Men get defensive about their foreskins. There are groups such as NOCIRC whose members feel that circumcision robbed them personally and that the process violates the rights of newborns every day. But at twenty-two, I couldn't wait to get rid of mine.
 &nbsp  The need for my circumcision started with sex, which is more than a lot of people can say. My penis and I had issues, issues going back to the summer of 2000. That was when I tried having sex with my girlfriend, Chloe, without a condom for the first time. When I looked at her and she okayed it with a blink, I reared up eager and got her on the kitchen counter.

 &nbsp  And there was bleeding.
 &nbsp  Logic would dictate it was her, but it wasn't. My frenulum — the small line of sinewy flesh that attached my foreskin to the glans of my penis — had ripped in two, and it was bleeding, enough-to-freak-me-the-fuck-out-bleeding, on the tile floor.
 &nbsp  "Oh my God!" my girlfriend said, or something similarly appropriate, then grabbed a roll of paper towels so I could stanch it. I kissed her and told her that it was because she was so tight, which it probably was, then I cleaned up the floor and put her to bed and we slept chastely, me with toilet paper wrapped around myself.
 &nbsp  We figured that was a sign. Over the next few weeks, we went back to using condoms, and I had to fuck over a pesky scab. I tried not to jerk off, but I've never been good at that. I tried not to have sex, but I haven't been good at that either. So for two weeks we had slow but satisfying sex, during which I was careful not to re-break my dick.


The summer before Chloe, I dated a very over-the-top older woman from Long Island named Elyssa. Whether I was having sex with her (we always used condoms) or just jerking off, a certain amount of activity would make small cuts appear on the inside of my foreskin. As I drew back to piss, the cuts would get pulled apart and sting like a motherfucker. Waking up every morning was an adventure. The first thing I would do was retract my foreskin and see what the damage was — a one? A ten?

 &nbsp  I began to think the mangled state of my penis was a reaction to latex, so I had sex with Elyssa without a condom, and then we both got tested for HIV. (I hadn't thought that out very well.) I came back clean, and I've been tested many times since.
 &nbsp  After two years of fighting with this tight foreskin/burning/fear/morning penis checks/recovery/healing, I finally visited my family doctor, the guy who tested my reflexes when I was a little boy.
 &nbsp  "You have a balanitis," he said.
 &nbsp  Balanitis, according to the Cleveland Clinic health center, is "an inflammation of the skin covering the head of the penis." This is the sort of catch-all foreskin disorder that doctors diagnose when nothing worse is wrong. Anyway, my doctor told me that my foreskin was very tight — this was something I had been born with — and that I might want to consider circumcision to fix it.
 &nbsp  I researched adult circumcision online and found a first-hand account which was written by an anonymous British man for the Acorn Society, "a U.K. based, non-profit group whose members have traumas, fetishes or fascinated interest in their own or others' penises." It didn't sound so bad. The Brit was masturbating again within three weeks. His girlfriend even videotaped the whole procedure.
 &nbsp  Still, I didn't want to go through that at the moment. I had been dating Chloe for a while, and sex was great as it was. I figured it could wait.


Turns out, it couldn't. The reason was Jackie. She went to my college and had a tall, pale body that she shrouded in coats and long auburn hair. We met, kissed, got drunk and had sex — the whole deal — on St. Patrick's Day. Jackie was important, not just because she was the first new girl I'd had sex with in 700 days. She was also number eight.
 &nbsp  When I was eighteen, I went to a website called TheSpark.com and took a sex-predictor test. I answered some questions ("How many people have you kissed?", "How many girlfriends have you had?"), and the site forecasted the number of people I would have sex with in my lifetime. I was thinking I would get 100 or 200, or at least double digits, and then the answer came back.
 &nbsp  Seven.
 &nbsp  I mean, c'mon. The average American woman sleeps with six men in her entire life. I was going to sleep with one more than that? I was pissed, but even more so four years later, when I was with Chloe and stuck on that number seven. Chloe, meanwhile, had slept with fourteen guys.
 &nbsp  Then I met Jackie. We were at a party; Chloe was at home. Jackie could drink, whereas I was never quite dedicated enough to get into it. We got to one of those critical moments, the moments that have bewitched me before, where you either kiss or shut up; you either make a move or become a platonic friend. So I brought her home.
 &nbsp  Jackie was eager to have sex with me. We made out, her top came off quickly and then she was wet and then she was grabbing my hips and pulling me into her, but I said no and put on a condom. I fucked Jackie with this condom but at the end it ripped, so I came inside her a little.
 &nbsp  Afterward, I sat on the toilet with the ripped condom on and wondered why I do this. Like some people do drugs, perfectly mindful that they could O.D., I break condoms and gamble. Luckily, Jackie got her period a few days later.
 &nbsp  Chloe and I had promised we would tell one another if we cheated. So I told her. She didn't take it well. Sometimes you need to sleep with girl number eight to really convince yourself of the sanctity of girl number seven.
 &nbsp  But apparently, I couldn't learn this without picking up genital warts.


Genital warts are caused by a strain of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, the most commonly occurring sexually transmitted disease in the U.S. According to CDC estimates, twenty million people have it. In my case, the warts that HPV causes started as micro-corpuscles that I thought were a prelude to another episode of jagged cuts on my foreskin but soon progressed into full-grown, can't-deny-them warts. Ten of them, small but vital, spread out on the inside of my foreskin.
 &nbsp  I went back to my family doctor. "You got these from the girl," he said. "Definitely. And you need to have your girlfriend checked out because they're not going to hurt you — they're just hard to get rid of. But in women, they can be a contributing factor to cervical cancer."

 &nbsp  Fuck. So I did it. I really did it. I was duplicitous, I had a virus, and now I might have given the girl I loved cancer. I talked to Chloe; she had just seen the gynecologist and everything was okay. But she'll go again and from now on, I'm paying for it.
 &nbsp  "Now the problem with these guys," my doctor continued, "is they're very hard to get rid of. I can zap them off, but you need to keep coming back for months and months to make sure all the babies are gone."
 &nbsp  "Uh . . . " It's like pod people. Like pod people on my dick!
 &nbsp  "Now we talked about circumcision before . . . " the doctor said.
 &nbsp  Bingo. "Will that get rid of it?"
 &nbsp  "Yes."
 &nbsp  "Let's do it."


A week later, I sat in the urologist's office with Chloe, reading Fortune and wondering how soon I could function with her again. The night before, I had been too drunk, and in the morning she had given me my last uncircumcised wank, an expert handjob under pressure.
 &nbsp  When it came time to enter the doctor's office/operating room, Chloe came with me. I introduced her to the doctor, then asked him if she could videotape the proceedings with her digital camera.
 &nbsp  "No," he said, as if I'd asked him to wear a dress.
 &nbsp  "Well, can she be with me during the operation?" I continued.
 &nbsp  "No," he said again. "It's short. She'll see you after."
 &nbsp  And so I lay down and got injected and woke up really fucked up with what felt like a ring of fire around the end of my dick. I staggered out to Chloe, asked for some Doritos and told her about the ring of fire. She told me that that Johnny Cash song "Ring of Fire" was about herpes. I thought about that as I sat in a leather chair in the recovery room, freshly cut, with old men who probably had more medically interesting problems. God, it burned.
 &nbsp  Just then, I was with the NOCIRC people. I felt for the babies of the world.


Well, I tore through the Vicodin in one weekend. The dressing came off my penis after two days, just like the guy in England's. (Before that, it looked like a corn dog, all wrapped up.) It looked pretty good, but the head of my dick was bright red and incredibly painful to the touch; every time it rubbed against my pants, it was like torture. Layers of skin kept peeling off and getting replaced. The stitches were black and fascinating — I was held together down there so expertly, my foreskin denuded and then stitched under the head of my glans, just like a tailor's alteration. I picked at the stitches and removed some of them (they were self-dissolving anyway), because I read that if they stayed in too long they might cause holes, like earring holes.
 &nbsp  I tried to jerk off once or twice, but that wasn't happening. Thankfully, I had familiarized myself with the unorthodox techniques of one Jonathan Ames, contemporary American novelist, who writes in his book What Is Not to Love?, "I've never been one to jerk on my penis, unlike most men, who employ that rapid up-and-down yanking, which when I've witnessed other men masturbating — in parks or public restrooms, those sorts of locales — I've always found to be somewhat unattractive."
 &nbsp  Mr. Ames strums with his fingers, tapping his penis like a small saxophone that can only have four chromatically rising notes played in a row. It's a process I haven't seen but have heard described at readings. Since jerking hurt, I thought I might try it.
 &nbsp  So, when I wasn't entertaining Chloe with the Tera Patrick cherry-scented vibrator and other tools we'd been collecting for two years, I strummed to thehun.com. And it worked. I beat that damn guy in England by a week to my first circumcised wank. I was worried that this activity (soon repeated) would scar me for life, but I soon stopped fretting because my dick looked fine. The front, the part that would face you in a lineup, looked like it had always been circumcised.

 &nbsp   Soon came my final visit with the urologist, who told me, with a thumbs-up, that I was "okay" for sex. ("I mean, no rough stuff," he said. "It's still a wound.") I started jerking off studiously in preparation for the Big Day, which ended up taking place on a trip with Chloe, in a bed and breakfast.
 &nbsp  "You're okay?" Chloe asked right before. That took me back, because it was what the other girl had asked, four years previous, when I had that other Big Day, the Really Big One, where I got to actually put my penis inside a girl and attack her like a man. That experience was a disaster — it revealed sex as one of those curious phenomena that lived up to its hype but was simultaneously a pummeling disappointment — because I couldn't come. The first girl had gotten mad and sore and hit me with her small fists: "What's wrong with you?" And here was Chloe, also with small fists, asking if I was okay prior to entry.
 &nbsp  Foreplay is never that long with us — we try our best to be Americans. There is messy kissing of the ears and neck, tongue traces on the sides of the breasts, and then she was on top of me with a condom properly positioned and she said, "Oh, God," which always hits a particular nerve that goes right from my penis to my brain, as she scrunched down on it. (It!) She smiled. I was so happy. I picked up her small but shapely butt and worked her, with us attached at the mouth, one hand twisting her nipple, so happy that I got to do this again but with a horrible feeling creeping up my spine to the back of my brain. It was kind of like the opposite of an orgasm: insistent, disastrous, deadly.
 &nbsp  It didn't feel as good.
 &nbsp  It really didn't feel as good. It was an entirely different experience from sex with a foreskin, kind of like Star Wars vs. Star Wars: Episode I. I never realized how much sexual pleasure was derived from my foreskin rubbing back and forth against my glans - a little bit of masturbation mixed in with sex. I had become dependent on this friction, and now, with the condom on the naked head of my dick, all I was getting was burnt rubber. If the condom were off, I knew I'd be getting the old friction from Chloe, assuming she wasn't too wet, which is another one of those sex Catch-22s, but I wasn't going to try that now. I just pulled Chloe close to me after five minutes and faked it, then ran into the bathroom to snap my empty condom into the toilet.
 &nbsp  "Did you?" she asked. I lied.
 &nbsp  We did it again, and I lied again.
 &nbsp  We did it again and this time I didn't lie; this time I told her it wasn't working, I'm sorry, I don't know what's wrong with me, I'm so sorry. Getting a guy off can be important for a girl. I know it's important to Chloe. She likes to have me look at her and keep my eyes wide open when I'm coming; she holds them open like in A Clockwork Orange so she can see me see her smiling at me.
 &nbsp  "It won't work with the condom on," I told her.
 &nbsp  "But we can't . . . " She was thinking about disease.
 &nbsp  "I know, but the doctor told me the warts are gone; I'm okay," I said. Which was true. He had said that. He had also told me to wear condoms, but for my own protection, not for Chloe's. He was openly suspicious of Chloe.
 &nbsp  "I looked it up on the Internet," Chloe said. Now we were sitting up in bed. "I can still get it from you even though they're gone."
 &nbsp  "Yeah, but you can get it if I wear condoms too," I told her, and rolled out of bed to her laptop. Ah, WebMD. Sex in the 2000s. "See?" I pulled up one of the many articles about HPV. It said that there were upwards sixty strains of the virus, that only the "low-risk" types cause genital warts; it's the nasty "high-risk" types that are factors for cervical cancer. If I had given her those, they would have shown up in her recent exam. Plus, the article said that we were all diseased anyway, that "upwards of two-thirds of all sexually active adults test positive for human papillomavirus," that condoms wouldn't prevent it because they don't cover the whole genital area, and that your immune system can keep it in check for decades, so long as you get your regular check-ups … Plus, I did have the top of my dick lopped off to get rid of the damn thing. And my doctor said it was gone. And there weren't any official articles about circumcision's effect on HPV, because, really, was anyone as fucked-up as me?
 &nbsp  "This is stupid," Chloe said. Then we kissed.
 &nbsp  So I took off the condom and we had sex. After a few minutes, I got behind her. This worked. I pulled out and came all over her butt, and also on her back and wrist, somehow. It was top ten, in terms of life-or-death evacuation orgasms. Jesus.
 &nbsp  The new intensity and lack of spurt control have since outpaced the old, safe friction. Chloe and I are as happy as we used to be. There's less rebound time for me, so Chloe and I do it twice on average. There was one thing I had in the back of my mind when I went in for circ — would Chloe do more oral stuff with me now? We have never done that much; I always get impatient and go for the gold if she's down there, but I've heard/read/gleaned-through-diffusion that girls don't like sucking uncircumcised dicks; that's apparently something like sucking off a giant fungus. So maybe now would be different.
 &nbsp  Well, it's only slightly different. We're getting there, though. The circ helps.
 &nbsp  When you think about it, turning into an adult, you don't get any new parts but you lose plenty — a full set of teeth (and then maybe some adult ones), a hymen, a thread of bone in a broken arm. All you do when you grow up is lose. I just happened to lose a very critical, complicated piece of me, and with it some complicated ideas, like the one that I'm supposed to fuck as many girls as possible in my twenties.  n°