What’s your take on circumcision? My sister is about to have her first baby–a boy–and is leaning toward cutting. I think it’s genital mutilation, and I have yet to hear a medical argument that makes any sense. If someone wants to be circumcised, I say let him decide for himself when he’s old enough. What do you think? –Concerned Uncle
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We did an open adoption, which means we met our son’s bio-mom shortly before he was born, and she told us the baby was going to be a boy. We didn’t really discuss circumcision before the baby came, both of us assuming we’d get our son circumcised. But at the hospital, holding our newborn son, I found myself feeling unexpectedly ambivalent about circumcision. Even before he was officially ours, before any of the papers had been signed, the urge to protect my son and keep him from harm was overwhelming. However much his future sex partners might thank me for having him cut, the thought of a doctor taking a scalpel to his little dick and hacking the end off without anesthesia–well, that seemed to me like harm.
Again, my support for the routine circumcision of newborn males has always been tied to my habit of putting adult males’ penises in my mouth. At the hospital, changing our son’s first diaper, I realized I was looking at one of only a handful of penises that I can say with total certainty won’t ever find their ways into my mouth (the others belonging to my two brothers, my father, and my stepfather). If there was ever a penis that–for all it matters to me–could keep its stanky ol’ foreskin, this was it. We should leave our son intact, I told my boyfriend, teach him how to wash this thing we don’t have, and let him make up his own mind about his foreskin when he’s old enough to get tattoos and facial piercings.
The Kinsey dick data showed that gay men’s penises, on average, were around a third of an inch bigger (6.46 inches erect for gay men, 6.14 erect for straight men). Bogaert and Hershberger discuss several reasons this might be, including prenatal hormone levels, biological mechanisms regulating genital growth, and vain gay men reporting that their dicks are way bigger than they actually are (“Homosexual men may be more likely than heterosexual men to exaggerate the size of their penises”). Bogaert and Hershberger dismiss the gay-men-are-fibbing explanation, observing that straight men are just as likely to fib (“Gay men may be more concerned than straight men with some elements of the body, [but] heterosexual men are in fact concerned–even preoccupied–about the size of their penises and often desire a larger one”).
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