common method involves running saline through an IV line into the scrotal sac via a butterfly needle inserted where the base of the penis meets the scrotum. A liter of saline inflates things for 24 to 42 hours. More fluid means longer effects. Marcus told Men’s Health he’s graduated to injecting Surgilube, a water-soluble surgical lubricant, and has reportedly stretched his sac to 14.5 inches. “I’m astonished at how flexible the testicles are,” he says. “They just expand.”

On the subreddit r/salineinflation, which has over 8,700 followers, this is considered aspirational content. Members post photos, share technique tips, and describe the experience in terms that would not be out of place in a wellness retreat brochure. Electrifying. Addictive. Euphoric. Transcendental. Jack, a 31-year-old blue-collar worker, describes the buildup as “electric” and compares it to “really good foreplay.” “There’s this mass that has its own momentum and inertia,” Marcus explains.

Men Are Injecting Their Balls to Make Them Bigger Now. It’s Called Ballmaxxing.

The reasons people get into it vary considerably. Some are drawn to the transgressive novelty of it. A 29-year-old IT worker said, “I know it’s freaky and abnormal looking. That’s exactly what I like about it.” Others connect it to more traditional ideas about masculinity, the same logic that drives penis pumps and enhancement surgeries, which have been a documented industry since acrylic penile implants arrived in 1952. By 2024, the global penile implants market was valued at $545.80 million. Testicles, somehow, remained an afterthought until relatively recently.

Kevin, 33, got into it during one of those periods where everything falls apart at once. Bad breakup, rough patch at work, still living with his ex because the logistics hadn’t sorted themselves out yet. He’d already been piercing things, nipples, urethra, drawn to the feeling of having some control over something. Saline inflation seemed like a natural extension of that. “Taking ownership of my own body was a lot of the drive for it,” he says. Things eventually stabilized, and the urge went with them. He still gets it. He just doesn’t need it the way he used to.

Predictably, doctors hate this. Dr. Shirin Lakhani, an aesthetic physician and intimate health expert in Kent, England, points out that the scrotum contains “delicate structures, including the testes, blood vessels, and nerves, which are not designed to accommodate fluid distension.” The consequences of getting it wrong range from tissue and nerve damage to erectile dysfunction and permanent infertility, with gangrene and embolism representing the worst-case outcomes.

Marcus got his scrotum stuck in a toilet once after a two-liter session. The skin tore. He’s still healing. His next move is adding 30 cubic centimeters of Surgilube to the left side and 20 to the right. “That should be ‘perfect,’” he says.