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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.
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.
promotion
And there was bleeding.
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.
"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.
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?
I was duplicitous,
and now I might have given the girl I loved cancer.
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.
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.
"You have a balanitis," he said.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seven.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
It's like pod people. Like pod people on my
dick!
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.
"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."
"Uh . . . " It's like pod people. Like pod people on my
dick!
"Now we talked about circumcision before . . . " the doctor
said.
Bingo. "Will that get rid of it?"
"Yes."
"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.
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.
"No," he said, as if I'd asked him to wear a dress.
"Well, can she be with me during the operation?" I continued.
"No," he said again. "It's short. She'll see you after."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
It was kind of like the opposite of an orgasm:
insistent, disastrous, deadly.
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.
"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.
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.
It didn't feel as good.
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.
"Did you?" she asked. I lied.
We did it again, and I lied again.
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.
"It won't work with the condom on," I told her.
"But we can't . . . " She was thinking about disease.
"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.
"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."
"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?
"This is stupid," Chloe said. Then we kissed.
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.
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.
Well, it's only slightly different. We're getting there,
though. The circ helps.
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°
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR:
Denver
Preiss writes books, remains loyal to his girlfriend, and tries not to kill himself in Brooklyn, NY. He can be reached at denverpreiss@yahoo.com.
