***Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional. I'm just an educated woman who wants to share some rather important information about penises.
Congratulations! You've just given birth to a baby boy! He's alive! He's healthy! And everyone in the hospital keeps asking if you want to cut off part of his sexual anatomy!
Wait, what?
Circumcision (Warning! Wiki link has pictures of penises!) is the process of severing the foreskin (more penis pics on Wikipedia) from a male's penis. In recent history in the United States, a vast majority of the population received a circumcision as part of the normal order of things: Birth, wiener whacking, go home. However, lately, as young folks are starting to recognize the pointlessness (ahem) of circumcision in 1st world nations, a fairly recent and encouraging trend is emerging: Only about a third of baby boys born in the US are now getting their one-eyed snakes violated permanently by the knife.
By now, some of you are indignant. Some of you have stopped reading. Clearly I'm some uninformed person who can't understand the so-called benefits of a circumcised penis. Well, if you made it this far, please do continue reading. You may change your tune. Or you can have something to whine about later. Possibly to your parents.
Proponents of circumcision will tell you that it's "necessary" for hygiene purposes. This is utter nonsense. Millions of years of evolution did not produce a protective layer on a man's penis that was likely to cause his means of reproduction to rot off. The two main drives of all life are to survive and to reproduce. Consider that if this notion of the foreskin being unhygienic is true, men would have died very often of urinary tract infections or have been unable to reproduce and therefore not share their genes with the rest of us. But guess what? These men continued to breed so successfully that every man on the planet is born a tiny baby boy with a protective coating on his glans.
Oh, but you may protest that nature is an ignoramus. Men will get a greater number of infections if we don't mutilate their genitals, you say. And now the latest bit of trollop is that it's more difficult for men to contract and spread HIV if they have no foreskin. [Yet this has been shown to be untrue for men who have sex with other men (anal sex, to be more explicit).] The message of the notion of circumcising to avoid AIDS seems to be, "Well, we know that everyone is pretty skanky and ignorant about safe sex, so instead of trying something in the way of social education, we'll just give you surgery." Gee, great, huh?
For those of you who don't know, the foreskin is a sort of skin organ on the head of the penis (boy, there are a lot of explicit words in this post; penis, penis, penis!). It's a natural extension with no obvious endpoints or dotted lines which indicate to "cut here". Those of you who see your wang's head when your penis is soft have had your tallywacker whacked. (I share this because I've discovered that even many college males are unaware of their circumcision status and are afraid to ask.) Before you were circumcised, you had a foreskin that acted like a little tent just for your trouser snake. Many men have a ring imprint or embossing (if you will), below the base of the glans (penis head). If I had a guess, it's scar tissue or granular tissue, but your doctor could tell you that.
I'm quite well acquainted with the circumcised penis. And before meeting my darling husband's genitalia, I was admittedly nervous about the prospect of interfacing with an intact foreskin. I wondered if it would be icky. After all, most men get rid of that "unnecessary" bit of skin, don't they? So, let's talk about this fear.
The general conception many parents have is that the son's penis should be made to look like the dad's. We actually spoke with one nurse at the hospital (who applauded us for not wanting to get Jackson's dong damaged), who told us a horrific story about her own daughter. Apparently after several years, she had never accepted that the original circumcisions done on her 2 sons were good enough because they didn't look enough like their father. So at ages 6 and 8 years, she had them redone. I hope these boys later sue for emancipation from their parents. They are doomed, otherwise.
Please just consider for a moment how relevant it is whether or not your son's penis looks like his father's. You done yet? It's ridiculously silly, isn't it? I mean, what, are they meant to have some competition later in life where someone tries to determine whose is whose by photographs? My only guess on this one is that, like my former self, these moms and dads who are ignorant of the experience dad underwent as a newborn are wanting to do what they think is best for the child by trying to make his genitals as appealing as possible to the opposite sex. Follow me now to the next paragraph.
You'll have noted by now that the man whose phallus initially intimidated me to even consider is now my husband and that I have opted not to have my own son circumcised. What changed for me? Well, I discovered that a natural ball buddy (I had to look that one up on a list of synonyms; I'm running a bit dry) was not only not scary, but it turns out to be a lot more fun.
Fears I had: Oral sex: would it taste icky? like trying to mouth a flaccid man-cannon? Would it feel different in a way I didn't like inside me? How would I know how to hold it and treat it? Would I be more likely to get an infection? Would I need to help clean it? How?
So, let's talk about erections. (If I don't talk to you about erections, who will?) In the "standard" butchered gear of the modern man, the head of the penis is always exposed. When a natural penis is erect, it looks (and tastes) virtually indistinguishable from the chop-shopped sort. The head may actually be softer and smoother for the man with his penile protector intact. However a major difference is present when stroking is performed. The man with a severed foreskin requires some form of lubrication in order to perform duties on himself. Snipped men resort to all sorts of measures, from saliva to lotion to soap to apple pie to I don't want to know what else in order to smooth out the experience of jacking off. For a man to receive a hand job, it's more of the same. (Yes, some circumcised males can successfully masturbate without the assistance of foreign objects, but it's less common. In fact, mitigating a man's ability to masturbate is one of the main reasons circumcisions are performed in the world.) However, the normal cock is perfectly capable of being stimulated without additional aids. The foreskin slides with the hand in a smooth motion, gliding over the head (man, this sounds like a porno, not a parenting blog!) and transitioning back down to cover the shaft. It's a fluid motion that involves no chafing and requires nothing but a practiced hand. Or, I suppose, a willing vagina.
Now that I've mentioned the V-word, let's head on down there. With the fashionably scarred dick, a woman's vagina (as opposed to a man's? sheesh) must be thoroughly lubricated. This isn't strictly a bad thing. But when you just want a quickie without a lot of foreplay or spitting on hands or KY, it can be frustrating. However, the original model requires far less lubrication when Tab A is inserted into Slot B. The handy dandy foreskin can be thanked for smoothing matters over and acting as a sort of diplomatic emissary in foreign lands. Ladies, you'll love it.
Men, so will you. Or you would, if your parents didn't ignorantly snip off your bed snake's hat (thank you again, thesaurus). Your meat thermometer is a much more sensitive apparatus when all of its nerve endings are intact. However when doctors barge in demanding that "it must be done", and parents are of the mind that you're "just going to have to deal with it", some of the most sensitive parts of your body are removed before you are even old enough to know what to call those jerkwads who are always hanging around your crib, fawning over how cute you are. In time, your body heals and your brain develops and grows and eschews unnecessary information from the formative days. So you have no recollection of how it felt or could have felt before nature's efforts were thwarted by modern science. But consider: if all those highly sensitive nerve endings in your third leg had not been severed, you might be capable of sensing a great deal more physical pleasure.
If you'll allow me a moment to cite Wikipedia: (Warning! There are photos of penises on this wiki link! Also, prepuce is used in lieu of the word foreskin.)
Taylor et al. described the foreskin in detail, documenting a ridged band of mucosal tissue. They stated "This ridged band contains more Meissner's corpuscles than does the smooth mucosa and exhibits features of specialized sensory mucosa."[3] In 1999, Cold and Taylor stated "The prepuce is primary, erogenous tissue necessary for normal sexual function."[2] Boyle et al., state that "The complex innervation of the foreskin and frenulum has been well-documented, and the genitally intact male has thousands of fine touch receptors and other highly erogenous nerve endings—many of which are lost to circumcision, with an inevitable reduction in sexual sensation experienced by circumcised males."[18] The AAP noted that the work of Taylor et al. "suggests that there may be a concentration of specialized sensory cells in specific ridged areas of the foreskin."
Nerve endings! This post is getting long, so I'm just going to tell you to go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_effects_of_circumcision and assume you can sort out the intent of that link.
With a last little parting plea, I insist that whatever your position is at this point you make an attempt to visit
http://www.intactamerica.org/ and watch the video with Dr. Dean Edell on Circumcision. (At press time, the video is on the bottom of the main page of that site.) It's a very informative video, and if you know anyone at all who is considering circumcision for their newborn son, PLEASE have them watch it.
In doing research for writing this blog post, I learned some interesting facts. One of which is that the majority of the world's circumcisions are performed around adolescence. What this tells me is that in other cultures (primarily, it would seem, Muslim) the right of the male to choose the status of his penis is retained by that male. Moreover, because he is an adolescent, his foreskin would be fully retracted and thus not nearly so dangerous or insidiously painful to remove. I'm not saying it would be any kind of picnic, because there would still be all those nerve-endings with which to contend. However a boy of 12 years is much more capable of understanding the situation than a boy of 12 hours or 12 days. So, if you are concerned that your son might decide later that he so very much wishes to have a more difficult time masturbating, be assured that he can still retain that option at any age. Preferably when it's his choice.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, carefully consider the message I am attempting to convey, and look at the links I provided. And just in case you need me to say it one more time....PENIS!
P.S. And I didn't even cover the horrid notion of female circumcision. You may find yourself very angry reading that link.
well put Jess...my sister is preggers...doesn't yet know the sex...but she's mentioned if it's a boy she'll want him to look like his dad!!! aagghhh. If it's a boy...I'm forwarding this post to her.
ReplyDeleteMost of the talk nowadays around Down with Circ and Long Live Foreskin is by women. I think the reason for this situation is the enormous self-education women have been doing in recent decades on sex, genitalia, and relationship matters. To a large extent, the founders of intactivism are Suzanne Arms, Marilyn Milos, and Rosemary Romberg Wiener, writing in the 1970s and 80s.
ReplyDeleteThus in recent years I have read many woman-authored internet posts and comments against circ and for foreskin. This has deeply moved me. But the above post is maybe the bluntest thing I have ever read by a woman who is no cyberwhore. You have penetrated very very deeply into male genitality and that is to your everlasting credit. CIrcumcision and the moving bits it removes are intensely sexual. Those bits interact richly with your vagina during every act of intercourse.
Sadly, in Islam and in tribal sub-Saharan Africa, while male circumcision is performed well after a boy is out of diapers, it is NOT optional. An uncircumcised man who claims to be a Moslem is deemed a liar. Moslem parents who do not circumcise their boys are at risk of being deemed apostates, a capital crime. An uncircumcised man cannot marry within his tribe if his tribe practices rite of passage circumcision.