Thursday, September 22, 2011

Part 29, Ignorance

My friend OtherKurt, one of a handful of other Kurt's I've known in my life, at the age of 27, didn't know that he was circumcised.

Here's how he found out that he was:

OtherKurt and a guy named Tim and I were sitting around the office one day having a discussion.  Now OtherKurt and his wife were planning on starting a family soon, and at some point in the discussion OtherKurt said "If we have a boy, we'll have him circumcised."

Now at this point in my life—I was 27, same age as OtherKurt—I think I had only ever discussed my negative feelings about my own circumcision with one other person, that person being B., my old BEER-drinking buddy from college.  I remember feeling really conflicted.  I felt like I had a moral obligation to say something to discourage OtherKurt from cutting up his unborn child's genitals, but I couldn't bring myself to say what I really felt about circumcision, that it was a sexual assault that had left me disfigured and obliterated part of my sexual experience.

So I kept it pretty impersonal.  I said, "You know, circumcision is medically unnecessary."

Then OtherKurt said, "Yeah, I know it's unnecessary.  I just want to have it done."

To this day, I couldn't tell you why he wanted to have it done, but he and his wife were kind of compulsive shoppers, so maybe that was it.  They'd watch this home shopping channel on the TV together for hours at a time.  Sometimes he'd call me up after work and tell me about something they were selling on the TV that he thought I might be interested in, and he'd offer to order it for me.  I like to cook, so I bought a few things for the kitchen.  And once in a weak moment, a briefcase. 

I know.  I'm the last person in the world you would think would need a briefcase, but I guess I got caught up in the moment.

So maybe OtherKurt thought of circumcision as another consumer item.  "Call now.  Lock in this special introductory price while supplies last."  Maybe it was like that.

Anyway, I didn't know how to respond to this consumerist approach to the whole issue.  I'd never thought about it in those terms before, but it didn't matter because my coworker Tim, seldom at a loss for words, buried my stunned silence under a flurry of questions.  "Circumcised?  Why would you want your kid circumcised?  Is it because you're circumcised?  Is it because you want to match or somethin'?"

OtherKurt said, "No, I'm not circumcised."

Tim said, "No way, dude, everybody our age is circumcised."  (We were all born in the early 1960s.)  "Where were you born?"

"Philadelphia," OtherKurt said.

Tim said "Dude, you're circumcised.  You're totally circumcised.  Hold on.  Let me get a sheeta paper."

Tim leaned over OtherKurt's desk, grabbed a ball point pen out of a plastic cup and scribbled.

Tim tapped his finger on the page.  "This is circumcised," he said.  "This is uncircumcised.  Which one do you look like?"

"This one here," OtherKurt said.

Tim said, "I thought so.  Dude, you're circumcised."  He pointed again at his doodle.  "That's circumcised.  That's uncircumcised."

OtherKurt made a sound like you make when you get poop on your shoes, and then he said "You mean like a dog?!"

Many times in my life I've wondered what exactly were those people thinking when they were circumcising all us little baby boys back in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s?  All those parents and obstetricians and experts like Dr. Spock, what kind of world did they think we were going to live in?  Did they think we were going to live in a world where circumcision was such a pervasive cultural norm that we wouldn't ever know that our genitals had been surgically altered?  It would just never occur to us that a penis could look like anything but Tim's circumcised penis doodle?  Was that the expectation?

That must have been the expectation, right?  Because did you ever hear of a dad sitting down and saying to his son, "Listen, I know you must be wondering about that scar tissue on your penis.  Let me explain what that's all about."

And then sometimes I think that maybe it wasn't so unreasonable to expect that kind of ignorance from us, because so many of us, like my friend OtherKurt, seemed to make it to adulthood with such a limited understanding of penile anatomy.

In the about the second or third chapter of Wallerstein's book, Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy, he debunks the studies that found a link between foreskin and cervical cancer, and one way he debunks the studies is he says that the studies relied on self-reporting of circumcision status, and subsequent studies had shown that women could not reliably report their husbands' circumcision status.

Not only that, says Wallerstein, one study showed that 34 percent of men reported their own circumcision status inaccurately.  Let me repeat that so you know it's not a typo.  34 percent.

Now I'm no statistician, but if I ask you your circumcision status, don't you have a 50 percent chance of guessing right?  So doesn't that mean that a 34 percent error rate would indicate that OtherKurt's ignorance with regard his own circumcision wasn't such an anomaly?

I don't think it was.  I think that ignorance has always been an essential part of America's circumcision culture.  I think that's what circumcision's apologists mean when they say "He'll never know what he's missing."  They mean "He'll live in a world where nobody knows what a natural penis looks like.  He'll live in a world where nobody knows that a foreskin is part of a man's body."

The problem with that logic, though, is that nobody really lives in that world.  You might live in that world until you're 10 or 15 or 27 or 32, but then all of a sudden one day you're having a conversation with your friends, or you're watching a hygiene film or, who knows, running around on a nude beach on the Balkan Peninsula, and you find out what you're missing, and that world ceases to exist.

It's only a question of when and how.

12 comments:

  1. Wow. I think you've really touched on something here... I think this is EXACTLY what those doctors are thinking.

    It's EXACTLY what doctors TODAY are thinking.

    They're thinking "If we just circumcise as many people as possible, the foreskin will cease to exist in the minds of people, nobody will ever know what it is, and nobody will ever think to question it."

    That's why doctors are so busy trying to circumcise everybody in Africa.

    That's why doctors are so busy trying to make sure all the boys are circumcised here.

    They're trying to erase human anatomy from existence and replace it with contrived, artificial version of it.

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  2. Hello!

    I only recently (few months ago) found out about circumcision in USA. And it's exactly as they say: The more I know, the worse it gets. To someone from Europe it's just horrifying.

    Anyway, I wanted to let you know I love your stories. You write in an entertaining way about a sad subject.

    Greetings from Balkan Peninsula

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  3. Nevena, thank you. That was such a thoughtful comment. And you're so right about "The more I know, the worse it gets." I think you pretty much summed up the experience of a lot of circumcised men right there.

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  4. Holy shit, there are people who don't know they're circumcised?! It's as if he doesn't even know the meaning of the word, and didn't bother to find out what it meant.

    Man this world we live in is depressing sometimes.

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  5. The boys I grew up with had a lot of dirty jokes on their minds. And boy were they quick with the off-color metaphor and turn of phrase. But they NEVER mentioned circumcision or foreskin. I first heard circumcision talked about in college. I never heard a human speak the word foreskin until I met my wife in my late 30s. I was 23 when I first heard an off-color remark about the ring scar. I have concluded that few parents explained to their sons that their penises had been altered. Sex ed typically did not mention circ. Diagrams in health and even medical texts did not depict foreskin. My wife had her moment of truth studying the diagram of the male reproductive system in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which did include foreskin.

    We now know that during 1940-85, many obgyns and urban maternity wards circumcised every boy born in them without asking the mother. The bill was sent to the health insurer, who paid for circ without question. It was too much trouble to explain to unsophisticated matters what circ was and why it was supposedly a good idea. When the main reason was to make circumcised America feel good about itself by removing all awareness of natural anatomy from the American mind. Millions of Americans last century went through their whole lives without ever seeing a normal penis in the flesh.

    While this does not depress me, it does go a long way towards explaining why we intactivists keep slamming into a mental brick wall. For millions of Americans, a short arm with a long sleeve is impossibly weird and sexually off-putting. To them, being intact is like a disability.

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  6. The states of mind you went through in the 1960s and 70s were quite similar to what I experienced growing up in the American heartland in the 1950s and 60s, with a signal difference: I was intact.

    You are correct. American obstetricians circumcise with a vengeance, so that 1940-90, 95% or more of boys born in urban hospitals to middle class parents, were cut at birth. But American parents would not talk about this with their boys. If the subject came up, parents were elliptical and evasive. American popular culture was deeply silent about all the cutting going on, so much so that I read and heard remarks while growing up implying that circumcision was still a Jewish peculiarity. Diagrams in health and sex ed materials, even medical texts, depicted the penis as having no foreskin. Sex ed typically did not mention circ. My wife had her moment of truth as a 12 year old girl, while studying the diagram of the male reproductive system in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

    The boys I grew up with had a lot of dirty jokes on their minds. And boy were they quick with the off-color metaphor and turn of phrase. But they NEVER mentioned circumcision or foreskin. I first heard circumcision talked about in college. I never heard a human speak the word foreskin until I met my wife in my late 30s. I was 23 when I first heard an off-color remark about the ring scar. I have concluded that few parents explained to their sons that their penises had been altered.

    We now know that during 1940-85, many obgyns and urban maternity wards circumcised every boy born in them without asking the mother. The bill was sent to the health insurer, who paid for circ without question. It was too much trouble to explain to unsophisticated mothers what circ was and why it was supposedly a good idea. When the main reason was to make circumcised America feel good about itself by removing all awareness of natural anatomy from the American mind. Millions of Americans last century went through their whole lives without ever seeing a normal penis in the flesh.

    While this does not depress me, it does go a long way towards explaining why we intactivists keep slamming into a mental brick wall. For millions of Americans, a short arm with a long sleeve is impossibly weird and sexually off-putting. To them, being intact is like a disability.

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  7. Man.... Wow...

    I can understand it though. I was circ'ed around age 5, so I was very aware and I always related it to fear, frustration (of the doctor ignoring that I didn't want to be cut, that I couldn't ran away fast enough), sense of loss... But I came to realize this year (I'm 41) that this was something that never was spoken about in my family. Nobody ever told me anything about it anymore. And even though I lived in a country where circ was not prevalent, when my friends saw me they knew I was circ'ed but they never asked why. The only people I ever said something about it where the few girls I had sex with.

    In 5th grade I went to the doctor. He asked if I had surgeries. I said no. When he saw me nude he asked why I said no, given that I was circ'ed. I said: I didn't know that was a surgery.

    I only started talking about this this year, as I've been becoming vocal intactivist. When I learned about J.H.Kellogg and the rationale behind American circumcisions, I just couldn't believe it. It angered me so much.

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  8. Oh my goodness. I guess I should resume this blog, huh? I have followers and everything. OK dreamer, roger, atlantina, nevema, I'm on it.

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    Replies
    1. Yes it's a great text! It touches very important points, like the fact that nobody really talks about it.

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  9. I'm looking for a term that describes the state of partial knowledge/partial ignorance I had lived in most of my life.

    I only *truly* found out about circumcision and the male anatomy at age 43! On a whim and out of boredom one day, I did a google search of the word "circumcision" and I saw a photo of an intact penis for the first time.

    I was completely floored.

    My whole life I never realized I was missing something or that that weird, ugly ring I was looking at all those years was a scar. Yet if you had asked me prior to that day on my status, I would have told you "yes, I am circumcised". I just had no idea what it was. So, I wish I could find a term that describes this level of awareness without having to take so many words in order to describe it.

    I've even talked to a fellow intactivist who gave a surprised reaction when I told him my story. But then I explain, yes I knew "I was circumcised" and that I do feel stupid for not knowing what circumcision was until such an advanced age. But then again, I find myself explaining further, I don't really think I am to blame, since my protracted state of ignorance was a result of the culture that cut us in the first place.

    So, prior to that day of discovery, how did I know "I was circumcised"? It's strange, I don't really know why I knew that, yet nothing else concerning it.

    Now I look back and I recall many clues that came up along the way, any one of which could have led me to finding out earlier, if only I had pursued them.

    One example is as a youngster, I recall looking at a cross-sectional diagram of a penis in an anatomy textbook. There were the perfunctory names of the various parts with a pointer showing where that part was on the diagram. I remember going through all the terms which pointed to parts which matched up with my own body- yet when I got to the "foreskin", I was like "huh? where is that on me?" Being a cross-section, it was difficult to visualize where this could be on a "3-dimensional me"; the cross section of a foreskin is represented in such diagrams as just a line that follows the contours of the glans and just sort of hangs there in space. I scratched my head over this. "What is that line doing there?? What is that? How does it stay there?" But as a kid I just let it go and didn't pursue it any further than that.

    I can cite many more such "clues" along the way until my life-changing discovery at age 43. I've been going back trying to recollect them, and I'm thinking of doing a blog post to recount them all.

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  10. Anonymous, your experience is probably not as unusual as you think. Your comment reminds me of a part of Ed Wallerstein's book where he mentions a study that indicated that a significant percentage of American women, when asked their husbands' circumcision status, got it wrong, and even more surprisingly, a percentage of men got their own circumcision status wrong. I think for the men it was something like six percent. That particular study was one of the studies that cast doubt on previous studies that had indicated that women with intact husbands were more likely to develop cervical cancer.

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  11. I am absolutely astonished at the number of guys (on personal-ads websites) who mis-categorize their own circumcision status. Mostly, it's cut guys who file themselves as uncut.

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