To Snip or Not to Snip

“So, David,” I asked my husband’s friend while we were all having dinner the other night. “You have a son. Is he cut or uncut?”

“Cut,” he said, giving me a strange look. “Why?”

“Lindsay put something on her blog asking people’s opinions about whether or not to circumcise our baby when he’s born,” my husband explained. “She got hundreds of emails about it.”

“From who?” David asked.

“Oh let’s see,” I said, shaking my head and laughing. “Intactivists. Circumfetishists. Foreskin restoration groups.”

“Foreskin restoration?” David spat, bits of pizza flying everywhere.

“Yeah, they use tape and weights to try and….” I bit my lip. “Well…”

“Unbelievable,” David snorted.

Yes. It was unbelievable. A simple request for advice from moms and dads morphed overnight into an online battle over the future of my son’s loins. Since posting the question on my website, I’ve been sent video of circumcisions, audio files featuring men singing plaintively about wanting their foreskins back, surveys claiming that circumcised men are happiest, excruciatingly detailed emails from strangers who want me to know why sex with an uncircumcised man is pleasurable and why it isn’t, and “proof” from conspiracy theorists that doctors want my son’s foreskin so that they can make face cream out of it.

I ended up wishing I’d kept my big mouth shut.

According to half of the responses I received, if I don’t circumcise my son, he’ll be a freak of nature, laughed at in the locker room, plagued by something called smegma, and sowing yeast infections and UTIs among his future partners, right along with his wild oats.

“I am definitely a woman who has seen a few penises,” one woman wrote. “And trust me, not that you want to think about this, but SNIP.”

“I went to school within 100 miles of Nashville,” another wrote. “There was one—ONE—boy in my school that was uncircumcised. And EVERYONE knew about it—girls and guys—because he was the only one.”

“As a guy who grew up uncut, is still uncut and still goes to the gym where 95 percent of dudes are ‘cut,’ it’s a horrible experience,” one man commented. “If I were in Europe, or Asia, yeah I would be ‘normal,’ but here I’m a freak of nature who has to ‘hide’ it as I did growing up. When some guy did happen to see, it was pretty tough trying to make excuses about it. I figure it would be less embarrassing if I had four nipples and a tail.”

“Quite frankly, uncircumcised ones look weird and kind of gross,” wrote one mom, “and I’d hate for my son’s partner to be icked out by it when he got older.”

“Did I mention I DON’T talk to my hippie-ass parents for not circumcising me?” wrote an angry dad. “Yeah, they wanted to make a statement about being humane. I DON’T see this as being anything humane at all.”

I pictured my son as a young man, uncut and uncommunicative. Eventually, I’d catch him on one of those sketchy daytime talk shows, interviewed in silhouette, complaining about his airheaded mother who didn’t have the good sense to have him circumcised. Clearly, the snip was the right decision.

Or was it?

The other half of the emails I received claimed that circumcision was old-fashioned and barbaric. Many people assured me my foreskinless son would hate me about as much as the uncircumcised one would. The men were particularly harsh.

“Your kids will despise you for making them mutilated freaks when they learn how wonderful the foreskin is,” wrote a guy named Ron.

A man calling himself “TLC Tugger” agreed. “If you do cut, you have robbed him of over half the sensual nerve endings he would ever have…. A slightly worse outcome is he hates your callously amputating guts.”

“You might want to Google ‘Foreskin Restoration’ before you remove anything from your son, to see what men really think about being cut as infants,” advised a presumably male “Anonymous.” “(You might want to save the information, your son might well want it when he gets older if you decide to cut him).”

Even if my cut son forgave me after I handed him the folder full of foreskin restoration facts I’d wisely saved for his 21st birthday, I’d still have his wife to contend with.

“I always thought that interfering with children’s genitals was the preserve of a few perverts and sickos,” wrote a British wife. “I had no idea, until I met my husband, whose sadly denuded penis was the product of his parent’s desires and handiwork, that there was an entire nation of them. I hate my stupid mother-in-law for foisting her ideas of what sexual enjoyment should be onto me. She had no right.”

Oh well. If it wasn’t the circumcision, it would probably be the comment I made about her cooking.

In the end, I learned that no matter what my husband and I decide, I can pretty much count on shouldering the blame (and probably the therapy bill) for any problems that result. Yet despite the glut of conflicting and often bizarre information, we have managed to come to a decision. What is it, you ask?

Ohhh no. I’ll be damned if I’m telling you.

 

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This column originally appeared in the Nashville Scene.

Header image via Josep Ma. Rosell/Flickr Creative Commons