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
http://www.drmomma.org/2010/12/foreskin-its-not-icky.html
i like my women freshly shaved and well douched before i get next to them .
no stinking wreaking fishy smell or extra hairy bush.
how gross it is ..
Poor Dalton…I hope kids don’t tease him about the shape of his nose, or laugh because his ears stick out like open taxi cab doors. He’ll be in for some other UNWARRANTED surgeries. Sorry, but this story just makes me nauseous. If you cant tell, I AM INTACT. Even though I was born in 1952, at the height of the American craze for male circumcision, I thankfully avoided the knife. And even in an all-boys high school, my VERY uncut penis was never even noticed, much less joked about. What a lame excuse for genital alteration. Shame!
This article is incredibly sad on so many levels…
Mistakes will be made when raising a child. Mutilating a child’ s penis is not a simple mistake, it is criminal. By any reading of the law, it still is criminal. What is worse is that you let your wife harm your son without the least bit of resistance. You both should be ashamed of yourselves. Your job is to protect and nurture your child, not harm him. Poor excuse for parents.
Just passing by to tell you that you’re a failure of a parent for letting this happen.
Maybe take a look into the “Grief” sub-forums of said “restoration sites” so you know how said people feel about fathers like you.
“I want him to have the freedom to come to his own conclusions about life’s major issues like religion, politics, and his own body.” OBVIOUSLY NOT.
Your wife is lucky. Foolish but lucky. One of the lucky few members of her generation who gets to experience sex as nature intended it with her dear husband without the grief and effort of restoration.
I would love to find a compatible intact partner (or at least one willing to restore, most are still in denial) to share my life and bed. It is not weird, it is your fully functioning penis, and it is a truly magnificent thing. Any partner who didn’t think the same wouldn’t have even deserved your son’s passing glance.
really who f-n cares..either do it or don’t . don’t whine it up after its said for and done.
This was not your decision to make – it was your son’s. Who do you think you are, making decisions to permanently alter your child’s body because your warped society considers a normal, natural body to be ‘icky’? Pathetic, I really hope your son forgives you for what you have done to him. If the time comes that he wants to try and repair some of the damage you have caused then I suggest you tell him how terribly sorry you are and support him as he restores. If my partner wanted my child’s genitals cut (whether male or female) I would stop at nothing to protect them from that. That was your responsibility as a parent and you failed miserably.
This man’s wife is a terrible woman. He’s going to stay with someone who makes ultimatums about his kids and backs them up with insults to his penis. I wouldn’t stay with a woman who did either of these things, let alone both at the same time. My favorite part is when she says that all the other women who had seen her husband’s penis were concealing their complaints.
Really now. What redeeming factors could there possibly be to this marriage? The sex can’t be any good now with him always knowing she’s not real keen on his penis. And he knows that any decisions they make together only appear so because he agreed with her.
I hate the word “snipped” as if it were just a little clip. It’s cosmetic surgery with a baby strapped to a board and screaming his head off until he passes out. Even if anesthetic is used for the procedure, it pinches and burns when that needle is stuck in over and over to numb it and it burns like any other incision point for weeks after.
What exactly does she plan to tell him when he asks why she took something from him that she can’t give back?!
It’s too bad your wife didn’t do her research. Only 1/3 of boy born in the last 5 years was cut. That means that your son is in the minority and has the “weird” penis
This makes me so sad.
I can’t believe your wife would make you feel that way, what a foolish woman.
And I can’t imagine bringing home my beautiful baby boy and think, ‘Ew, parts of him are gross and we need those things surgically removed”.
I feel sad for you and your son, but I mostly feel sad for your wife.
I can’t imagine how depressing it would be to be her.
I am circumsised but my sons are not. My wife had absolutely no problems with this. I told her flat out that we wre not circumsising our sons, and that was that. Her mother also seems to be ok with this. And since my mother is German, she definetly has no issues.
I refuse to let religious paranoia influence the quality of sex that God intended for us as men to enjoy. And just so everyone in here doesn’t get the wrong impression, I do believe in God. I have no problem with believing in God. It’s 98% of his fan club that is fucked up in the head. DON’T LET A CHURCH INFLUENCE YOU!!!! ORGANIZED RELIGION IS WHY THIS PLANET CAN’T STAY OUT OF A CONSTANT STATE OF WAR!!!
Your wife’s a bitch. I say this as a mother. Apparently, there was a part of your child’s body which she deemed “unacceptable.” It’s not like it’s a sixth toe, or a cleft palate! Every perfectly healthy baby boy HAS one.
Wow really upsetting! Also married to a intact man and we are leaving our son intact too cause foreskin isn’t weird but circ’ing is.
Gotta say, the comments here are pretty harsh! Ouch people. o-O
I left my son intact and really had an uphill battle it seemed everyone felt that I was entitled to their opinion talk about bizarre! It seems your wife took some real cheap shots, parenting is hard enough without one half hitting below the belt like that…
I realize I’m coming awfully late to this party, but I found this post when looking for information about the pros and cons of circumcision, as I’m pregnant and my husband and I are trying to come to a decision about what to do if we have a boy.
First of all, thank you, Cole, for sharing your experience. It’s very helpful to find men willing to be open about their situations, and I’m sorry that so many people feel the need to denigrate you and your wife for your choice.
My husband is circumcised, and we are currently leaning toward not circumcising our son. Not because either of us has a problem with the aesthetics or functionality of his penis, but because it seems sensible to avoid unnecessary surgery. If our son wants to be circumcised when he is older, we’ll certainly support that.
While I don’t agree with the comments vilifying your wife, I do find it disturbing that she is so hung up on this issue. Frankly, I think my husband’s penis is beautiful, not because it is circumcised, but because it gives me pleasure and is part of the man I love. If it were green with purple polka-dots, I suspect I would learn to appreciate that, too.
Many women in Europe convert to Islam. So maybe many women do prefer circumcised men.
I’m a woman and I couldn’t give a crap whether a man has his foreskin or not. But that’s having a non-opinion on a past action. As for contemporary or yet-to-happen actions – it’s barbaric. Also your wife is a mean, judgmental woman and you’ve already let your son down.