'Shit Was Like a Cheese Grater': All the Ways You Can Break Your Penis

I have never broken a penis. Not mine, because I do not have one, nor anyone else’s. As someone who has only ever contemplated the myriad horrors of having a penis in the first place – with mild distaste and sympathy – the injury fascinates me. 

For one, I never have to fear breaking my dick. For two, when you speak to a man who has suffered a penis break, the story’s climax is usually all of the blood. I’m not denying that one of the most humiliating and horrifying ways a sexual encounter could be interrupted is with a sudden spurt of blood… But it’s like, yeah, been there. It’s terrible for your genitals to just start gushing blood, isn’t it?

What I find really enticing about penis breakage is there’s just so many ways for it to happen. The most common is the snapping, or tearing, of the banjo string. Known medically as the frenulum, the banjo string is the thin ridge of tissue connecting the penis head to the shaft, which works to retract the foreskin over the glans. A snapped banjo string is the injury famous for producing copious amounts of blood. 

The full-blown-penile fracture, where the penis swells into a big, purple eggplant, is more rare, but grim. There aren’t any literal bones in a boner, when you “break” it, you tear the tunica albuginea, a rubbery sheath that allows the penis to enlarge during an erection. If not addressed, usually with surgery, this can lead to problems with erectile dysfunction.

Penis fractures usually happen on impact during vigorous, careless sex: it slips out of whichever orifice and slams against a bone. But since speaking with various penis-owners, it would seem there is a wealth of other calamities awaiting unfortunate cocks. Here’s all that we learned.

“My foreskin was too tight, so the first time I had sex it ripped a little. It was honestly ok. It had to happen anyway, otherwise I couldn’t have had sex.”

“I’ve broken two. It’s not even that exciting, I was rubbing a peen over his boxers and it rubbed his banjo string and it was a little bleedy. The other time, I had an IUD, we were banging from behind and he sliced his penis perpendicular to the urethra so it opened like a little cross. It stung when he peed. He went to hospital and got antibiotics, so no sex for a while.”

“My friend ripped his banjo string during sex and he filled up a shot glass with blood.”

“I broke this guy’s dick once and it was horrific, the most blood I’ve ever seen in my life. The room was filled with a metallic smell and I was like, oh fuck I smell blood. He was still trying to go at it, we were both fucked on MDMA so I guess he had tunnel vision. Light went on, boom, murder scene. My legs were covered in blood to my ankles and there were hand and ass prints on the wall.” 

“I went back to this hottie's house after a Halloween party and we were discussing who was gonna be top and bottom, we both wanted to top but I hadn't prepared to bottom. We had a sexy make out sesh and they were grinding on me really intensely, then I felt a sharp pain – I looked down and there was a bloody mess all over this person's white sheets. We both freak out and have a shower, they're super apologetic and I'm freaking out because it's still spurting out everywhere. We managed to calm it down and slept in the bloody sheets. The next day I woke up and caught an Uber to my house and got ready to go to work, after work I booked a doctor's appointment. They said that I needed to clean it with baby wipes twice a day and not have sex until it heals, it took a month and I was reluctant to have sex again. IF ONLY I BOTTOMED THAT NIGHT.”

“There was this guy I used to casually sleep with and one night we were trying to set up a threesome with his best mate. He couldn’t make it but he said his best mate would still be down to link up with me that night. I appreciated him offering up his hot best friend to a horny piece like me for the night. So I go over to the friend's place, we talk, drink and get into a bag of k and then slowly, things start coming off. When we got into his bedroom, the sex was going pretty well and I’m pretty sure I was ovulating at the time so I was extremely horny and at that point my coochie was like a slip and slide. Hazardous to be honest. So I start riding him (my speciality) and all is going well until the horrible awful happens.

As I’m going up while riding him, his dick just misses my hole so when I go down, instead of the dick going inside my hole, the tip hits my clit, and because everything in my lower region was soaked, it slipped right against the top of my pussy, bending his dick forward into a slight L shape and I bounce right on it, smacking his hard cock right in between our pubic bones. At first I panicked and asked him what the fuck happened and if he was okay and at the time he winced a little bit but then said he was fine to keep going. Which I think was the ket talking, because as my ket started to wear off, I could see the pain slowly overtaking the horniness in his eyes. So, like all things, it had to come to an end.

The next day, he thanked me for coming over and let me know that his dick was in pain, but that it was kinda worth it for my company. Yeah I’m that bitch. Over the course of the next few days, he told me that he went to the doctors to figure out what damage we had caused his dick and although he hadn’t been diagnosed with a broken penis, he was prescribed with abstinence and no self pleasuring for a week to allow for the penis to fully heal and reduce swelling. Poor thing.”

“I broke my banjo string like 18 months ago and honestly, it could be worse. I don’t know how common this is but the girl was wearing fishnets when it happened, she shifted her butt and the fishnet just lacerated the fuck out of my banjo string. Shit was like a cheese grater. It was honestly a 9/10 pain but only for a moment? There was a lot of blood! I didn't have to go to the doctor though, it healed really quickly... But the terror was a full 10/10, every guy friend I've told this to has physically recoiled at the thought. My dick healed fully, not an issue, didn't lose any sensitivity or anything at all really... I think that part of the dick, the actual string bit, has no nerves... The bit under it certainly does though.”

“We went to have sex in a hostel room during the middle of the day. He went in, banjo snapped, blood squirted on me, on him, on the friggin walls. I looked at him and was like, has this happened before? As if it was a type of cum or something haha. He’s like, no, what the fuck? And we were both in the bathroom trying to stop the blood from coming out and praying no one would come into the room and see all the blood all over everything. Had no idea that could even happen, we were both Google doctoring in FEAR.”

“When I was 18 I had just started seeing pookie and it was all new and exciting. One morning we moved from the bedroom to the shower and about three minutes in I heard him say ‘oh no’. I turned around and blood was gushing everywhere, I was immediately embarrassed because I thought I got my period. I realised it was him not me when he slid down to the shower floor and started losing consciousness. Water is not lube, the banjo string had SNAPPED. Mans fully passed out, then had a seizure. His eyes gave me this dead ass look while he was convulsing LMAO. I had no idea what to do so I called an ambulance. On the phone to the ambo, in his half conscious state, he heard me refer to him as my boyfriend –  that’s how pookie became boyfie. The ambos assured him it happens ALL THE TIME, and he was gonna be okay. We didn’t sleep together for two months after that, we were too scarred.”

“Doggy style… After school … Year 10… Riding that dick and he was hitting so hard from behind… He hit the wall of my cervix so hard and all we could hear was a SNAP CRACKLE AND POP. We had no idea what happened but immediately stopped. I felt a crunch in my coochie and immediately he let out a disgustingly horrendous yelp. We were on his parents’ couch and blood started squirting everywhere from his P hole. We both screamed and didn’t know what had happened or how it happened… Coochie too tight perhaps...

His Year 10 man-brain instinct was to call his best friend and lock himself in the bathroom until he arrived while I pondered and figured out how to clean the piles of blood off his parents couch. His friend came, I cried, wondering what had happened and his older sister walked through the door much earlier than expected… You bet your ass I ran home and I don’t think we spoke about it after, I’m not sure how his penis is going but I felt really sorry for it upon reflection.”

“I’m one of Australia’s top male OnlyFans creators and I am currently on day 26 of 30 days’ abstinence while my fractured dick heals. We were doing a doggystyle variation that looked great on camera but bent my dick in a funky way, then the girl flinched and ‘right angled’ it completely. There was acute temporary pain, but I figured it would be fine, and finished off… Then it was just a dull ache all day until the next day when it blew up and swelled to three times its usual size. I went to the hospital for an ultrasound where they were figuring out if it was a full fracture or not. I was definitely worried, my dick ‘soft’ was the size of a coke can… and when I went for the ultrasound they basically gave me the options two hours beforehand. 

Option 1: Blood clot/burst blood vessel – 4-6 weeks full recovery expected. Option 2: Full penis fracture – will require surgery immediately so I don’t get permanent erectile dysfunction.

I was scared for those 2 hours. A penis fracture is a hole exploding in the muscle wall – making it leak whenever the body is trying to fill it with blood, like trying to fill a tyre with a puncture in it. Thankfully it was just a burst blood vessel.”

“We were about 17 and he was too scared to tell his doctor or family. He pulled out and there was so much blood. We thought it was me, then we looked back at it and it was spraying blood everywhere! He had no pain until the shock went away then it would hurt him all the time. It wasn’t fully detached but tore it almost all the way through, it looked awful. He ended up blaming it on me to his mum saying I bled all over the sheets, the next day she bought him a mattress protector and brought up at the dinner table that we weren’t virgins any more (it definitely wasn’t our first time). We didn’t have sex again for months, he was so scared.”

“I broke my boyfriend’s dick when we lost our virginities lmao it was terrifying. The banjo string, not a full break. It was cooked because we were both like, is this normal? And I felt so bad, I thought I’d broken him for good, I was almost like oh my god was that assault?! Like are you okay! Why are you suffering?! So confusing. I was definitely too inexperienced to be dealing with that shit hahaha.”

“I was in London on the first day of my euro vacation, went out to an ABBA themed night and a gay club called Club du Fromage. As the night went on my friend introduced me to this girl and one thing led to another. We ended up heading back to her flat for what was sure to be a rambunctious night. As the foreplay entered into the next era, we started to do the thing and I felt a sharp pain. I figured this was nothing and continued. A few moments later I lifted up my hand, it was dark so I brought it close to my face. I saw that my hand was covered in blood and said to her wtf. She turned on her light and we moved apart from one another. Blood proceeded to shoot from my penis and a state of panic ensued, she rushed me to the bathroom and put me in her shower, the blood proceeded to squirt from my semi erect penis. Eventually the bleeding subsided. We then went back to bed. I was then rudely awakened (extremely hungover and with a broken dick) to my alarm warning me that I had to go to the airport and fly to Dublin. I left in a flurry, apologised for the inconvenience and rushed back to my hostel. I grabbed my bags from my accommodation, rushed to the airport and flew to Dublin. After checking in I went to the ER and explained what happened. The doctor told me ‘no sex for six weeks' and sent me on my merry way. I actually saw the girl out at a club in London two years later and tried to say hi and she ignored me and walked away. Which was fair enough in hindsight.”

“Me and this dude started dating and the sex was shit and he could never stay hard and then one day we were going at it and for some reason he was FEELING IT and I was like yeah righto let’s go!!! Then I was like, wait, I’m really wet, then I looked down and it was like a massacre. Blood EVERYWHERE. GUSHING. FALLING OUT OF ME. There was a brief moment where I thought I’d gotten my period, then we looked at his dick and his banjo string was fully yeeted off his dick and spouting blood. He went to try and clean up the blood on his end and I was just sitting in my bed like I had just witnessed a sacrifice, blood still pouring from my vagina because we’d obviously been doing it for like five minutes before we realised what had happened. So I had five minutes of projectile blood up in my vagina, and was excreting someone else's blood in these little clots for days. It was disgusting.”

“I broke my ex’s banjo string during tent sex at Maitreya festival while we were on acid. I guess ‘we’ broke it. So much blood. He didn’t really feel anything and tried to tell me I’d gotten my period suddenly but I knew that maths wasn’t mathing, so we had to go searching for the source with flashlights. We didn’t go to the medic tent and retrospectively I’m not sure why (aside from the being very high part). Afterwards he always thanked me for it?! Because now he could go harder without worrying about ripping it because it already happened.”

I had an operation to straighten my dick and one of the sutures popped while wanking – very macabre! There was an audible snap. It was a total surprise, wacky as hell, totally alien. It wasn’t like bad bad pain, like it is when the actual circumcision scar is healing and it’s tugging on all the skin, it was like this really foreign like what the fuck just happened feeling… Maybe like a popcorn kernel going off? There was this sound that was like clicking or snapping your fingers. When it happened I was mortified lol, but I had it redone a year later, no problems. I think on the whole the experience has made me more resilient. Like, your dick exploding? What could be worse?”

“It happened with my first high school boyfriend and we started screaming and my mum walked in and couldn’t stop laughing. I just remember seeing blood and then screaming and my mum coming in with a tea towel hahahahahaa. A bonding experience for us all.”

“I broke some guy’s banjo string when I was 18, it was a bloody mess… literally. It’s so fucked up. And he was mad at ME?! I’m like how is it my fault? Just because I have a gorilla grip pussy. He was all gross you have your period. I’m like nah that’s your dick sir. I ended up having to take him to hospital and he got it cauterised.”

“Not a broken dick in the same sense but one time at work a guy booked me and he couldn’t get it up. He ended up slapping his dick really hard over and over while saying ‘why won’t you work’. It was hilarious.”

Arielle Richards is the multimedia reporter at VICE Australia, follow her on Instagram and TikTok.