But understand­ing that I was normal and healthy, and had been spared serious pain, did not banish the fear of ridicule in sexual intimacy. I still believed that the foreskin had no important sexual function, wrongly believing that an erect penis was an erect penis, cut or not. I did not see the light about the pos­sible sexual im­portance of the foreskin un­til I was over 40, after years of sexual experience and after reading summaries of Taylor’s work. Incidentally, because nearly every penis I have seen in the flesh has been circumcised, the circed penises I see on the web strike me as normal and natural, and to describe them as “mutilated” strikes me as too pejorative.

Circumcision was talked and joked about in college, where I began to detect a note of sadness and loss in the way some guys talked about it. The banter seemed to assume that present com­pa­ny was not circumcised. Decades later I read that some men resent having had something profoundly sexual trimmed at an age when they are unable to refuse consent or to protest. I observed that Jewish boys could make jolly fun of it, as long as no Gentile within earshot criticized the practice.

After my father was dead, she told me that before I was born, he had asked her to have me circed at birth. My mother reluctantly raised this matter with her European OBGYN, who flatly refused. Curi­ous­ly, my father never raised the subject again. I am also confident that he never changed my diaper! A few months later, my grand­mother told my pediatri­cian (who was not the Dr. X mentioned below) that it was deplorable that I was not circumcised, but my mother declined to do anything. I am still a bit sur­prised my mother reports no further attempts to have me go under the knife. Fact: I have seen a number of posts stating that the author was intact because he was born premature. I wonder if the 1950s USA saw circ as some­thing done in the first few days of life. If that window of opportunity was missed, the medical profes­sion lost interest in the matter, unless there was a clear problem in later life. My grand­mother never raised the matter with me; in fact, I was very much her favorite grandchild. If adults ever discussed intact­ness in my presence, they did so at times when I lacked the vocabulary to understand.

I suspect that my mother was torn between her European distaste for circumcision (she would chide me gently when I would pull my foreskin back in the bath to look like my younger brother) and her great respect for American medicine. During the '50s and '60s, the prevailing American misconception was that the foreskin should be removed because it was unsanitary (to which my mother had no counterar­gu­ment). She also believes that routine infant circumcision (RIC) is a Jewish ritual that somehow spread to the entire American population. She didn't want me circumcised, but had no medical leg to stand on. Finally, the whole matter was tied up with her sexual feelings. I still remember her staring hypnotically at my groin when she saw me naked as a child. The upshot must have been that the whole topic had become intensely emotional, and linked to other powerful dilemmas in her life, so that she simply could not stomach trying to unravel the whole ball of wax. When a problem becomes too intense, we tend to do nothing about it.

A very secular Jewess who had the hots for me in the 70s was disappointed when I told her that circ was un­nec­essary and she guessed my condition, but it certainly not did lead her to lose interest in me. She talked freely about it, thinking that it was legally required as a public health meas­ure. I retorted "Is there a law requiring us to brush our teeth?" Ironically, she later married a European clergyman, who was almost surely intact. Otherwise, no woman  has ever expressed puzzlement or disgust at my being intact, much less ever made fun of my foreskin. However I drew little comfort from this fact, because I believed that most American women of our generation were not even aware that men were born with foreskins. Rosemary Romberg writes that she was almost totally unaware of the matter until she gave birth to her third son.

Incidents that fueled my Aardvark Complex include the following:

·        The following incident is the only instance of genital play I recall from my childhood. Some­time before age 10, my regular playmate of the day showed me his penis and then asked to see mine. I screwed up my courage and complied. He shouted "Eew! It looks like a worm!" I laughed and put my tool back in my pants, but felt very much confirmed in my deviance. My impressionable young­er brother witnessed this brief episode and reported a garbled version thereof to our mother, saying that I had taken the initiative to expose myself (not true) and then let our playmate stroke my penis with a twig (if true, I had no recol­lec­tion thereof). Our mother, deeply disturbed by what my brother had told her, called me on the carpet. She referred to her version of this incident many times subse­quent­ly, main­ly to condemn the playmate involved, whose parents she considered white trash. She may have feared that I was straying into homosexuality, and later conversations revealed that she believed that homosexuality was, in some sense, “socially contagious.”—for her, homosex­uals were made as well as born. I lacked the vocabulary to explain what had really happened, and even had I known it, I would have been much too embarrassed to employ it. I denied nothing of what she alleged simply in order to avoid talking about what I later learned was my foreskin and the deep embarrassment it caused me.

·        When I was 13, the same Dr. X expressed considerable curiosity, now to me alone, about how I dif­fered from his other patients. Even though he was the father of several children and I believe he was happily married, he gently manipulated my foreskin in a way that struck me as less than fully professional and innocent. He asked me if any of my schoolmates were also uncir­cumcised (recall that I had only recent­ly learned what that word meant); I ducked the humiliating truth by saying I didn't know. Dr X was the only adult who ever made me feel that my penis was a problem. Other­wise decency prevailed throughout my upbringing. Still, when I was 31, a gastroenterologist gasped loudly upon seeing my genitals for the first time. Incidentally, I agree that every boy should have the retract­a­bility of his foreskin checked starting around puberty, although we need to find ways of doing so with a minimal effect on impressionable boys.

·        The prospect of having to shower before other guys in summer camp and in gym filled me with dread. On the first dozen-odd days I had gym, I kept my foreskin retracted using a rubber ban. It was hard to find the Goldilocks rubber band--tight enough to do the job, yet not so tight as to result in discom­fort. I soon discovered that I could very quickly pull my foreskin back before slipping out of my under­wear, and that it would stay back while I showered. I noted that the handful of boys (not all foreign born) who did not conceal the fact that they had foreskins also did not betray any evident embarrassment. But I simply could not bring myself to imi­tate their exam­ple. In any event, nobody in high school or college ever commented on my being un­cir­cumcised.

·        When I was about 30, I admitted to a younger man that I was intact. He was dis­gusted, telling me of his horror as a teen Candy Striper at having to clean under the foreskin of an elderly man bedrid­den in a nursing home. He did admit that a British friend he very much admired was also intact. Soon thereafter my friend and I vacationed together on a Mediter­ran­­ean island; he would go to nude beaches (yours truly the unbearably horny virgin declined to join him), indulge in one night stands with northern European women he met there, then boast to me the next day of how they were fascin­ated by his cut member.

·        2-3x a year, I played with the son of an American friend of my mother’s. He was kind and not over­sexed. When we would pee in the woods, he would begin with his foreskin fully extend­ed, then glance at my retracted foreskin (from age 9 to 45, I always peed with foreskin fully retract­ed), assume I was cut, blush, and try to pull his foreskin back, without complete success. We never talked about it.

·        One summer I took part in a 10 day scout camp in France. One of the boys had been circum­cised at age 9 because of a chronic rash. The other boys were fascinated about this fact and he talked about it happily and freely. We listened attent­ive­ly and never made fun of him. Thus I learned that circumcision after infancy was not especial­ly pain­ful, but that the recov­ery required about 10 days of down time. No boy knew the French term for circumcision, or the operation's religious signi­fi­cance until I enlightened them (my own knowledge was quite new at the time). One boy claimed that his father had told him that RIC was then the case in France; I could not make sense of that then or now. A boy interjected “Cutting it off makes no sense; I wash myself carefully down there every time I take a bath.” Much of their childish phallic humor, by the way, from the way an intact penis resembles a banana. The boys were curious about how I looked; while I evaded their questions, my habit of peeing with my foreskin retracted convinced them that I was circum­cised. I did not dis­abuse them and they made no fun me of me whatsoever. I was so uptight I could not admit to having a foreskin even to friendly intact boys.

·        In the 1970s, a fellow who studied in Italy once told me that Italian young men are incredulous when told that Americ­ans are all circumcised. A tall, buxom Sicilian-American engineering stu­dent, girdle showing under her jeans, told me that her saying “let’s talk about circumcision” to a tableful of fellow women stu­dents in a college cafeteria was met with stares and silence. I changed the subject.

·        Late one summer night, I was eating in a Mexican restaurant with an Indian friend. Ten feet from us was a table full of young nurses yacking about their on-the-job experiences with circumcision. One nurse described a boy born without a foreskin as “being born circumcised,” and the doctor's trouble in explaining to the mother that no circum­cision was "necessary." Another nurse described her excitement and cur­i­ous­ity the first time she witnessed a RIC. Yet another said that she was all for RIC after having seen an adult man hospitalized for “problems down there.” I cannot recall hearing the word “foreskin” once. It is curious how many of us can talk about its removal, but not about what is removed! Overhearing this conversation made me shiver in a very embarrassing way. Some years later, my Indian friend converted to Judaism to marry an Orthodox Jew.

·        I used to be very attracted to Jewish women, an attraction complicated but not dampened by my be­lief that a Jewish woman would have difficulty accepting a foreskin as part of her sex life. One of my hottest sexual fantasies was imagining a Jewish woman's reaction the first time she saw me naked. I finally met a young Jewish woman from the Middle East who, while declining to be my lover, was willing to talk frankly with me about matters sexual. She told me that she had had sever­al intact gentile lovers, and was adamant that this was not an issue with her. (She was no Jewish chau­vinist for several reasons: her family belonged to a Jewish sect many Jews do not recog­nize. Her mother tongue was Arabic, she looked very Arab and was not pretty. Worse yet, she was no intel­lect­ual and had not been a good student. Most Jewish young men did not find her attractive.) Like­­wise no woman with whom she had talked sex had ever mentioned it. After talking to me, she asked her closest woman friend what she thought about intimacy with an intact man, and her friend reportedly said that that it had never crossed her mind to think of that as a defect in a lover. In no way did any of this dent my Aardvark Complex, because I believed that it was hard for a Jewish women to appreciate the effect of universal cir­cum­cision on the expectations of American women of our generation. 25 years ago, tens of million of American women had no idea what a foreskin was. Even now, I bet most women cannot distinguish erect intact from erect cut just by sight or inter­course. The only easy way to distinguish the two is to manipulate the penis by hand or by mouth. Jews, of course, grow up knowing that there is such a thing as the foreskin, because remov­ing it is a defining Jewish ritual. I wonder if well-educated Jewish women are more likely to accept an intact lover than many American gentile women.

·        There is a remarkable scene in the 1967 (released in 1987) Soviet film ”The Commissar”, filmed through the wheels of a moving cannon carriage, of three naked Jewish boys taking an outdoor bath in an Ukranian “shtetl” sometime in the early '20s. The two older boys were circumcised (I bet the child actors had merely pulled back their foreskins; circumcision not being an option in the Soviet Union), while the youngest one, purportedly born after the Revolution, was not. The point was to impress upon the viewer how the Revolution had suppressed Judaism. I saw this film with my sister but dared not mention this detail with her.

The raunchy men's magazines don't say much about circumcision. I do remember reading about a young single Swedish woman who had immigrated to the USA only to discover via foreplay, to her dismay, that her American partners were all circumcised. I read an intact American college student tell of being shown a Playgirl layout of an intact man by two women stu­dents. They then said that they could not conceive of making love to a man whose penis “looked like that” (they did not know that the fellow they were speaking to was intact).

After decades of living in shame, I began reading about people of both sexes who would be downright envious of me! Anticircumcision activists who target their writings mainly at expecting parents, report receiving many thousands of letters from American men expressing rage and sorrow at having been deprived of a normal part of their sexual anatomy. (I suspect that RICs performed decades ago were often too radical; the skin on a flaccid cut penis should be quite loose, even wrinkled, otherwise there is not enough skin to accommodate an erection.) I am aware of the book by O’Hara and O’Hara, although I find their research methods naïve. I have even read a state­ment by a California woman, happily married to a circumcised man by whom she has had 6 children, declar­ing her passionate desire to be intimate with an intact man. I have found the following telling quote from Lara Loewenstein’s (?!?) column in the UCLA student paper:

There are young Ameri­can women who cruise the web looking for images of intact penises (Google makes this very easy). Nearly all web sites devoted to the intact penis cater to gay men, but I have seen two purportedly created by women for women.

Even though Novocain and related local anesthetics have been available for about a century, and have been widely used in dentistry, doctors performed those 100M circs without pain management. The possibility that the foreskin influences the quality of one's sex life, or that of one's partner, was a question not posed before the 1990s. I submit that all in all, the American medical profession has behaved very badly here, has failed in its duty to lead, and has breached the trust we naturally place in it.

1. Most fathers cannot face having their sons ask them in the bath or locker room "Daddy, how come your willy doesn't look like mine?"