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Do You Know: About foreskin restoration?

This is the fifth in a series of informational essays by Marilyn Milos, RN, founder of the National Organization of Circumcision Resource Centers and a pioneer in the movement to end the forced circumcision of boys in the United States.

The urge to seek what has been lost is all too human. And, the more personal the loss, the greater the desire to recover it. That’s why it should come as no surprise that more and more circumcised men want to restore their foreskins.

The foreskin (prepuce) is a unique structure with specialized muscles, blood vessels, and nerve endings. Because circumcision permanently removes that structure, neither the surgical attachment of skin from another part of the body nor the stretching of skin that remains on the penis can ever completely bring back what’s been taken away. However, lots of men report great improvements in their personal comfort (for example, sufficient tissue for a comfortable erection, decreased chafing with clothing and irritation of the exposed glans, and return of the gliding mechanism for ease of masturbation and intromission), and many “restored” men and their partners report more sensitivity, sexual pleasure, and satisfaction.

A little background might be interesting here. During Classical times, the Greeks greatly admired the male prepuce — the longer, the more elegant and aesthetically pleasing. They pathologized a penis with a short or missing foreskin, especially one that had been surgically removed. The Roman Emperor Hadrian hated circumcision as much as he hated castration, and outlawed them both. This stigma led Jews and other circumcised men to practice “epispasm,” an early form of foreskin restoration.

The modern foreskin restoration movement began in the 1970s, among men unhappy with having been mutilated as infants. The techniques — surgical restoration and tissue expansion — essentially remain unchanged from ancient times. A new and potentially promising technique — foreskin regeneration — is also beginning to emerge.

Surgical foreskin restoration involves taking skin from another part of a man’s body and suturing it to his penis. Unfortunately, even when the graft “takes,” this surgery often causes other problems, such as unsightly scars and the transfer of pubic hair onto the penile shaft. It takes courage for a circumcised man to willingly let a doctor cut his penis again and, when the results are problematic, the psychological consequences can be worse than the despair that led him to seek penile repair in the first place.

Tissue expansion, or non-surgical restoration, involves stretching the remnant foreskin, often with the use of mechanical devices (see photo). One of the earliest pioneers in the tissue-expansion method of restoration was Wayne Griffiths. During the 1980s, the ability of the skin to stretch became better understood and men began to develop effective and gentle stretching techniques that allow new cells to form, permitting coverage of the glans penis. In 1994, Jim Bigelow’s book The Joy of Uncircumcising! was published, and tens of thousands of copies have been sold. New, innovative devices continue to appear on the market. (Intact America does not endorse or recommend any of particular device, but readers can “shop” by searching the internet under “foreskin restoration devices.”)

A potential new development is tissue regeneration, a process being pursued by scientists in Europe and elsewhere who are working to regenerate many different body parts. Thus far, this solution is not available for men seeking to restore their foreskins, but many are hopeful that it will eventually be an option.

WWhile some people scoff at men’s desire to restore, men who have re-covered their glans describe their relief at having regained a sense of male wholeness (“I was born with a foreskin and, dammit, I’m going to die with one!”) and an increase in sexual sensitivity and pleasure. Now, who can argue with that?

For more information about restoration, check out:

http://www.cirp.org/pages/restore.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreskin_restoration

Author

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.