SKIN!

Can we talk penises for a minute?

Part of being the husband of a midwife means you’re pretty much piped in to every conceivable controversial issue that is in any way related to pregnancy, childbirth and parenting.  C-sections, homebirth, vaccines, co-sleeping, breast-feeding, best hemp strollers for hippies and of course, the pros and cons (mostly cons) of circumcision.  In the past seven years, beginning when we got pregnant with our first child who, at the time, might have been a boy, I swear I have talked more about foreskin than all the other years of my life combined.  So I feel fully qualified to get a few things off my chest right now.

For starters, can we just lay this on the table right off the bat: FORESKINS ARE WEIRD!!!

I say this, mind you, as the circumcised father of two uncircumcised sons.  That’s right we didn’t do it because, as I said, I married a midwife, and we’re about love and peace, not mutilation and being horrible wicked parents… at least that’s what the mommy blogs say.  And I fully accept that my narrow-minded appraisal of that floppy stuff on the tip of my sons’ winkies has everything to do with the fact that for the first twenty-eight years of my life, my only model for what a penis was“supposed to” look like was my own.  Sure sure, here and there, in the locker room for example, you couldn’t help but catch sight of other “examples.”  But either I was hanging out in predominantly Jewish gyms or else I just never looked closely enough to know for sure whether somebody, ya know, was or wasn’t.

I knew there was such a thing as circumcision, I wasn’t completely sheltered, but for the life of me, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around what an extra bit of skin would even look like.  In later years I guess I could have Googled the answer but, honestly, I didn’t care enough to risk someone walking up behind me while a penis was in close-up on my desktop.  My very first glimpse of an uncircumcised penis came the day my first son was born… and even then, you couldn’t really tell that anything was different because everything on an infant is always so wrinkled and out of proportion anyway.  It was only about a year later when the thing started retracting that I sat up and yelped, “Whoa, crap, is it SUPPOSED to do that?”

That’s right, I said it: my three-year-old’s penis creeps me the crap right out!

It’s not his fault, it’s just that, not ever having had access to the covered version myself, I have no idea how to advise him on such issues as, oh say, the relative strength and elasticity of his extra half-inch.  So when he starts yanking it back and forth in the bathtub, as little boys (and let’s face it, fully-grown men) are wont to do, I can only cringe because it sure as hell looks like he is less than a millimeter away from injuring himself in a way that I am frankly not drunk enough to deal with without freaking out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all the benefits of leaving your boy’s integrity in tact.  It makes intimate passion in later years something like a thousand times better.  Cutting it off supposedly impedes the early bonding process, which, hooked into the attachment parenting vibe is like totally unacceptable, man.  So whatever, I get it.  I’d never go back and change the decision we made. Go Team Foreskin!  Though when we were in the early days of the first pregnancy, I did ask an unabashedly loose friend, who had seen her fair share of junk over the years, whether she preferred one kind over the other.  I blame that damn Seinfeld episode where Elaine says the uncut have “no face, no personality.”  Not to worry though, my worldly friend assured me, she herself had been enjoying both flavors equally.  For years.  And if you can’t rely on the opinion of the promiscuous in situations like this, what can you rely on?

As he grows older, my son is not going to be able to rely much on me I’m afraid.  I can barely help him with his business now while everything is still normal and healthy looking, and where the worst problem I ever have to deal with is gritting my teeth as I help him remove a piece off fuzz that has somehow become, ya know, adhered.  But the minute he starts coming to me with smegma issues I swear to God and Ina May Gaskin I will slice him off with a c-section knife that was sterilized in Similac.