Foreskin.
Yes, that's the skin that naturally covers the head of the penis.
If you're a Midwest-born man of college age, chances are about 74 percent you don't have one, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, and you probably pity any guy who does.
Women might hear "foreskin" and think "Ew," even if you've never seen one. You've heard that uncircumcised penises resemble anteaters instead of mushrooms.
Exempting religious traditions, secular American culture has a compulsion about circumcision. Like any compulsion, it defies rationality.
This great American absurdity began in the Victorian era. Back then, people actually thought that masturbation caused mental illness, so doctors in the English-speaking world appropriated the idea of lopping off the foreskin, hitherto a Jewish and Muslim custom, to decrease the penis' sensitivity and manipulability. Even as Victorian anti-sex hysteria subsided, the fad stuck, and new reasons to clip the tip were concocted: It prevents penile cancer! It guards against urinary tract infections! It prevents sexually transmitted diseases! It makes personal hygiene easier! The ladies love it!
According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, the absolute risk of boys' contracting UTIs is only 1 percent. The annual penile cancer rate is 0.31 men per 100,000. Circumcision reduces risk of UTIs and penile cancer by 1 percent and 0.2 percent, respectively. It does help prevent STDs, but so do good hygiene and safe-sex practices.
A World Health Organization study in sub-Saharan Africa offers yet another justification. According to the study, circumcision helps prevent HIV transmission from women to men. After the WHO released the study, New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene recommended that men at high risk of contracting HIV get circumcised.
So can circumcised men forget all that mumbo-jumbo about condoms? Before you foreskin-free guys start partying, look at some statistics. According to the World Health Organization, between 76 and 92 percent of American boys are circumcised, the highest rate of any Western country outside Israel. According to the CIA World Factbook, the HIV infection rate here is 0.6 percent, also higher than other Western countries. The infection rate is less than 0.1 percent in South Korea, where most boys are circumcised. It's the same in Japan, where most are not. Rates of HIV infection and circumcision are similarly low in Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Of course, this doesn't mean that foreskin protects against HIV or that the WHO's results are invalid. The WHO made clear that circumcision alone would not protect against the virus. But could the notion in those countries that good hygiene better guarantees cleanliness than surgery and the absence of circumcised-equals-clean delusions also explain the lower infection rates?
Maybe American men and boys wouldn't have to worry if they had better personal and sexual hygiene.
And as you might have guessed, circumcision accidents happen. They don't happen often, but try to imagine the pain a boy will feel later in life if the doctor takes off the whole head or even the whole penis, which has occurred. Even if it doesn't, babies don't scream during the procedure because it feels good.
So why do so many American parents have their sons circumcised? Why do we hypocritically denounce female genital mutilation in Africa while condoning male genital mutilation here?
Americans view mutilated penises as normal. Even the word "uncircumcised" implies that circumcision is normal. Being uncircumcised supposedly elicits ridicule in high-school locker rooms, so circumcision provides an effective substitute for teaching healthy self esteem. Fathers want a body part that mostly remains hidden to look like theirs so they can avoid the awkwardness of explaining why daddy's looks different.
If we were not meant to have foreskins, evolution would have eliminated them because a vestige on the penis would interfere with reproduction and therefore be maladaptive. Circumcision's persistence in American secular culture is an anomaly, especially considering that the other Anglophone countries already know better.
A painful, cosmetic surgery usually performed without patients' consent that carries risk of accidents and may dull sexual sensitivity has overstayed its welcome.
Write to Alaric at ajdearment@bsu.edu
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