Circumvent the Circumcision – Transcript
Circumvent the circumcision. In today’s episode, I’m speaking with Brendon Marotta, who is the director of the 2017 film American Circumcision.
This is a difficult topic for many people to talk about because, in acknowledging the truth behind why circumcision happens and the lies people have been told, we’re faced with the horror of realizing that people have been duped. There is no good reason to cut off a baby’s penis. Only terrible ones.
Then, once you realize this, how do you pick up the pieces? How do you heal? The truth is that male circumcision came about for the exact same reasons why people scream bloody murder and “That’s genital mutilation!” when it’s done to women. The reason is to prevent sexual pleasure.
“Oh, but isn’t this for religious reasons, Kim? It’s for hygiene, right?”
Really? You think that God and nature messed up the most important part of humans’ anatomy? The part responsible for the reproduction of the species and—oops—made a mistake there!
No. Dig deeper. Within every single culture, religion, or explanation around circumcision, you go back further, and it’s always about trying to prevent sexual pleasure, knowing that this part of the male anatomy is incredibly sensitive and if we remove it, we will perhaps also remove their desire for excessive lust and sex.
But what it really does is cut off, obviously, a very pleasurable part of a person’s anatomy, and the essence of who they are.
In the midst of all these stories, rationalizations, and beliefs that people have, we see people fighting for the right to circumcise. This is called internalized oppression. When people can’t bear to look at the truth, they settle for a lie or a story that makes them feel better about something that’s utterly horrific. It’s a form of Stockholm Syndrome; this idea that you’re being kept prisoner, and you fall in love with your keeper as a way of making the experience not feel so bad.
I believe that the reason we have a premature ejaculation epidemic, where 75% of men come within three minutes of intercourse, is that men are fully dissociated from their sexual organs. How could you not be when one of the biggest and most formative experiences of your life, perhaps even on the first day of your life, is having your genitals cut off?
In the interview with Brendon, we’ll discuss how the foreskin is not some inconsequential part of the male anatomy. It actually has miles and miles of nerve endings. How, through the ages, circumcision has been used as a cure-all for all kinds of random things, like diarrhea. We’ll address the common myths that people have about why it’s useful, this idea of hygiene or the concept that babies don’t feel pain.
What is foreskin restoration, and is it really effective? The answer is yes. The foreskin itself in an intact man is multi-orgasmic, capable of having all kinds of different orgasms, just like the way women can have G-spot orgasms and cervical orgasms in their vaginas.
Here is Brendon. Brendon, thankfully, was inspired to bring all of his information and research to the public. This documentary has been years in the making. It’s an award-winning, feature-length documentary about the modern circumcision debate and the growing intactivist movement, which is an incredible word, this idea of intact and activist put together, and this overall concept that human beings ought to be able to make their own choices about their own bodies.
***Interview with Brendon Marotta***
KIM: Brendon, welcome. It’s so wonderful to have you here.
BRENDON: Thanks for having me on.
KIM: When I have done any research into circumcision, there are all these justifications, like hygiene or religion. But if you dig deeper, the origin is always about preventing sexual pleasure. Am I wrong in my research? Because that’s what I’ve seen. Then it just gets thinly veiled with these other justifications, but the root always seems to be, even in religious circumstances, that it’s a way of preventing lustful sexual expression. Let’s cut off a piece of a man’s penis.
BRENDON: Yeah. When you’re dealing with any shame or shadow, there’s often a lot of what we call cover emotions, or cover justifications in this case.
If you talk to most parents in America about circumcision, they will say—at least the ones who have done it—“It’s cleaner” or give some medical justification.
But if you look at the history, circumcision began as a medical practice in the United States to prevent masturbation. During the Victorian era, a lot of the attitudes you’re describing were present. They saw sexuality as somehow harmful and damaging to one’s health and needing to be prevented. Masturbation was seen as the cause of a great many social and physical ills.
All those jokes you hear people make about if you masturbate too much, you’ll go blind, or you’ll get hair on your palms, or something like that. Things that we joke about as absurdities now, they actually believed in the Victorian era. They thought that by removing the most pleasurable part of a man’s penis, you could prevent this awful thing.
Over time, those justifications went away because we had the sexual revolution in America. Preventing sexual pleasure was no longer seen as a good thing. And at that point, all the marketing around circumcision changed, and it went to, “It’s cleaner; it’s better. There’s no difference in sexuality.” When you look at the history of circumcision, it’s exactly the opposite. They knew that it would dramatically reduce the amount of pleasure a man could feel, and that was the intention of it, because they saw that pleasure as somehow harmful or bad.
When you go back in religious history, especially in Judaism, it’s similar. There was a famous rabbi, Moses Maimonides, who at one point said that the purpose of circumcision was to reduce sexuality. The man would lose interest in that, and he could focus more on God.
The cultures that this comes from are also very sex-negative. When you look at the Ancient Roman and Greek cultures, they saw the foreskin as the center of male pleasure. If you look at art from those cultures, the foreskin is very large.
KIM: That’s right! Yeah, giant.
BRENDON: It’s the thing that all of the attention is going on.
KIM: Yeah.
BRENDON: Now, compare that to their neighbors, the Israelites and Jewish people. If you wanted to attack someone else’s God, if you will, what would you do? If all their focus is on that male virility, you cut that off.
It’s almost like they’re attacking a false idol, in their view. “Oh, this is not what we want to focus on. It’s a differentiation there.”
If you go really far back in the history, many people think that circumcision began in the Biblical and Jewish tradition, but it actually goes back further. That was a custom in the ancient world prior to the biblical text. They said, “Well, we’re going to take this custom that already exists and make it a symbol of our covenant.”
If you go back further to the earliest African writings about circumcision, first of all, it’s both male and female circumcision. They existed together in traditional African cultures. When you go back to the symbolism of it, what they believed was that in the foreskin was the feminine of the man and in the clitoris was the masculine of the woman. And to create gender, you had to remove the opposite gender from the other.
So the foreskin is wet. It’s enveloping, it’s receiving, all things that you would associate with the feminine body.
And the clitoris gets erect, it is a nub, it sticks out from the body, and they saw that as more masculine.
And so they thought, to create gender, you had to remove one from the other. Now we have a very different view of gender, and I think part of the reason that Western cultures see female circumcision as really bad and male circumcision as tolerable is that women have fought very hard for the right to play the masculine role.
One of the worst things you can say to a woman is that it’s not okay for her to play a traditionally masculine role, and she has to play a traditionally female role. If you were to say the phrase “Get back in the kitchen,” that would be extremely offensive. But the opposite is not true.
So if you tell a man, “Get back to work,” that’s not as offensive, right?
KIM: Right.
BRENDON: In fact, we see men who exhibit feminine qualities as weak or worthless, and there’s a lot of shaming language around men who have that. So to cut off what might symbolize the masculine element in women is seen as one of the worst things you can do, but the same is not true of men. There’s a bit of gender equality work that hasn’t been done there.
But you’re right that in all of these cultures, there is a view that some aspect of sexuality or gender is not okay and shameful and needs to be removed.
It’s slightly different; there’s a nuance to each culture, but that theme runs through it. The practice of circumcision involves removing as much sensitive nerve-ending tissue as you can without losing the ability to procreate.
There are some forms of female circumcision that can remove more tissue because a lot of the woman’s body is internal, but male circumcision does remove all the tissue that is possible while still allowing for procreation. It’s very much an attack on pleasure, more than procreation. Because in a lot of the cultures that practice circumcision, obviously, you can’t remove procreation or else your culture dies out. But pleasure is something different.
KIM: Seen as optional.
BRENDON: Right, yeah. As if the two are separable.
KIM: It’s so interesting what you’re saying about the deeper symbolism, the origins of this, the masculine part of the woman and the feminine part of the man. That’s a very profound insight that I haven’t heard anyone articulate before. Yeah, it seems like it really rings true in a very deep way.
BRENDON: So that comes from a woman named Flombite, whom we interview in the film. She is a woman from Sierra Leone who chose to get circumcised as an adult. In her traditional culture in Sierra Leone, it’s part of their initiation ritual. She went there and, as an adult, had that done.
I think a lot of people are really shocked by her testimony and her speaking because the view in Western culture is that female circumcision is always awful and always done to oppress women’s sexuality.
On the other hand, male circumcision is somehow good and for the benefit of the man.
When you talk to women who come from cultures where that’s been done, they say many of the same things that circumcised men say. They say, “It’s cleaner and healthier; my sex life is better after having done this.”
The psychology is similar, and I know that there are people who would say that those women are just brainwashed, or they have the bias of the fact that they’ve had this done to them. They don’t want to admit something wrong happened to them. But all of those same arguments could be made of male circumcision.
KIM: Absolutely, yeah.
BRENDON: When we hear the two cultures speak, it’s very similar. The structure of cognitive bias is similar regardless of culture.
KIM: Yeah. Well, it’s very interesting because to me it’s like a form of internalized oppression or even Stockholm Syndrome. You have to start to rationalize this offense, this violation that was done. It’s interesting to see people fight for that right.
Definitely in American culture, there’s almost a vilification of an uncircumcised man. “Oh, that’s gross,” or there’s teasing and the words that go along with it, which is so bizarre to see how deeply entrenched those beliefs have become with people.
BRENDON: Well, even the language “uncircumcised” implies that circumcision is the norm.
KIM: Right. Exactly.
BRENDON: You wouldn’t call a woman who was whole un-mastectomied or un-clitoridectomized. You’d say she’s whole, she’s natural, she’s intact.
The movement against circumcision is known as intactivism, a combination of the words intact and activist.
KIM: A great name.
BRENDON: One of the things that they want to shift is even that language, so referring to the man as intact or whole or natural. Because even that language implies that somehow a man who was born with all of his body parts and didn’t have anything happen to him, who was born naturally, there’s somehow something unnatural about him, which is not the case.
KIM: Before we get a little further into your documentary, what inspired you to create it in the first place?
BRENDON: I sometimes hesitate to answer this question because, on the one hand, the answer is very obvious. This happened to me. I have a scar on my body, and I wanted to understand why that was there.
And it’s odd to me that more people in our culture aren’t curious about it.
KIM: Yeah.
BRENDON: And I think that there’s a lot of what we call cultural trance there. You’re just under the spell of a particular way of seeing the world.
Up until about age eight, most children will accept whatever you tell them. An adult says something, and you just say, “Okay,” and it goes in.
I studied hypnosis at one point, and one of the things that my hypnosis teacher told me was that when he was a kid, he was filling out a Scantron test. The teacher told him, “You have to fill it in thickly so the little hand on the machine can read it.” And then as an adult, he was working in the public school system making those tests, and he went to the machine and opened it up, and he thought, “There’s no little hand here.”
But of course his mind immediately went, “Well, of course there’s not.” But when he was a kid, someone told him that and it just went in, and he never questioned it, and that was the image in his mind.
I think for a lot of people, their ideas about sexuality are similar. They’re told something as a kid, and they just believe it and say, “Okay.” And over time, those false assumptions get corrected either through personal experience or when someone tells you something different.
KIM: Santa Claus.
BRENDON: Yeah, exactly. But our culture doesn’t really know a lot about the foreskin. People aren’t educated about it, and unless it’s something that happened to you and you’re a straight man or you’re with partners who are circumcised, you’re not going to have that experience to see something different.
I also say if this happened to you yesterday instead of when you were a baby, you’d question it a lot more. If you just woke up one day and half the shaft skin of your penis was missing, how long would you spend trying to figure out what happened there?
KIM: And strapped down and held down against your will.
BRENDON: Right. You have to have a point where that trance is broken. For me, that was during a meditation group in Los Angeles. I have a practice of Zen meditation, where I just sit and I’m present with whatever comes up. I had stumbled across the topic of circumcision before and always thought, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about that now, so out of sight, out of mind, I won’t think about it. It’s uncomfortable to think about.”
And yet during this meditation, I felt this cold sensation in the body, and I felt all my energy drain down to my belt, and it was this really uncomfortable cold presence. I just had the word circumcision enter my mind more than once during this meditation.
I thought, okay, some part of my consciousness wants me to look at this, and I pay attention to what comes up in meditation. So I went home and started researching. One of the first things I found was something called foreskin restoration. There are complex nerve endings in the foreskin that you can’t get back if you’ve had them removed.
But what men will do is they’ll take the remaining skin and stretch it over time. Just gentle, constant pressure, until they have a covering of that part of the body again.
One of the things I learned while working on my documentary is there are nearly—and this is our best estimate because, obviously, there are a lot of men who do this and do not share that they’re doing it with anyone—but the best estimate I’ve heard is about a quarter of a million men around the world are doing this.
KIM: Wow, great.
BRENDON: So I thought, that’s interesting. My whole life, I’ve been told there’s nothing I can do about it, and apparently there’s something I can do about it. So what else have I not been told? That opened the gates to learning everything I could possibly learn about the subject.
KIM: Let’s dive into what men are missing if they have the procedure done. Because I think there’s this justification and rationalization, like, “Oh, it’s no big deal; there’s just a little snip or a cut and whatever, no big deal. I still have sex. I still have pleasure during sex.”
What are men missing that they don’t know they’re missing?
BRENDON: First of all, there’s no standard for what men are missing. It actually varies from person to person. It’s not like men are born with a dotted line on their body that says, “Cut here.”
KIM: In America, they are.
BRENDON: [Laughs] Right. That’s the cultural perception. But the part that is removed in every circumcision is the foreskin and the ridged band. The opening that encircles the foreskin. This is the most nerve-dense part of a man’s body.
The same way that women can get orgasms and different sensations from different parts of their body, men actually can too. The sensations that come from those nerve endings might feel slightly different than the ones that would come from the head of the penis and the frenulum, which is the underside of the foreskin.
If you have ever looked at your penis—or a penis, I suppose—there’s a place that comes up on the underside, and that’s what’s known as a frenulum. It holds the foreskin in place and connects it. You have a frenulum in your lip that keeps your lip from falling down in front of you and connects the underside of your lip. So they’re something similar.
There are a lot of nerve endings around the opening of that ridge band, which makes sense. You have a lot of nerve endings around all of the openings of the body. So, for example, your lips, a woman’s vagina, the anus, and all of those places, because it’s important for you to know if something is entering your body or not. Right?
The same is true of these nerve endings around the edge of the foreskin. And the inside of the foreskin, the foreskin itself, has two layers. There is the outer layer and then the inner layer. The inner layer is full of sensitive tissue. If you have been circumcised, you can feel the difference between those layers by running your finger along the area above the scar line and the area below the scar line. I would bet that the area above the scar line is significantly more sensitive.
You can actually, if you’re circumcised, feel the difference between what that foreskin lining would feel like and what the area outside feels like.
On uncircumcised men, the most sensitive part is often the scar tissue because scar tissue tends to feel a bit more, but it’s more sensitive to pain. If something has experienced scarring, the body wants to know, “Okay, if I’m going to feel pain here again, I need to be aware of that.” So it’s actually a little hypersensitive to pain.
You don’t want that part of the body to be hypersensitive to pain. I think most people would prefer that it’s sensitive to pleasure or good sensations.
So the nerve endings that are in the foreskin and the ridge band are what’s known as Meissner’s corpuscles. You have Meissner’s corpuscles in the palms of your hand. That’s one of the most common places to feel the difference.
The interesting thing about those types of nerve endings is that the lighter you’re touched, the more you feel. If you just palm your hands together, you might feel some sensation, but if you really slowly run a finger across the palms of your hand or a feather or something like that, you’ll feel it a lot more. You can feel that the back of your hand doesn’t have the same sensation. If you run your fingertips along the back of your hand, you do feel something, but it’s not as much as the palm of your hand.
So similarly, there are a lot of nuanced sensations that the inner lining of the foreskin and the ridge band are capable of.
When you talk to men about their sexuality, they often will say, “Well, it’s fine. I can get off.” But they’re not aware of the different types of sensations they’re getting. They’re not aware of the quality of the sensations. So you might feel good if someone touches the palm of your hand, but there’s a difference between that and the nuanced sensations you would get from different types of touch.
There’s a difference between the orgasm that comes from the head of the penis and the one that comes from the frenulum and the ridged band.
This is another place where it differs from person to person. Some people still have a lot of their frenulum, and some do not. Depending on how much you have, you might be able to feel that place, and I would also bet that, on men who still have their frenulum, it’s the most sensitive part for them.
The circumcision scar is often, for many men, the most sensitive part, but if you have your frenulum, you still have a piece of the foreskin, and that might be something you can orgasm from or at least experience a lot of pleasure from alone.
KIM: When people do the foreskin restoration, is it increasing pleasure? I’m assuming that part of the penis, the head, the frenulum area, which is normally covered by the foreskin, is more sensitive. And perhaps without the foreskin, it becomes more exposed and desensitized over time.
So is rebuilding the foreskin restoring that sensitivity? How is that bringing back more pleasure for the man?
BRENDON: You’ve got the basic right idea. The foreskin, during sex, glides over the head of the penis. When a man is circumcised, he’s relying only on the friction of his body against his partner’s body. When he’s intact, his foreskin will actually glide in and out over top of the head of the penis.
That actually changes the quality and the rhythm of sex. If you have twice the skin rubbing over itself, you don’t need that much friction. If you are relying solely on friction to feel pleasure, you might have to do longer strokes or faster strokes. That changes the experience for the woman as well, because if you have to do longer strokes, you pull your body away from the woman more than you would have to if you were able to do shorter strokes and stay closer.
I’ve heard it said too that the shorter strokes often mean that your body is rubbing against hers more and against the outside of her body. Her clitoris and things like that. So it changes sex for both partners. If you restore the foreskin, then you have that gliding motion again, and sex is closer to what it would be if you were natural or intact.
But the other thing that it does is that it keeps the head of the penis more wet and sensitive. If you rub a body part a lot, like along the inside of your pants, or even one of the most common places this happens is your elbows, you get what’s known as keratinization. The body feels something rubbing against something a lot and starts to build up tough tissue there.
You have a lot of nerve endings in your hands, but if you work with your hands a lot, you get calluses, because the body wants to keep that area safe.
Similarly, if you look at circumcised men, the head of the penis is often keratinized. It looks dry and cracked. If you look at intact men, it’s much smoother.
When you restore the foreskin, when you have a covering there again, that area becomes moist and softer again.
Men actually also produce their own natural lubrication, and it’s exactly the same as the lubrication that women’s bodies produce. America and Israel are the largest markets for personal lubricants. Now, why is that? It doesn’t make sense that in nature you would need the—
KIM: For female lubricant?
BRENDON: For lubricants for sex. Things like Astro Glide.
KIM: So just in general sales, not specifically for females.
BRENDON: Yes. So general, not female-specific. But you look at that, and it doesn’t make sense that you would need something like that. In nature, you shouldn’t have to go to CVS before you have sex with someone. The body naturally produces its own lubrication, but when that’s removed, then the man is not producing his.
Actually, when people shame intact men’s bodies, one of the things they’ll talk about is smegma. But that’s actually the same lubrication that’s in a woman’s body. So when you talk about a woman being wet, it is exactly the same as the thing that we shame in men.
That lubrication comes back if you cover the head of the penis and it’s not drying out anymore.
By the way, if you’re circumcised, you can test this. If you were to just wear a condom for two to three weeks straight, this would also occur because that part of the body would be covered, and it wouldn’t be rubbing against everything, and some of that sensation would come back.
I know one guy who thought this whole anti-circumcision thing was silly and wanted to debunk it. He tried that, became an intactivist, and started a chapter of the organization.
The interesting thing about all of these sexual claims is that even if you’re circumcised, you can test them on yourself if you’re willing to explore. But I think that people are sometimes afraid to explore because of what it would mean if that were true, which gets into a whole psychological element and the fact that people are very afraid not just to face sexuality, but also trauma and things they might have experienced.
KIM: Absolutely. The stats that I’ve seen are that women enjoy sex and orgasm more frequently and have more lubricated-naturally sex with intact men.
BRENDON: Yes.
KIM: Yeah. Walk me through a couple of the common myths out there. We talked about the origins, dispelling the idea that it’s somehow this religious-based thing, which, whatever, becomes a cover for the true source of it. But what about the hygiene argument and the idea that babies don’t feel pain? Can you talk about those?
BRENDON: Sure. The hygiene thing actually goes back to the Victorian history I mentioned earlier. When they would talk about that, they were not talking about being physically hygienic but morally hygienic. Like there’s something somehow unclean about sexuality that needs to be removed.
That claim got repeated later and really popularized, I think it was either in the ’40s or ’50s. I don’t remember the name of the doctor who did it, but he was also very specifically referring to—
KIM: Was it Dr. Kellogg? Kellogg’s Corn Flakes?
BRENDON: Kellogg was the Victorian person who was very pro-circumcision.
KIM: Oh, he was earlier, wasn’t he?
BRENDON: Yeah. But there was someone in the ’40s and ’50s, I believe, who was specifically promoting it because he saw black sexuality as somehow predatory and was specifically promoting it to that community to make them “cleaner.”
KIM: Really?
BRENDON: Yeah. When you get into the history of this, there are a lot of weird claims that have been made.
KIM: Dirty as fuck.
BRENDON: At one point it was supposed to cure epilepsy. There were all these weird things that they thought it could do.
KIM: I saw that they believed if you had recurrent diarrhea, if you got a circumcision, that would help.
BRENDON: Yeah. The joke I’ve heard is that it’s a cure in search of a disease. We know we’re doing this, so there must be a reason why we’re doing it. We’ve got to find something that we can use for justification.
That’s the challenge of anything that has the structure of trauma to it; well, if you acknowledge that something is a trauma or is wrong, then you also have to acknowledge the people who didn’t protect you when you were young might have done something wrong. I don’t want to acknowledge that my parents might have done something bad to me, so I will pretend that my parents were perfect, and then my culture was perfect, and in fact, because I want to be perfect too, I’ll reenact the same trauma on my own children.
A lot of these excuses follow that structure. I can get really deep into the science of some of them. The first sequence around one of those claims is in my film. The difficulty is that they don’t really address the underlying questions.
If you believe that human beings have the right to their own body, my body, my choice, consent matters, all of those things, then the health claims don’t really address that.
For example, I saw a story recently about a woman who got prophylactic mastectomies. She was afraid she was going to get breast cancer and had her breasts removed. You could debate whether or not you think that’s a good idea. But I don’t think anyone would seriously argue that you should then do that to children so that they have the same health benefits. We all acknowledge that women have the right to their own body.
KIM: I wouldn’t be surprised if we get there, honestly, the way things are going these days; in the next few decades, that wouldn’t surprise me. Okay, maybe right now we’re considering it a bit absurd, but I think that day is on its way.
BRENDON: I shudder at the level of consciousness that would think that’s a good idea.
KIM: Can we shudder at the level of consciousness that’s doing this?
BRENDON: True.
KIM: This has become so normalized that it’s no big deal.
BRENDON: Right. It’s the power of culture in part and trauma, which perpetuates itself. It’s one of the reasons why it’s really important to create cultural change. There are people who will enact things like this out of their trauma or out of an ability to profit monetarily from it. Yeah.
I can see where you’re going with that, and I think it’s one of the reasons it’s important to talk about it.
You had another health claim you wanted me to address, but I forgot what it was.
KIM: Well, the hygiene one. I’m not sure if you fully answered that, but if somebody was making that as their argument—when I bring it up to people, that’s usually the first one that they cite, health and hygiene.
Then the second question was this idea that—not that there’s any good reason to do it—part of how people rationalize it is this concept that babies don’t feel pain.
BRENDON: Oh yeah.
KIM: If there’s anything else you could speak to hygiene, and then go on to the babies-don’t-feel-pain idea.
BRENDON: On hygiene, I guess the question to ask is: Do you think that the human body is dirty? Do you think there’s inherently something gross or unhygienic about sexuality? Do you think that children are born in need of fixing?
Part of the challenge of those excuses is that they’re one-liners designed to end thought. When you start seriously considering the idea that somehow the natural male body is unhygienic and in need of fixing, it becomes absurd. It reveals a way of thinking that is almost anti-human.
KIM: Part of the problem, yeah, absolutely. To me, that’s so obvious. It’s like we’re saying that nature or God or whatever was wrong. Made a big mistake. Oops! Got it wrong on every man. Got to fix it. On the area that’s responsible for reproduction. The most important area of the species. Oops, fucked that one up.
BRENDON: Right. The place the most evolutionary design has gone into.
KIM: Right, right.
BRENDON: But people are told those things when they’re young and never question them. Often, they never look at them in light of the other values they have. I suspect most of your audience is very sex-positive; they think that sexuality is healthy and natural. And yet this is a piece that many people haven’t integrated into their larger beliefs.
I suspect that most of the people in America think that consent is important and that people have the right to whatever type of sexuality they’re interested in, as long as it isn’t harming anyone else. I think most people would hate the idea of conversion therapy or something like that, attempts to change someone’s sexuality. But this is surgical conversion therapy. This is literally cutting away part of someone’s sexuality.
Getting into the second question you have about the claim that babies don’t feel pain; this is a huge excuse that was perpetuated in the medical community for many years, and we can say now has been completely scientifically disproven. All of the research that we have indicates that not only do babies feel pain, but they feel it much more deeply and more profoundly and with a more lasting effect than adults do. Pain caused in early childhood has an effect on later behavior. This has been scientifically proven.
The two studies that we talk about in the film, one was just measuring cortisol levels in children. Cortisol is a hormone associated with stress, and what we find is that during circumcision, there are massive stress hormones, which makes sense. If someone is cutting into part of your body and you’re feeling every bit of it, of course you’re going to be stressed. You’re in pain.
I think the only reason this claim was even something people would say is because we’re dealing with children who are not capable of language yet.
KIM: Right.
BRENDON: If someone can articulate their pain, then we acknowledge it sometimes. But children can only scream. When you hear the screams during circumcision, they are different from any other type of scream you’ve heard from a child. Many of the activists I interviewed said that they became interested in this issue and started caring about this issue when they heard the scream of the child. Children have had their lungs burst during this procedure from how much they’re screaming.
Then the second excuse people give is, “Well, maybe it’s painful, but they don’t remember it.” This is an excuse that you would not use in any other context. If someone said, “Well, don’t worry, bro, she won’t remember it,” you would think that person was a rapist, and someone needed to seriously look into what they were up to.
But when we talk about it, it’s fine because they’re children who aren’t even capable of giving consent—when you get into this, the psychology is very similar to other things that people do without consent. It’s all the same excuses.
Again, there is research to indicate that circumcision causes a lasting change in behavior, which is a form of memory. This study in particular was by Anod Anjicki, and it was done in the late 1980s. Even people who are pro-circumcision will acknowledge that this study is legitimate.
They tested children who were being vaccinated, and they found that one group of children being vaccinated responded really dramatically to the pain of vaccination. So vaccination, there’s a needle put in, and some children feel the pain and have one response to it, and some children feel that pain and are really dramatic in their response. It is like an intense pain for them, or at least in their reaction to it.
They were trying to figure out, okay, why is one group of children acting so dramatically when they’re feeling this pain? What is the variable? Breastfed or not breastfed? Were they held more?
What they found was that it was the children who were circumcised who responded much more dramatically to the pain.
The researchers attributed this to PTSD. So people who’ve experienced posttraumatic stress disorder have a traumatic event in their life, and then they feel something later that triggers not just that event in and of itself but the feeling of the original pain that they felt.
What they were finding was that children had been circumcised, had an extremely painful experience during circumcision, and then they felt pain later and the memory of the pain of circumcision came back to them in the form of PTSD.
Now, that’s a form of memory, and it’s a different memory than what you and I might talk about when we talk about memory. When adults talk about memory, we’re talking about what you might call narrative memory. What did you do yesterday? What did you have for breakfast? There’s a story that you can tell about it.
But the body also remembers, and there’s a lot of research around this. There’s an entire area of healing known as somatic healing that deals with just the memories of the body and preverbal memories. Somatic memory is similar to the memories that, say, an animal might have.
When you come home and your dog sees you, your dog recognizes you and is happy to see you, and if you beat your dog, your dog will flinch when he sees you. That’s also a form of memory. Now, your dog can’t tell you a story about who you are or anything like that, but it knows through repeated experiences.
If someone were to beat their dog because he’s just a dog and he won’t remember it, you would think that person was a monster. Yet we do this same thing with children. Children also have a similar memory. If you have a child, that child recognizes its mommy. It recognizes who’s nice to it and who isn’t, and then that will create changes in behavior that can last someone’s entire life.
When you’re at that early preverbal state, you are learning. Your mind is developing. Connections are being formed in the brain, and everything that you do then is going to have a dramatic impact on the rest of that person’s life.
The indication here is not just that babies do feel pain and remember that pain. But that pain can have a dramatic impact on the rest of their lives. It’s going to be different for each person, so even with the type of PTSD that adults experience, one person might go to war and have a traumatic experience and come home to a loving family and a support system and be okay. Another person might come home from that experience and not be okay.
It’s going to be different from person to person, and so it’s really hard to gauge the psychological impact of this. But you would have to believe that everything we know about childhood development and sexual trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder is wrong to think that this isn’t having a huge impact on every man in America who’s circumcised.
KIM: It’s very like the idea of someone being sexually abused in their early childhood and then blocking it out. Then they go on into their sexual relationships, and they manifest all of these issues. For women, it can often be low libido, or they can’t lubricate, or they develop these growths in their reproductive organs. Or they have what I call vagina on clamp-down, which is a very common symptom of unresolved sexual abuse. Their vaginas are literally clamped shut and won’t open because the body is saying, “Hey, until you heal me, I’m not open for business. I need healing.”
But they don’t know, and they might start to do some work and uncover that. Some people have memories of these experiences. Maybe they were older.
One of the major, major things that I see in men as a sexual challenge is premature ejaculation. The stats are something like 75% of men ejaculate within three minutes of intercourse. To me, this is massive. Men can overcome this with a lot of work, but there’s this massive dissociation and disconnect with their genitalia. They often will claim that they get to this place, and then they feel like they don’t have control. They lose control. There’s like a blackout zone. My theory is that a big part of that could be circumcision-related.
Overall, so you’re talking about these somatic memories and deeper memories and people having this psychological, emotional, and energetic imprint of having had these experiences done to them.
How are these same people healed? So apart from the physical aspect of restoring the foreskin, I would think that even for men who might perceive something a little bit off, if they have that level of self-awareness, it will be hard for them to attribute it to circumcision unless they’re in a community having those discussions or they have a direct, personal insight from their intuition that they’re not really allowed to even make that connection.
I would imagine that A) First, it’s a struggle to piece that together. Then B) What have you seen people do to heal the more energetic and emotional imprinting of those experiences from a trauma perspective?
BRENDON: The types of healing work that I have seen be most effective and heard from men are most effective fall into two categories. What you would call somatic work bypasses the conscious mind and goes straight to the body. There is a whole genre of healing work that you could call somatic work.
The other category is what you might call trans-based work or work that bypasses the conscious mind to go to the deep mind. Things like primal therapy or hypnosis. I actually just this past week became certified in a method known as the completion process, which uses the feeling that’s arising in the present moment to go back to the memory where that feeling was first felt.
KIM: Right. Just to interject there, there are a number of those therapies I recommend in my work for exactly that, sexual abuse and trauma, assault-type healing. Because we want to get into the visceral neural pathways of the body; talking about it doesn’t help. Doesn’t actually heal. You can recognize, okay, intellectually, this might be where this came from; “I get it, that’s why I’m having these reactions,” but it doesn’t actually remove the reaction.
BRENDON: Yeah. Talk therapy tends to be ineffective on this, except in one case. If the person feels like they’re not allowed to talk about or feel this issue, then having someone else validate that it’s okay can be really powerful. Because very often men do have feelings of this, and when they try to share them, they’re told, “What’s wrong with you? That’s normal. What, are you saying there’s something wrong with your penis?” There’s all this shaming that goes toward that.
I find this happens even just with my film. People ask me, “Oh, what do you do?” as a casual question. I’ll share some of the film with them, and just by saying, “I made a film about this issue,” that gives people permission to talk about it and say, “Oh yeah, I’ve felt something about that.”
That’s the one case in which I think it’s useful, the validating of someone’s feelings and making it okay to go there.
KIM: Well, presumably the person they’re speaking to will validate them and not just say it’s normal. You’d have to find a special circumcision trauma therapist to work with, because I bet you’ll be dealing with people’s own inherent—
BRENDON: Surprised how many therapists do that.
KIM: Yeah, right. Their own inherent biases.
BRENDON: Well, they treat it as “This person must have some unique psychosis or issue to be concerned with that.” If you’re a healer and you invalidate the person you’re working with, you’re not a healer. You will never accomplish healing until you can acknowledge the problem.
Even getting men the emotional and healing services they need is difficult, and something that I’m working on is trying to create a site that will allow those healers to list themselves and connect with the men who need it most.
But right now, there’s not a lot. There really needs to be because there have been men who’ve committed suicide over the grief they feel over this issue. There’ve been a lot of men who have all sorts of different problems.
When you do healing work, it is healable. I think a lot of people have the idea that because you cannot yet get back the physical tissue—although there are people working on that question as well—you can’t heal the emotional side. That isn’t true. There are people who get in an accident, and they wind up in a wheelchair and still heal. They might not be able to walk again or physically heal, but you can still find some peace and good feeling within yourself.
The good news is that everything we know about sexual trauma or preverbal trauma, or anything related to those things, can be used on this. All the things you know about healing apply here.
KIM: Tell me a bit more about those modalities that you said you’ve seen success with. You said somatic-based therapies and trans-type work.
BRENDON: Yeah. The thing those two have in common is that they’ve bypassed the conscious mind to go straight to the feeling. Because at the time this wound was created, if it was done in infancy, you didn’t have the mental story there. The mental story is something that was created later to cope with the feelings.
So if we just go straight to the feelings, which you can get at through the body, or you can get at through the part of the mind that can access those feelings, then you’ll get there. That whole process is something we could do an entire podcast on. But if I were suggesting a modality to someone, I have found a lot of success with the completion process. I’ve found a lot of success with different types of bodywork. And I have heard from people that they’ve had success with primal therapy and hypnosis, although I haven’t tried either of those in that context myself.
KIM: Got it. You mentioned that when you bring the film up to people, it often gives them an outlet or a feeling of permission to finally voice these feelings or identify them. What’s your overall response been to the film?
BRENDON: So far, it’s been really positive. I went into it thinking there might be more pushback. I actually think the culture has changed during the time I’ve been making the film, where it’s more okay to have these discussions, and the places we can have those discussions have increased.
When I started working on the film, it was a very long process, and when I started, this social media we have now didn’t exist. Facebook was just becoming popular. Twitter was new. Instagram did not exist yet, and podcasts like yours were not popular yet. If you talked to someone about podcasting, they’d say, “What’s that? Is that like a radio show?”
Now that’s all that we do when we consume media. Most young people don’t even have a TV in their room. They have a laptop. The way that people receive information is different now, and the willingness to receive new information is greater because I think people are starting to see that there’s a lot outside the traditional corporate media that has great things that they might want to learn about or a lot to offer in those spaces.
The reception has been incredibly positive. I’ve seen a lot of messages on social media and gotten a lot of messages from people saying that the movie has changed their life. It changed their decision with their own children. It allowed them to feel heard, and a lot of men have said that there was something that they wanted acknowledged in greater culture for a long time that my film acknowledged.
It’s been really positive. What I’ve noticed now is that the people who don’t want to understand this issue or don’t want change on it have largely fallen silent because before, someone would go on TV or write an article or write something in a newspaper talking about how great circumcision is, and no one had a way to speak back to them.
Now, if they say something like that, the men who’ve been harmed by this and the parents who feel like they were deceived when the doctor pushed this on them are able to talk back to them. When you put those two stories side by side, it’s not very flattering for the people who are still promoting this, and so they’ve largely fallen silent.
KIM: In my work, I talk about how the vagina is capable of all different kinds of orgasms and sensations. In Taoist reflexology, they apply this same concept of a reflexology map to male and female genitalia. Say the head of the penis is connected to the heart, and the cervix in a woman is connected to the heart point, and beautifully, they match up when they’re inserted together.
There are all of these different sensations and emotions and pleasure spots that vary throughout the anatomy. In your film, you feature someone called Glen Calendar, and he talks about how he can have orgasms with different parts of his foreskin. Tell me about Glen, his fantastic foreskin, and his multi-orgasmic abilities because he seems like he’s basically demonstrating that there are all these different pleasure spots available in an intact man that somebody else may not have.
BRENDON: I’ll preface this by saying that Glen is an outlier, the same way that there are women with whole anatomy who have a variety of different amounts of sexual pleasure based on their knowledge of their body and their comfort in their body and if they have received shame or approval for their sexuality. The same is true of intact men.
KIM: Let me just interject further because in my philosophy, everyone can, but they have different kinds of blocks.
BRENDON: Oh, everyone can.
KIM: Yeah. That lies on top of that, and once those blocks are removed, which could take minutes or years, depending on the person, they all—we all—have that same potential to be crazy multi-orgasmic, 30 orgasms in a row; everyone can, but it often takes work to get there and to heal.
BRENDON: Right.
KIM: Okay, great.
BRENDON: That’s where I was going next.
KIM: Okay, good.
BRENDON: I totally agree. Everyone is capable of that, but not everyone does. I bring that up because every now and then someone will see that sequence and say, “Well, I know an intact guy who can’t do that.”
KIM: Okay. Right.
BRENDON: Then you ask some more questions, and they say, “Well, he always felt insecure about his foreskin growing up because people told him he was different and there was something wrong with that.”
KIM: Right.
BRENDON: It’s like okay, well, maybe that has something to do with it.
Glen looked at the Sorel study, which went into penile sensitivity. It’s one of the best studies that has been done on intact anatomy. He said, “Well, I have all those parts. What is the difference between them?”
So in his show and in his work, he will simply stimulate one part of the penis. He’ll be touching the ridged band or the frenulum and not touching the head of the penis, not doing any type of stroking motion, and he’s able to have multiple orgasms on camera. In the film, we frame it in a way where you see him talking about it, and you see it out of focus in the background, because I knew that certain platforms would not let me get away with showing that in full. But it’s on the internet if you’re really curious.
But he would just touch that part and then have multiple orgasms. In one part, he has five orgasms from the ridged band of the foreskin in two minutes. What he talks about in his show is that those are different sensations. The same way that a clitoral orgasm feels different for a woman than, say, a G-spot orgasm, something from the ridged band feels different than the head of the penis.
Now, I can’t report that from first person because I’m circumcised. I don’t have the ridged band. But I do know myself that the head of the penis and the frenulum, or what remains of it, feel different.
If you become aware of your body, even if you are circumcised, you may begin to notice that there are different sensations from different parts of the body, and some of those places, if enough nerve endings remain or if there’s enough sensitivity there, or you’re aware enough of that part of your body, you might be able to orgasm from in isolation. You might be able to have multiple orgasms from them.
In his show, he’s not pausing between those orgasms. A lot of people believe that when a man orgasms or ejaculates, that’s it, and that means that they have to stop, or it’s the only amount that they can have. At least in intact men, that’s not necessarily true. You can keep going. Obviously, it takes a lot of energy, and there is, at some point, a stopping point, but it is possible to have multiple orgasms from just touching parts of the foreskin in isolation.
KIM: That’s amazing. Yeah. To me, this is all big, unmapped territory. I’m a specialist, I guess, in mapping out the territory of the vagina and, to some degree, the cock, but I’d like to dive deeper into this and really devote a portion of my work to mapping out more of these areas so that men understand what’s really possible for them with an intact penis. What their birthright really is for pleasure.
BRENDON: There is certainly work to be done there.
KIM: Because we think that female pleasure is so complex. Probably male pleasure in some ways has been reduced to being more simple because of circumcision, where in an intact man, it sounds like there are many more layers and nuances available.
BRENDON: Yeah. I think that in popular culture, male sexuality is seen as a light switch. You turn it on or you turn it off, and it goes in and out and then feels good. In reality, there are a lot of different sensations, and the penis actually has moving parts. The foreskin is gliding over the head of the penis, and when a man is circumcised, it’s changed. It is now closer to a dildo, essentially, as opposed to having that gliding motion.
By the way, when people get things like ribbed condoms or sex toys that have some ribbing on them, that’s meant to simulate the sensation of the foreskin. The foreskin naturally has that.
I think that there is a lot to map here, and women’s sexuality is ahead of men’s in this regard. I think a lot of people complain about the research that’s been done on women’s sexuality and how, up until fairly recent history, scientists were unable to prove female orgasm; there’s a whole series of jokes you could make about that.
But men’s sexuality is even further behind. I don’t know that anyone has done the research. There’s the Sorel study. There are the anecdotal things that we’ve heard from people like Glen and the activist community. There’s obviously video of things like this, but in terms of really mapping it and sharing that information with a wider audience, I don’t know if that work has been done yet.
KIM: Me! Me! I’m going to do it. [Laughs]
BRENDON: I 100% support you doing it. I look forward to hearing about your many adventures on this journey.
KIM: Well, thank you. You’ve inspired my direction in my work because it just lit up for me. Because of that reflexology map, I knew that there were these different attributions to different parts of the male anatomy, but I hadn’t taken it in in the same way that the vagina has all these different, unique orgasmic sensations. When I work with men with Tantric breathing practices and Taoist exercises, they can have more expanded and full-body orgasms and learn to orgasm without ejaculation. That’s usually the direction that we go in, versus all of this other geography that’s on the penis. Yeah, inspiring stuff.
BRENDON: I would be really interested in that reflexology map, because as I understand it, it’s the idea that certain parts of the body correspond to other systems or parts of the body. Is that correct?
KIM: Yes.
BRENDON: I was just going to say, that would be interesting because then you could see what parts might be affected if the corresponding part in the genitals has been cut off. I wonder if you could almost be feeling from that.
KIM: I’ll send you a copy of one of these maps, but basically, from the head of the penis, you’ve got pineal, pituitary glands, and then heart. Heart would be the big area. One of the major issues I see in men is a cock/heart disconnection.
There’s this perpetuated myth that men are much more easily able to separate out that way, but I don’t believe that’s reality. I believe that’s a conditioned thing. If you look at this as reinforcing that, then it would say there’s literally been a cut in the heart point of the cock.
BRENDON: So, do you want to hear some interesting evidence of that theory?
KIM: Yes!
BRENDON: One of the people I interviewed didn’t make the edit of the film, but she’s in the bonus features. Patricia Robinett is a woman who was circumcised in middle America. One of the things that people don’t know is that female circumcision used to be legal and not uncommon in America as a medical practice.
KIM: A medical practice for what? What was the justification for that?
BRENDON: A lot of the similar justifications for male circumcision; it’s cleaner, it’s better, it feels good. There is an article in Playgirl in the ’70s talking about how it’s so much better to remove that extra skin.
KIM: [Gasps.]
BRENDON: Yeah. You can look this stuff up. Patricia Robinett wrote a book about her experiences called The Rape of Innocence. There is another book whose name I’m blanking on; it’s a very academic tome. If you put female circumcision into Amazon and want to get a giant piece of academic reading on this, it goes into the full history.
But one of the things that Patricia talked about is that she had a lot of similar attitudes and traumas as men. She reported that she would go from sexual experience to sexual experience, never feeling quite fulfilled, feeling like, “Maybe if I try this new partner or this new position, I’ll finally get what I’m looking for.” Her sexuality mirrored a lot of the negative stereotypes we have about men.
Which brings up the question, are these things that are true of men, or are these things that are true of men who have received sexual trauma on the first day of their life? If that’s the case, it implies that a lot of our research around gender or sexuality is untrue because it doesn’t control for circumcision status.
KIM: Yeah.
BRENDON: So if all the knowledge we had of women came from studies of circumcised women, you’d question those studies and say, “Well, is that really true?” You’ve got this huge variable you’re not accounting for.
KIM: Exactly.
BRENDON: One of the things that Patricia talks about is all of the things that you would say about men and male sexuality were true of her until she processed her trauma, and she actually ended up becoming a hypnotherapist and doing a lot of healing work.
It’s very similar when you look at the trauma for both genders. I suspect that a lot of the ideas we have about men and male sexuality are really ideas about traumatized people.
KIM: It’s a brilliant observation. Yeah.
Is there anything else you want to add to the mix before we wrap up? I think we’ve covered a lot. We’ve covered why not and how you can heal. Is there anything else you want to add?
BRENDON: One thing comes to mind. I think it is important to do the healing work here, not just on yourself, but on the greater culture. Because one of the things that Martin Luther King said is that he treated society as his patient and himself as a therapist. Only a society that is sick in some way, or mentally ill in some way, could treat people this way.
When you look at it through that frame, then activism can become a healing work. Something that you do to help shift and heal everyone. I think when you raise consciousness around this issue enough, there will be new types of healing that are available.
For example, one of the things that people are working on is the idea of generative medicine. Using things like stem cells or gene editing to regrow parts of the body.
KIM: Yeah.
BRENDON: There have been cases where someone had a finger cut off and they regrew it with stem cells. There was a case in Hong Kong where a woman’s entire vagina was recreated using stem cells.
KIM: What?
BRENDON: I believe that it would be possible to do the same for the foreskin. Now, it would require a lot of money, and it would require someone with the technical knowledge and willingness to do it, and someone with the ability to fund it. And someone who’s willing to be the test subject or brave enough to be one of the first people to try this.
But I want to put that out there because if there’s someone in your audience in that field or who has a connection to a connection, that’s something I think a lot of people are looking for.
But the demand for that will help create the possibility of it. A product that would make men’s dicks bigger and their orgasms better, I’m 100% certain there’s a market for that. But most people don’t have the consciousness to be even aware of the problem and think about that application.
KIM: Amazing. Anyone out there in Silicon Valley who wants to experiment with obtaining a larger and more pleasurable multi-orgasmic cock, please get in touch.
BRENDON: Yeah.
KIM: Yeah. I’m glad you said that.
BRENDON: I’d also add I’m putting together a site to make all these things easier. It’s still in development, but hopefully I’ll be able to share that with you in a month or two, and people who want to find a healer can find one. People who want to find a local activist group can find one, and all the other things.
Even things like if you’re having a child and you want to find a doctor or a doula who is intact-friendly and doesn’t practice this, we’re going to try to connect with those people too.
KIM: Excellent. Definitely let me know once you have that up and running, because those are resources I would want to share for sure.
Wonderful! Thank you so much, Brendon, for taking up the charge and doing all of this research and putting all of this information out there to really educate people and help them to understand and break through what we’ve been told collectively. Your work is very, very much appreciated.
BRENDON: Thank you. I appreciate you being willing to hear it.
KIM: Thank you for being on the show, and we will put up information about the film, and then, as I say, in the future when this other information becomes available, we will put that out as well to my audience.
BRENDON: Thank you.
***End of Interview***
KIM: With all of that, there is hope. There is hope for recovery. If you were injured at birth, there are techniques you can use to bring back sensation and connection to your genitals.
Our Resurrect Crystal Elixir in the Anami Alchemia Online Shop helps to heal sexual trauma, including circumcision. That particular remedy is for men specifically.
Self-massage, partner lingam massage, and using different breathing techniques can help to bring that reconnection back.
And there are, as I mentioned, specific foreskin restoration techniques, which we talked about in the interview and are featured in more detail in the film American Circumcision, as well as overall conscious sexual energy practices and other modalities to help clear trauma, PTSD, stagnant sexual energy. These are things I teach in the Sexual Mastery for Men Salon.
Sexual Mastery for Men is coming soon! This is my eight-week online salon for men with everything you need to know for how to master your life, sexual expression, stamina, orgasms, and your woman and her orgasms too. You can watch the free preview video series on my site under Sexual Savant Salons, Sexual Mastery for Men.
Thank you and bless you for this program!
Brilliant!! You’re the first sexuality expert I’ve ever come across who’s actually acknowledged the harm of circumcision. It truely is a sexual handicap for life. There’s so much more going on too!
Did you know that the foreskin absorbs hormones in vaginal fluids like vasopressin and oxytocin that sends chemical signals to the brain, triggering a bonding response that makes him want to protect his mate? Fascinating hey?!
Keep up the good work!
That’s amazing! Would you please send me links to this? I’d love to read more. I totally believe it too. Thank you!
Fab interview as usual. BTW, 23 state in US still practise Female Genital Mutilation https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/nov/22/us-is-moving-backwards-female-genital-mutilation-ruling-a-blow-to-girls-at-risk
Well, that’s not surprising. Sigh.
Hi Kim,
Love your work – but in Judaism it’s nothing whatsoever with denying sexual pleasure. It was Abraham’s covenant with God and the Jewish people.
Rabbis aren’t prevented from having sex like Christian priests are.
Thanks!
J
Dig deeper. It’s always been about denying sexual pleasure. Different reasons have been layered on top of that over the years, and woven into the religious and medical narrative, like the justification of doing it to “prevent diarrhoea”.
I was born into a jewish family that followed its traditions and practices. Unfortunately that included my unsolicited mutilation (circumcision) at birth which eventually showed up as deep resentment against everything jewish and at times at my parents who except for unwillingly affecting my quality of life for ever have been good and caring. I wish my mother and father, my uncles, grandparents and those present and willing participants and clapping accomplices of my torture and mutilation could have heard my future feelings over my cries (I was told I cried a lot and over several days) at that “joyful” brit milah reunion. I am sure my parents did not want to forcefully and willingly handicap a perfectly healthy boy a week after being brought into this world, supposedly with love. My conclusion: Ignorance HURTS. Religion excuses can only hide the truth so long. Personally, I am still working on how to accept and make the most of what I have, instead of feeling sad for what I am missing. Married to a wonderful but at times painfully honest woman that had most previous partners being “intact males”, my own conclusion (and hers) is that this barbaric practice does indeed take away a huge amount of enjoyment for me and her and perhaps many other benefits that apparently I will never have, feel, give or receive by not having a foreskin. A couple of her very close female friends shared similar views, but in their cases they never brought it up with their husbands as they felt it would cause immense pain and sadness. Women if given a choice go for the intact penis. Its only natural and it works better, I am told. I think most women will not even touch the subject as it can devastate a relationship or even stop one from having a chance. The religion angle and justification makes it even more difficult to bring up as it contradicts a supposedly godly mandate. how convenient. I was lucky my wife of 20+ years picked me as her partner for life and wanted me to father her children, who obviously were not circumcised. Here is something no man wants to hear but if my marriage lasted this long through every storm and challenge it is because we can talk and listen and then we try to move forward and be grateful for what we have, but… she clearly told me that if she had a choice as to what equipment I was bringing to the table, her preference would have been clear. Intact. I guess my penis was not at her top of the list when she said “I do”. Not very comforting for me and at times it makes me wonder why jewish people work so hard to make money. I can just imagine those advocating in favor of circumcision now touting that it makes for highly successful men. As painful as this revelation might be for billions of men, I hope that eventually information and education stop this nonsense. In the meantime a barbaric religion that insists in branding newborns hoping to keep them jewish for life is not for me. I might “look and feel” jewish to women but that is not a good thing. I proudly now state that I am no longer jewish and the scars on my penis do not make me one. Just like holocaust survivors branded with tattoos forced on them, me having been unwillingly circumcised and now having a chance to tell the world that such action should not be forced on boys in the name of religion is perhaps what I hope will help future generations be happier lives while I try to make the best of mine. I have let my own children choose their faith, hoping that my experience will keep them away from a religion that will harm their children (my grandchildren) and hunt them for life if their kids (boy or girl) eventually get to have a frank talk with them. My parents when confronted with information and my feelings simply went into denial. I can’t blame them and also feel sorry for them as the enormity of this revelation and how it affected their son who they always expressed was the most important thing in their lives was too much to process. It brings a contradiction between their intentions and their actions and as a son it feels like anything but love. It is true that love can heal and make this a better world. Let’s start showing it by keeping future penises intact in the name of LOVE.
Thank you Kim for having the guts to bring this topic into your popular platform. Feel free to share my experience with the other 7.5 billion people in the world.
So much respect for that Drew. It’s hard to acknowledge the trauma of genital mutilation, too hard for most. what happens to social groups that inflict this on babies is a type of trauma based mind control where the participants (all present) are bound together by collective guilt and the associated shame of their inaction. It damages us all and undermines maternal instincts to protect children.
There are many Jews who are starting to speak up about what is and isn’t sacred in Judaism, they are reclaiming their religion from the psychopaths. Traditional music, family gatherings, friends, shared histories, food, dancing are all integral and sacred – hurting babies isn’t sacred.
I want you to know that I found your testimony to be overwhelmingly powerful and great. I believe that Your experience and courage to speak out can change the world..
Shalom
Thank you for penning this beautiful message of love and support.
Thank YOU for sharing your experience and insight, and most of all, for daring to change the paradigm and create a whole new world for your lineage. I do believe this trauma can be healed and shifted, but yes, ideally, it doesn’t happen in the first place. It takes courage to share your feelings when most people try to brush this off as something trivial.
The irony is that if this act was performed on an adult without their consent, if they were tied up and it was forced upon them, it would have a very different name, and it would also carry jail time.
Kim:
You need to figure out how to translate this much needed circumcision talk into Spanish for example (or point people to tools that might translate it into other languages). Great work. Circumcision hurts. Truth hurts.
Thank you! Great idea.
Yes, the truth hurts, in this case. It’s such a massive thing to realize, that most people can’t even go there.
This is CRITICAL information that needs to be shared with the world. As a sexuality counselor I did not know many of these details. SO grateful for this!!!
Astonishing how it’s still taboo to talk about and question!
Thank you so much for helping to educate all of us, so that we can help teach others…and learn how to help ourselves and others heal from the wounds…