Penile prostheses come in two basic types, malleable or inflatable, and both involve surgery to implant the devices in the penis. In the case of the inflatable prosthesis, your surgeon must also implant a pump and a reservoir to hold the fluid that is used to inflate the penis for sexual activity.
For both malleable and inflatable prostheses, the surgeon will implant two cylinders — usually made of medical grade silicone. One goes into each of the penis’s two corpora cavernosa, which are cylinders of erectile tissue that ordinarily fill with blood to create an erection.
According to the Urology Care Foundation, the malleable implants create “a degree of permanent penile rigidity or firmness that enables the man to have sexual intercourse.” A malleable implant can be bent downward to allow urination or upward to facilitate sexual intercourse.
Other components for the inflatable prosthesis include the aforementioned pump and reservoir, the former implanted in the scrotum and a fluid-filled reservoir implanted under the skin of the lower abdomen. To prepare for sexual activity, the man triggers the pump that draws fluid from the reservoir to fill the cylinders in the penis making it rigid enough for intercourse.