Circum-Size Me!

Heather and I have decided not to find out the gender of our forthcoming baby, but a simple headcount in my neighborhood suggests that there's about a 50% chance that we'll end up with a boy. (That is, of course, a lie. If I'd really based my guess on a headcount in my neighborhood, I'd be predicting a 75% chance our baby would be a gay man with a tiny dog.)

So, if it's a boy, should we snip the tip on this little guy? Should we pop the hood? Should we, to be blunt, unravel the turtleneck?

I don't know much about the unclipped member. I haven't seen an uncircumcised penis as an adult (outside of porn, which, of course, I've only seen at book burnings). My wife did meet an uncircumcised penis in college. She says it was "hard to work with". (I assume they were assigned a class project together).

I've only seen one uncircumcised penis in real life, when I was a kid. Most of the little boys in my generation were circumcised. In fact, I didn't even know what circumcision was until I was in second grade, when I met Rommell. Rommell (pronounced Rome-EL; he was East Indian, not the devilishly clever Nazi general of the North African campaign) was in my second grade swimming class. After class, we all had to change in the same damp windowless concrete bunker, so when Rommell's uncut johnson was on display, it - like all our ice cold microwangs - had retracted to the size of a quantum singularity. His still-intact foreskin didn't retract as much as the rest, making it look like there was a short length of tube at the end of his penis. As a kid, I natually assumed he was deformed somehow, but I kept open the possibility that his weiner-tube had some sort of nectar-extraction role in the springtime.

(This kind of misunderstanding is exactly why we have to stop telling the "birds-and-the-bees" metaphor to kids. It doesn't even fucking hold together on the level of logic. Sex is like bees carrying pollen from one flower to the next? That suggests that babies are made when a man has sex with woman A, collects the semen that was already present in her vagina on the end of his penis, and then has sex with woman B to impregnate her with woman A's sperm. You call that making love? That's not making love. That's a CU football recruitment party.)

(As long as the flowers are passed-out drunk.)

I feel bad for Rommell. He probably went through life thinking that he had a weird unit, even though it was the rest of us that were mutilated.

It's hard to know why so many Americans are circumcised. It could be yet another example of Christian Jew-envy. Christians think that if they get circumcised, when they go to heaven God will open their fly, take one look at their junk, and say "Oh! You're one of the chosen people. Go to the front of the line and collect your gift basket." These poor misguided Christophiles don't realize that God will smell the bacon-cheeseburgers on their breath when he zips them up, and then they'll have to stand awkwardly before God himself as he asks "Wait, you chopped your dick off and I didn't even ask you to?"

Anyway, circumcision in the U.S. isn't about religion. When I asked my mom about it when I was a kid, she said that you had to do it to keep things clean. If you don't remove the foreskin, she said, it gets all dirty and infected under there. The problem is that this theory is, prima facie, total fucking bullshit. If the real explanation is cleanliness and concern for infection, why don't we also remove the kid's tonsils and appendix too, and since we've got him strapped down anyway, let's sew his filthy, filthy asshole shut. How dirty can a foreskin get? At the absolute worst, you've got maybe enough storage for a tablespoon worth of smunge. (For Ron Jeremy, add a quarter teaspoon to taste).

Consider this: If a man's foreskin space is equivalent to a glove-compartment, women have an entire Bed Bath & Beyond to keep tidy. But you don't see that many filthy, infected lady-parts, do you? (If you do, consider switching services.) I think a boy can be trusted to keep that relatively small area clean, especially considering the amount of time he's going to spend handling the damned thing anyway.

Which is, of course, the real reason why circumcision took hold in the U.S.: it was a Victorian era cure for masturbation.

For real. Look it up.

Victorian doctors were so worried about young men "stroking the coonskin" that they decided that baby boys should be circumcised with no anesthetic. That way, they would have lifelong negative associations with their penises and be less inclined to rub one out. In the late middle ages and the Renaissance the vital task of creating traumatic penis experiences had been left to the Catholic clergy, but apparently by the 1800s the medical establishment had to step in and take over for the waning papists.

(Life tip: "Waning papist" is an awesome euphemism for impotency. Try using it on your next date! You know, after the inevitable "I don't understand... This has never happened to me before." Yeah, right. Tell that to your 10th Pabst Blue Ribbon, Skeeter.)

Anyway, I don't know what the prevailing medical opinion is, but my own extensive lab work shows that circumcision doesn't have much of a dampening effect on masturbation. (Or if it does, thank God I was circumcised, or I would have died of exhaustion/cock-trauma during the summer between 9th and 10th grade). If you actually want an effective medical procedure to curb masturbation, try removing the kid's hands.

You know, that probably isn't enough - a lot of guys would just give themselves a stump-job. Better to take the arm off at the shoulder.

And the leg off at the knee. Just to be safe.

The thing is - who gives a fuck? Does anyone really care about masturbation anymore? Show me a person who doesn't masturbate, I'll show you a person who has made some horrifying romantic compromises.

I could give you dozens of reasons why I'm not comfortable with it. I could bore you with the story of when I took a long hike in wet swimtrunks and flayed the tip of my circumcised jimmy so raw that I had to prop a twig in my wasteband to hold the material away from my battered but proud pantswarrior ("Your name is Toby!" my bathing suit shouted at the little guy, but he raised his head high and gasped "Kunta... Kunta Kente"). But that anecdote might be awkward, so I'll keep it to myself.

So never fear, little Logan. I pledge allegiance to your foreskin, and the united state of your genitals!