My Son's Penis

I've been a father for over a decade now (typing that out, I feel a lot older than I otherwise would), and a father of a boy for nearly eight of those ten years. And almost a decade in, I'm still trying to relate to my son via his genitals.

The long and the short of it (pun definitely intended) is this: I am circumcised, and my son is not. "Wow," you're probably thinking to yourself, "that's a lot more than I ever thought I wanted or needed to know about a random stranger on the Internet." To which I'd respond, welcome to the Internet. The confessional nature of this proclamation aside, what I'm really getting at is the nature of a specific speed bump in the road of parenting I never gave the proper consideration to.

As the proud owner of a penis, and getting to know it quite intimately over the past thirty-six or so years, I thought it was one subject that I would never have my expertise questioned on. But since my son was born, I have struggled to confidently respond to basic questions relating to genital hygiene. Having had my foreskin removed mere days after my birth, I had never had occasion to consider the proper way to take care of one prior to the birth of my own son.

The short answer to the great riddle of how to clean an infant's penis with a foreskin intact was pretty simple: the same way you clean one without a foreskin. I remember my wife turning to me for guidance when we first got home from the hospital with our newborn son, and drawing a complete blank. It wasn't so much the fact that I didn't know the answer, but as a man, I should have known the answer. Having a penis is kind of like having a car (see: any middle-aged man with a sports car): that is, you never tend to read the users manual until something goes wrong.

As my son began to grow up (And the cat's in the cradle...), a new issue arose. From what little I knew of foreskins, they were supposed to pull back fully from the head of the penis (known in medical circles as the glans). I did not realize that they were born with the foreskin attached to the head with a membrane, and that you should not try and pull it back before it became loosened on its own. Again, no clue. After doing some quick Internet searches (again, an a topic I thought I was pretty sure I had mastered), I discovered that young boys should be encouraged to pull back on his own foreskin gently to aid in the natural process of separation. Until the foreskin is completely separated and pulls back completely over the head of the penis, there is no need to try and scrub around inside there during bath time.

Even eight years on, I'm still plagued by doubt. My son hasn't asked anything I haven't been able to answer yet (explaining erections seems like a snap by comparison to the foreskin), but the specter of that foreskin hangs like a pall over any future conversations with my son about our genitalia, which as he gets older, aren't likely to get any less complex. Besides any questions around hygiene are bigger philosophical reasons.

For the record, I am completely on hundred percent against circumcision. The term itself is really just a polite way to describe genital mutilation. And I use the term "mutilation" quite intentionally, as it captures the true horror of the non-consensual removal of a piece of your body, especially from such a sensitive place. (I made the mistake of using the term mutilation in a debate at a family gathering with my mother, who had all three of her sons circumcised. While I had the comfort of being technically and morally correct, there is a time and a place for the proper debate of certain more sensitive matters, and in retrospect, Thanksgiving dinner might not have been the best forum for a nuanced debate about circumcision.) The problem of male circumcision is obviously not as much of a moral imperative as female circumcision, but both are ugly and disturbing for (slightly) different reasons.

Male circumcision evolved as a social practice out of a combination of outdated religious practices and pseudo-scientific ideas from times when we, as a society, had a lot less information to go on than we do now. But now, in the Information Age, we no longer have the comfort of claiming ignorance on a practice that causes real, tangible psychological and physical damage for no real or discernible benefit, other than conforming to outmoded ideals of body image (i.e., getting one's progeny circumcised so that their genitals look the same as their father) and stifling sexual pleasure to discourage masturbation because of misguided religious beliefs about how that any type of sexual pleasure is somehow ethically wrong.

To which my then-teenage son will probably reply, "Jesus, dad, I didn't need an entire ethical treatise on the rights of the individual, I just asked a simple question about why I wasn't circumcised."

To which I will reply "While I admire your vocabulary and pristine grammatical structure which was likely do to my influence and, I cannot simply ignore the potential complex ethical and social implications of such a simple question because it would be convenient for me. We need to face the injustices of the world head on, with eyes wide open, and confront those truths that conflict with our own worldview and always be ready to adapt and evolve as new experiences and new knowledge continue to pull back the shrouds of ignorance into which we are all born and which we must all struggle against on a daily basis, not only for ourselves, but for the betterment of the world for our children and our brothers and sisters of all nations and creeds around the world, because it's the only world we've got."

To which my then-teenage son will likely roll his eyes and go off and play some Playstation or smoke some completely legal weed.

C'est la vie.