Late in the summer of 2005, I visited a nondescript medical office in
San Francisco's fog belt, lay down on an examination table and had
eleven regions of my penis poked by various gauges of monofilament. It
wasn't quite what I'd envisioned when I'd signed up for the Penile
Sensitivity Touch-Test Evaluation Study — "touch test" had conjured
something a little sexier than a retired MD coming at me with
medical-grade fishing line. But by the age of thirty-five, the human
penis is nothing if not well schooled in disappointment, and so, for
the good of science, I went through with the exam.
The science in this case concerned one of the most controversial and
common medical procedures practiced in the West: circumcision of the
penis. The study, published in the April 2007 BJU International (the
former British Journal of Urology) under the title "Fine-Touch
Pressure Thresholds in the Adult Penis," is the latest research salvo
in the war for the neonatal foreskin.
Pro-circumcision forces have been getting the upper hand
promotion
on the
research front in recent months, brandishing high-profile studies
associating male circumcision with significantly lower HIV-infection
rates in Africa. And while the American Academy of Pediatrics
continues to call the evidence "complex and conflicting," several
older studies claim a link between male circumcision and lower rates
of specific sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, syphilis,
and cancer of the sexual and reproductive organs.
Anti-circumcision advocates cite methodological problems with the STD
studies while raising a separate question about the ethics of
discarding a body part to prevent its becoming infected. In order to
establish what, exactly, a male person loses when he loses his
foreskin, the study set out to compare sensation in the cut and the
uncut organ. Its conclusion may seem obvious to those of us with only
a lay interest in the penis, but it's controversial, nonetheless:
uncut dick feels more. A lot more.
"The study shows that the foreskin is the most sensitive portion of
the penis," said study coauthor Robert Van Howe, a pediatrician at the
Marquette General Health System in Marquette, Michigan. "It's not like
you're chopping off plain old skin. The analogy would be like removing
your lips, because the lips are more sensitive than the skin around
them."
The study, organized by the anti-circumcision advocacy group NOCIRC
(National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers),
isn't the first to compare the sensitivity of the cut and the uncut.
Masters and Johnson found no difference between circumcised and
uncircumcised men's glans sensitivity, but they didn't subject that
finding to peer review. Another dozen studies cited in the BJU
International report compared sexual function of cut and uncut men,
and some looked — from an anatomical, rather than sensory, perspective — at
the loss of sensory tissue in circumcision. But the study authors say
they've achieved something new with their study: a comparative sensory
mapping of the male organ.
This new cartography of the penis proffers nineteen zones. Missing
from the circumcised male are eight of these penile destinations, four
on the dorsal side (the outer prepuce, the orifice rim, the
muco-cutaneous junction, the ridged band) and four on the ventral
(frenulum near ridged band, frenulum at muco-cutaneous junction,
orifice rim, and outer prepuce). Missing from the uncircumcised
anatomy are two regions on this new map, and they're both scars.
In the areas that cut and uncut men have in common, the study showed a
sensitivity deficit of between two and thirty-three percent. In those areas
peculiar to the intact penis, the deficit is by definition 100
percent. And it's in those areas, the study concludes, where most of
the sensory action is. Perhaps the most salient of the report's
findings is that "the transitional region from the external to the
internal prepuce is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised
penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the
circumcised penis." If the penile map were of New York City, the
equivalent cut would be Manhattan from Fourteenth Street to Battery Park.
