Not Without My Foreskin

Where do my blog ideas come from? Sometimes from the most innocent of beginnings - I'm sure some of the people involved in conversations with me would be mortified at the blog postings that come out of my casual chats. Last weekend was no exception. A perfectly normal conversation that somehow got around to circumcision that made me exclaim "Oh my god, do you know there are losers out there who obsess so much about being circumcised that they go to a huge amount of trouble to 'reclaim their foreskin'?" Nobody else had heard of this or was interested in discussing it further.

A blog post is born.

It strikes me as absurd and perhaps more than a little sick, that in a world so full of problems and injustice, some men can treat the fact they were circumcised as one of the biggest travesties of modern life. Hey guys, you're free to wish it had never happened to you, your free to pursue your weird foreskin-extension programme, but don't you think you should get a bit of fucking perspective?

I will go on record as saying circumcision is unnecessary. I don't think anyone's built a compelling case for a medical need or even significant benefit for circumcision. Some people have tried - Dr John Harvey Kellog (yes, the cornflakes inventor) proclaimed: "The remedy for masturbation which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision." Yeah, nice one Dr K. I'm circumcised and, not that I'm of the opinion that masturbation needs to be "cured", I can safely assure the good doctor that he was off the mark with that idea.

Actually, the best pro-circumcision argument I've ever heard comes from gay sex-advice columnist Dan Savage who says, gay or straight, circumcised boys will get more blowjobs. The line forms over there fellahs.

So it's perfectly possible to mount a good case that circumcision is unnecessary. I just think you're undermining your case when you say things like "these doctors... have blood on their hands from torturing and mutilating thousands of baby boys." Oh, and forming associations like the International Coalition for Genital Integrity, the National Organisation to Halt Abuse and Routine Mutilation of Males (NOHARMM) and Brothers United For Foreskin (BUFF) might make you feel important, but to rational people it makes you look like a dork.

And the solution these obsessive types have is sometimes surgical but most often a stretching regimen that last for a year or two. Then these lucky men are "re-uncircumcised". I might be overly suspicious but after doing research on the web sites for these "fauxskin" evangelists, I got the creepy feeling this was just a bunch of guys who wanted to stretch and contort their dicks and are dressing this fetish up as a noble cause.

I'm sure these foreskin evangelists will say that I, as a circumcised male who doesn't give a shit, am in denial. But excuse me if there's a few injustices I want to sort out before I bother with "the crime of circumcision".