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.

Part 26, Steve Dahl

Yes, I said livestock pavilion.

The high school I went to in Houston was pretty big.  There were about 600 or so of us in the graduating class, and the campus was spread out over maybe five buildings, not counting the football stadium and the livestock pavilion.

Yes, the livestock pavilion.  There are those among my fellow Spring Branch High alumni who will claim that the livestock pavilion was a multi-purpose building, but that's a lot of revisionist history if you ask me.  I think some people just aren't comfortable with the idea of graduating from a high school that had its own livestock pavilion.

Well, Spring Branch High School had a livestock pavilion, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.  Every year the Future Farmers of America would host a... I'm not sure what you would call it, sort of an open house in the livestock pavilion, and there would be sheep and cows and chickens and what not right there on campus in this big building with high ceilings and no permanent interior walls, the sort of place where you would go to see a boat show.

Anyway, the point is high school was big, but college was huge.  Physically, I mean.  It was gigantic.  I spent my first few months in college feeling lost and bewildered a little lonely and homesick living there on the third floor of a big concrete dorm on the edge of campus.

I had a roommate, but he was never around.  He was a sophomore or a junior, I forget, and he had a girlfriend he would shack up with for weeks at a time.  I think he kept up a pretense of living in our dorm room for his parents' benefit.  They must have been Catholic or something.

So I was kind of a lonely guy my first few months in college, and I used to turn on the radio in the morning just to hear another human voice, actually a whole lot of human voices.  I used to listen to this radio show in the morning called "The Steve Dahl Rude Awakening" on WDAI.  It was Steve talking to all these outlandish characters.  I remember a grandma character and grandpa character who performed a duet called "Whenever I Cough up Phlegm," sung to the tune of the Kenny Loggins hit "Whenever I Call You Friend."

There was a flamboyant gay character called Rex Reational, and there was a dumb guy character whose name was Bruno or Bluto something like that.  I remember one time Steve came out of a commercial or a song or something and Bluto was saying "Gee, Steve I don't know about this."

Then Steve tells him "It's OK, Bluto.  It's for comedy."

And then you hear a toilet flushing five or six times and Steve starts blubbering and gasping for air, and you realize that Bluto (or Bruno) is giving Steve what we used to call in college a "swirlie."

I don't know what happened after that because I was laughing too hard.  All that day I kept replaying that gag in my mind, and I'd start laughing. I still laugh when I think about it.  I was laughing when I typed that sentence.

Anyway, when I came back from winter break in January, 1979, Steve Dahl was gone, and all the characters were gone too.  I don't think I realized it until after Steve lost his job, but all those characters were Steve.  I'd always pictured a whole studio of people doing voice characterizations, but it was all just Steve.  The man was a comic genius.

But WDAI didn't need a genius.  In December 1978, they switched to an all-Disco format and pink slipped Steve.

A few months later, Steve moved to another radio station in Chicago, WLUP, where he railed against the whole Disco phenomenon and smashed Disco records on the air.  His anti-Disco efforts gained such a wide following in Chicago that the White Sox asked him to host Disco Demolition Night, the event where my friends Joe and Mohammed narrowly averted a pot bust.

I guess you could say Disco Demolition Night got a little out of control.  I turned on the local news the next morning, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing.  Smoke billowing into the stands, smashed up records all over the outfield, police dragging half naked teenagers by the hair and tossing them into paddy wagons.  Steve Dahl's destruction (by means of dynamite) of thousands of Disco records in center field after the first game of a double header had inspired an anti-Disco riot of such intensity the White Sox had had to forfeit the evening's second game to the visiting Detroit Tigers.

Now I know you're probably thinking what in the heck does all that have to do with Ed Wallerstein's book Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy?

Well, I'm getting there.

Before Ed Wallerstein's book came out in 1980, America had never really had much of a dialog about circumcision.  Circumcision rates went into a gradual decline beginning in the 1960s, and I think that decline happened for all sorts of reasons: immigration, the sexual revolution, the hippies.  (I mean actual hippies who lived on communes and ate granola and got back to nature, not these young people you see these days who buy their tie-dye at the Old Navy.)

But even when the American Academy of Pediatrics came out with those wishy-washy policy statements in 1971 and 1975 about circumcision (Essentially, they adopted a policy of "There's no medical need for routine infant circumcision, but, hey, who needs a medical reason?"), even then there was no real public dialog about circumcision in the media, not that I remember.

As I remember, the dialog began with after Wallerstein's book came out in 1980, and the first public figure who I ever heard questioning America's tradition of circumcision in a really frank, open way was Steve Dahl.