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Ask Marilyn – 19-year-old Considers Circumcision

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Ask Marilyn, Blog
May 2, 2022

The penis advice columnDear Marilyn:

My parents didn’t have me circumcised because they thought the choice should be mine. I felt a little self-conscious when I was in grade school because I was the only boy with a foreskin in my class. When I was in 7th grade, our science teacher told us circumcision was done so boys would be cleaner and healthier. After that, I felt inferior. Now that I’m 19, I’ve been considering circumcision for myself, but a couple of friends have warned me against it. My doctor told me it’s a simple surgery and a personal choice. That’s all he said. Can you tell me why I should or shouldn’t be circumcised?

­– Uncut in Milwaukee

Dear Uncut:

American doctors have been circumcising babies for several generations, so most  doctors practicing these days don’t have a foreskin. They learned little or nothing about the structures, functions, development, and care of the normal foreskin. Instead, they were taught it should be cut off.

Even though, at 19, you are legally able to consent to circumcision, it’s clear that your doctor has not given you the proper information for that consent to be truly “informed.”

Here’s what you should know:

  • A penis without a foreskin doesn’t work as nature intended for its owner or his sexual partner.
  • Amputating the foreskin eliminates the penis’ “command and control” nerve center, the normal skin system that allows for comfortable erections and the gliding mechanism necessary for sensory pleasure, foreplay, and normal intromission (entry during intercourse).
  • Circumcision amputates the tens of thousands of specialized, erogenous nerve endings that signal to the man where he is in relation to the orgasmic threshold.
  • It denudes and exposes the glans (head of the penis), causing it to become dry, calloused, and desensitized. Circumcised men talk about becoming impotent during their 50s or 60s while intact males tell me the urge doesn’t come around as often but their sensitivity hasn’t diminished.
  • Circumcision makes the penis smaller, too.

Your seventh-grade science teacher was wrong! Circumcision does not make the penis cleaner, reduce the risk of penile or cervical cancer, or prevent urinary tract infections, STDs, or HIV/AIDS.

Remember: Once the foreskin is cut off it can never be replaced. Though many men are now stretching the remnant foreskin to re-cover the glans and regaining the gliding mechanism and some sensitivity, the nerve endings in the foreskin are lost forever.

Your parents protected your body and your rights when you were a child. Now, it’s up to you to protect yourself, if you want to maintain the wholeness of your body and the fullness of your sexual experience.

—Marilyn

Related Posts

Marilyn

Marilyn Fayre Milos, multiple award winner for her humanitarian work to end routine infant circumcision in the United States and advocating for the rights of infants and children to genital autonomy, has written a warm and compelling memoir of her path to becoming “the founding mother of the intactivist movement.” Needing to support her family as a single mother in the early sixties, Milos taught banjo—having learned to play from Jerry Garcia (later of The Grateful Dead)—and worked as an assistant to comedian and social critic Lenny Bruce, typing out the content of his shows and transcribing court proceedings of his trials for obscenity. After Lenny’s death, she found her voice as an activist as part of the counterculture revolution, living in Haight Ashbury in San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love, and honed her organizational skills by creating an alternative education open classroom (still operating) in Marin County. 

After witnessing the pain and trauma of the circumcision of a newborn baby boy when she was a nursing student at Marin College, Milos learned everything she could about why infants were subjected to such brutal surgery. The more she read and discovered, the more convinced she became that circumcision had no medical benefits. As a nurse on the obstetrical unit at Marin General Hospital, she committed to making sure parents understood what circumcision entailed before signing a consent form. Considered an agitator and forced to resign in 1985, she co-founded NOCIRC (National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers) and began organizing international symposia on circumcision, genital autonomy, and human rights. Milos edited and published the proceedings from the above-mentioned symposia and has written numerous articles in her quest to end circumcision and protect children’s bodily integrity. She currently serves on the board of directors of Intact America.

Georganne

Georganne Chapin is a healthcare expert, attorney, social justice advocate, and founding executive director of Intact America, the nation’s most influential organization opposing the U.S. medical industry’s penchant for surgically altering the genitals of male children (“circumcision”). Under her leadership, Intact America has definitively documented tactics used by U.S. doctors and healthcare facilities to pathologize the male foreskin, pressure parents into circumcising their sons, and forcibly retract the foreskins of intact boys, creating potentially lifelong, iatrogenic harm. 

Chapin holds a BA in Anthropology from Barnard College, and a Master’s degree in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University. For 25 years, she served as president and chief executive officer of Hudson Health Plan, a nonprofit Medicaid insurer in New York’s Hudson Valley. Mid-career, she enrolled in an evening law program, where she explored the legal and ethical issues underlying routine male circumcision, a subject that had interested her since witnessing the aftermath of the surgery conducted on her younger brother. She received her Juris Doctor degree from Pace University School of Law in 2003, and was subsequently admitted to the New York Bar. As an adjunct professor, she taught Bioethics and Medicaid and Disability Law at Pace, and Bioethics in Dominican College’s doctoral program for advanced practice nurses.

In 2004, Chapin founded the nonprofit Hudson Center for Health Equity and Quality, a company that designs software and provides consulting services designed to reduce administrative complexities, streamline and integrate data collection and reporting, and enhance access to care for those in need. In 2008, she co-founded Intact America.

Chapin has published many articles and op-ed essays, and has been interviewed on local, national and international television, radio and podcasts about ways the U.S. healthcare system prioritizes profits over people’s basic needs. She cites routine (nontherapeutic) infant circumcision as a prime example of a practice that wastes money and harms boys and the men they will become. This Penis Business: A Memoir is her first book.