Cole Gamble, who has both a foreskin and a happy sex life, never thought his wife would demand that their son get circumcised.
I am an uncircumcised man.
This has never bothered my wife, Nicole. Or so I thought. “It’s like your penis is wearing a turtleneck,” she’d sometimes say, benignly.
As such, there was never any doubt in my mind that, should my wife and I ever produce a miniature me, he would also go uncircumcised. We would leave his little thing alone. No snip-snip, just like Daddy.
Until, that is, the late-September day when we brought our newborn son home from the hospital. It was chilly, and the tightly wrapped baked potato of a boy felt warm in the crook of my arm.
“We’re getting Dalton circumcised,” my wife said as she fastened the potato into his car seat.
“What?” I said. “Since when does he need that?”
“Ever since uncircumcised penises are weird.”
She paused before adding, a little backpedally, “Except yours, of course. Yours is OK.”
This is how I learned my wife’s true feelings about the type of penis I have—by comparing it to our infant son’s. She thinks—has always thought—“OK.” I knew what “OK” meant, of course. “OK” meant weird, just like she’d said.
She’s not the first person to feel iffy about foreskin. Just look to the message boards, where uncut penises are routinely denounced as “gross.” “I honestly saw one and almost passed out,” reads one poster’s typical response. On Seinfeld, Elaine once bemoaned the uncircumcised penis’ lack of “personality.” I’m well aware of this uniquely American repulsion. But my wife? I’d just assumed she was a freak for the foreskin. Turns out I’m the freak, and she’d just learned to live with it.
♦◊♦
Confronted with this bombshell, I began to obsessively review the entire history of our relationship with half the self-esteem and twice the paranoia. Our wooing period, our first sexual encounter, our wedding day—behind those smiling, devoted eyes, she was picturing my uncircumcised penis and thinking, My God, that thing’s strange. Am I really going to spend the rest of my life with this bizarre dick? Suddenly my genitalia—to my mind, a cornerstone of our relationship—was not a resplendent totem to celebrate, but a deformity to grin and bear.
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All my anti-circumcision arguments—the barbarity of the procedure, the theory that it lessens sexual sensitivity—withered in the face of one multiply confirmed assertion: foreskin is weird.
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“There were plenty of girls before you who voiced no complaints,” I cried, a bit desperately.
“Not to your face,” my wife responded. Touché! “Besides, people are going to make fun of Dalton. Boys in the locker room will tease him.”
Nicole’s dad backed up this theory.
“Oh yeah, we’d give a guy like that hell,” Rick told us at dinner a few nights later. I always treasure opportunities to discuss my penis with my father-in-law. Rick’s assertion didn’t jibe with my own experience. I never had a guy in the locker room say to me, “Dude, I’ve been staring at you for a while and just wanted you to know: you disgust me.”
But were they thinking it, and thanking God that their own parents had the good sense to slice and dice theirs at birth? And do the guys at my current gym steer around me in wide arcs, fearing my elongated foreskin is contagious? And what about the girlfriends? Did all the girls who permitted me to get past second base titter together later, sharing horror stories about the first time they saw that thing in the moveable sheath?
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About Cole Gamble
Vocalyze
this is so sad to me on so many levels…foreskin is NOT gross, or weird. it is a biologically normal body part that through generations of conditioning has become stigmatized. break free from it, break free from the garbage our society feeds us! embrace the way our bodies are formed…nature does not make mistakes. My husband opened my eyes to the awesomeness of foreskin…but i was open minded enough to receive it (no pun intended
)…i wish this man’s partner hadn’t been so narrow.
So sad for so many reasons. First off, your wife is selfish. I have been with both a cut and an intact man, and after being with an intact man, I could never be with a cut man again. The difference is indescribable. You don’t amputate body parts from someone you love because you don’t like how they look, and to carve your son’s penis to be sexually appealing to you is perverted. Amputating a healthy body part is a personal decision for the person the part belongs to. NOT a parental decision. Secondly, I am sad for you. I have never seen your penis, but I can tell you it is more attractive and feels far more luxurious than a mutilated penis ever could. Perhaps your other girlfriends were smart enough to realize that and that’s why they never said otherwise. However, you as an adult are free to make the decision to remove it. If your son was not allowed the choice to keep his, it is selfish of you to keep yours. What was good for your son is good for you. Why do you choose to keep yours? Don’t you think your son would have chosen to keep his for the same reasons you do? You did not choose better for your son. You deprived him of something beautiful you yourself choose to keep.
Please read this and see how the foreskin is NOT freakish … http://theobsessedgardener.blogspot.com/2012/03/dont-mess-with-mother-nature.html
Circumcision of children is never acceptable. It is genital mutilation. It has no benefits and children die from it everyday. Leave your child’s penis alone. The wife’s actions are nothing short of disgusting. She should value her child more!
I agree! Sounds like your wife is the one to cut off, not your son. Sorry you’re stuck with her.
What the hell?
Dude. Foreskin is NORMAL AND NATURAL! It’s how the penis is SUPPOSED to look.
Now imagine if a man said, “We got to get that girl cut, having a labia is weird. Having a prepuce is disgusting. Men HATE clitorises.” People would freak out, yet it’s OK to let someone cut off a natural part of a boy using sugar water? Really?
People, realize that us Americans have been brain washed. Do you realize that 85% of men in the world have foreskins? You go to Europe, most parts of Asia and men have foreskins there. They don’t cut their children at birth because it’s a natural body part! And yet, due to brainwashing and that nut Kellogg who couldn’t just stick to cornflakes, we do this to baby boys, mutilate them.
Get over foreskin. It’s not dirty, it’s not disgusting. It’s not making men’s penises fall off in the countries where they don’t even bother with this crap. It’s a good part. If I was a man and some woman I was with told me my genitals were disgusting and suggested I let some doctor apply the Plastibell, which is NOT a snip, but peeling the foreskin off (sugar water doesn’t do a dang thing to protect against that pain) I would LEAVE HER! Same thing if I married a man who didn’t like my natural genitals and wanted my daughter cut! I would say, HELL NO. This will never happen!
I am just… so sorry. I am sorry that your wife made you feel that way, that she was so disrespectful to you AND your son and that she overruled you in a way that can’t be taken back. It makes me sick that she would lie to you that way.
I love my husband’s penis, as much as I’ll love any penis. It’s cut and scarred. I would love it with foreskin, too, though it might not be as interesting to explore the modification. I like tattoos and piercings, too. But that has NOTHING to do with our child’s genitals. The year my second daughter was born, 33% of her male peers were circumcised. Almost all of her male friends are intact. So the circumcised men will be the minority when she is grown. My first, 51% were circumcised. I don’t know about my third.
But because of their friends, my girls will probably think that your son’s penis is ‘weird.’ So will many of his peers. Your wife may have done the biggest disservice to him that ever could have been done and I am sorry.
Dude
If a woman tells you that she dislikes your penis type she is telling you just about everything you need to know. See, women never care much about the dick; only the owner and bearer of the dick.
Run, do not walk, to the DNA testing facility nearest you. Bring a box of tissues.
Great comment! – more succinct than mine
Wow. It ain’t over of course. And your marriage will likely suffer because of your wife’s ignorant attitude. The fact that she talked you into it, eventually you won’t respect yourself for having gone along. I feel for both of you and for your son. Why the hell can’t she go see a therapist? She has to cut a little boy for her sexual preferences? It is wrong for dads to do it, it is wrong for mom’s to do it.
I Hate the argument that your son will be made fun of because his penis will look different. To mutilate your baby because you are afraid he will be teased is horrible.
I’d just like to say I really appreciate all the women who’ve come in to voice their concern. It’s something we don’t hear nealy enough of.
This article seriously disturbed me. The fact that your wife unilaterally decided to have elective surgery performed on her son, way before he could consent, to satisfy her own aesthetic bias is just wrong. I’d just like to assure you that your uncut penis is a beautiful thing and I know for a fact many women appreciate it just the way it is. Stay strong dude.
This story made me sick to my stomach. How can a genitally intact (not “uncircumcised”) man authorize the genital alteration of his child? Your description of his prepuce (foreskin) as a “half inch of skin” is out of context – the double-sided area of an adult male’s prepuce is typically 15 square inches. It is by far the most innervated portion of male genitalia – no small matter. Your due dilligence on this important topic was lacking. The decision to excise healthy, functional and normal erogenous tissue was not yours to make – you failed to protect your son. If, and only if, he felt teased or concerned about future sexual partners, he could have consented to circumcision as a teenager. It may have cost you a bit more, but he would have made the choice about his body (not yours). As a circumcised man who understands what was lost, I know that my bodily integrity rights were certainly violated. I urge you to research this issue further and help protect other children from genital alteration – some of our most outspoken advocates have circumcised children and are now trying to fix this cultural problem. Btw, your son’s genital alteration was based on inaccurate data – the US circumcision rate is just over 50%. Locker room parity has arrived…
Cole, it’s not your penis that your wife has issues with, but your distinct lack of balls. Grow a pair and start standing up for yourself or she will lose respect for you and will continue to make important decisions like this unilaterally. More importantly, stand up for your son at least.
Israel has nukes, so circumcision is here to stay.