WWW- MAYBE it’s what happens when you are the owner of the most famous penis in the world.

Not content with the fact that it was successfully sewn back after being separated from him with a six-inch blade, John Bobbitt went back under the knife – and had it made bigger.

It was, he says, performance pressure to impress the hordes of women queuing up to see if it was still in good working order.

“I decided to to lengthen it because I lost some of the length when it was reattached,” he explains. “I got some fat transferred there and added a couple of inches and increased the girth.

“It was a big challenge going under the knife again, but I felt I had to prove something. I didn’t like people calling me dickless.

“I wanted it to be bionic and show the world it worked. What with all the groupies and the porn stars, I must have slept with 80 women during that period. At first I needed injections in the base and Viagra. Now it’s no problem. Just tell me how long you want me to last and I’m there.”

It is 10 years since his first wife Lorena was found innocent by reason of insanity after slicing off his penis.

While little has been heard of Lorena since, Bobbitt used his all-American good looks and comedy surname to turn himself into a side-show attraction. He moved to Las Vegas, won and lost a fortune, went to prison – and even tried his hand at a stand-up routine in which he was the butt of his own jokes. He has been a chauffeur, bartender, furniture removal man and porn star.

He married twice more. He was divorced from his second wife Dottie Brewer within two months. Ever the romantic, John married the third Mrs Bobbitt, an ex-model, in the same Las Vegas wedding chapel a year later.

In many ways childlike and naive, he admits to being taken advantage of by those who wanted to make a quick buck from his notoriety.

AGENTS and lawyers have been and gone – most of them taking his money with them. One, he claims, disappeared with £150,000.

Yet he remains quite proud of his most memorable performance to date in the X-rated movies John Bobbitt – Uncut and Frankenpenis.

Just out of prison, where he was serving a spell for attempted grand larceny, he was thrilled that Joanne had copies to keep her company on those long, lonely nights.

“She found my films very – um – inspirational,” he says cheerfully.

Despite unflattering reviews of his performance from her predecessor Dottie, who said the botched enlargement has made his penis look like “a pig rolled up in a blanket”, it is clear John considers himself a red-hot lover.

“My penis is bigger, better and stronger,” he says. “Joanne certainly has no complaints in that department.”

If she does, she is not here to voice them. As we speak, she is off getting her lips surgically enhanced for her role as a horse-riding medieval princess in a local extravaganza.

Bobbitt is a shy man who talks in a low mumble with downcast eyes – except when it comes to his favourite subject, sex. And it is easy to see him as a perpetual victim. He claims he got caught up in a scam when a women friend who worked at a local department store offered him the chance to pick out what he liked free of charge. John said he took the offer at face value. The police saw it as part of a long-running £100,000 fraud.

He got 25 months. And if life in a Nevada jail is not tough enough, you should try it when your name is Bobbitt. Prison officials had to take special precautions to keep him away from the verbal abuse.

He steered clear of the communal showers at Lovelock Correctional Centre – washing just once a week and at night to avoid the unwelcome attentions of fellow inmates. But today, three days after his release, his face still bears the marks of a parting shot from fellow jailbirds: a black eye and two angry-looking scabs on his cheek.

He hold no grudges against Lorena for making him a household name, but has not spoken to her since. Asked what led up to the castration, his verdict is a masterpiece of understatement.

“We didn’t see eye-to-eye. Women can be extremely emotional,” he muses. But that’s not all. In a pronouncement that will turn the feminists who have pored over the case white with fury, he adds: “Lorena was highly sexed. She wanted sex at least every day.

“My penis gave her a lot of pleasure, so when she left I think she took the thing about me she loved the most. She wanted to stay married, while I wanted a divorce. She was jealous and angry and she saw it as emotional abandonment. We were always fighting. I was a player, always out and competing with my friends to see how many girls I could get.”

HE says there was abuse on both sides and adds: “Lorena was capable of doing anything. She stabbed me with a dinner fork and punched me in the face.

“I hope she has gotten the help she needs. But yes, I was a bad husband. I was insensitive to how she felt, so I forgive her for what she did to me.”

His last words to her, on coming home at 3.30am from a nightclub, were: “I want a divorce.” Later that night, a condition he calls “sleep-sex” meant that he unconsciously made sexual advances to her. When he failed to get a full erection, he says, his disappointed wife lopped off his penis in a fury. He woke up to find the sheets drenched with blood.

“I had this sensation of flesh being torn from my body,” he remembers. “It all happened so quickly. It was just a single slash and it was gone.

“I woke up into a nightmare. I got up, looked down and realised what had happened. I thought I was going to die.

“Lorena had vanished with it the second it happened. I ran to my friend and said: ‘My wife’s cut me.’

“At the hospital, I had my hands down my pants to try and stop the bleeding and the doctor told me to show him my wrists because he thought I had tried to kill myself.

“I took my hands away and blood just whooshed out from between my legs. The doctor looked like he was going to faint. They kept stacking towels on me, but the blood kept coming through.”

For a highly sexed man such as John, life without a penis simply wasn’t worth living. He desperately searched for a gun so he could shoot himself.

But Lorena told police she had thrown his organ into the car park of Seven Eleven store, and it was recovered.

Such an experience would have turned many men off marriage for good, but John believes he has finally found his “compatible soulmate” in Joanne.

They married in 2002, and John, never the academic type, says they held the wedding on his birthday so that he wouldn’t forget their anniversary.

But two months later, a row over a TV appearance ended in a violent scuffle. Joanne told police he slammed her to the ground, fracturing her coccyx and a finger. He had violated his 1999 probation for attempted theft and was shipped off to jail.

But all is now patched up now, says John, who views himself as the ultimate survivor.

Although clearly open to more offers to cash in on the Bobbitt name, he now wants to run his own trucking company. And though John may have one of the more unusual claims to global fame, he believes he deserves it.

“People look at what I have been through with women as a learning experience,” he says.

“What happened to me is the biggest fear for most men – and I came through it. It see it as an accomplishment.

“Andy Warhol said that everyone has their 15 minutes of fame. Well, I’ve had 10 years.”