#circumcisionstory
When everyone talks about circumcision, they debate. Debate if sensation was taken, forced acts, right of passage, morality and human right. Male identity. Ownership of body over ownership of thought, parenthood, or religion. The erotic nature of sexual control hidden subversly in cultural tradition. Know whats the first thing I always think of? What it felt like.
Maybe its because for most the experience is displaced beyond memory, or they were knocked out for the procedure they willingly took part in as an adult. But being cut as a kid, you are squarely between the ability to perceive, but without any ability to have control or authority of self. The experience is the definition of cultural control. This isn’t an inflated issue, or one tied deeply to my culture or religion. Its an experience that happened to me. What no one tells you is how it feels to feel part of yourself be pulled away forever. That the nerve block injection numbs all the pain receptors, but “soft touch” you can still feel- during the procedure. So you don’t feel pain, but you feel a shadow of the experience. That feeling is never too far off in my memory when I talk about all this…
But I am getting ahead of myself now, lets rewind a bit. This next chapter in the story of my circumcision is titled: The Doctors Examination
So as I was saying before- my family moved to the Midwest. Different climate, different culture, different life. But the start of Fall was filled with normalcy- the comforting repetitiveness of back to school shopping and of course the start of school doctor visit. We had moved to such a small town there really was only one pediatrician that was in a reasonable distance. She was an older woman. Looking back on all this I think all her medical training took place during a period where it was standard procedure to circumcise every American boy at birth- without getting even parental consent. Her perspective probably was “to be a boy, means having your foreskin removed.” Just like to have Pancreatitis means having your pancreas removed. It wasn’t a question. So probably having not one, but two twin boys who lived (unusually) in America with the same unaltered bodies they were born with- walk into her office was a problem in her eyes.
There is a cold unease for any boy who enters a doctors office. Because for us, the doctors office is not a safe space. If you are a girl its a place to be protected and cared for, for a boy in America-the medical world- the doctors office is place where your natural self is subverted for the manufactured, cultural one. Where the value of what you are is not just seen as valueless- its been redefined as a medical problem desperately needing radical treatment- amputation.
But at that age, in that moment- I knew none of this. I came in and she asked me to undress and immediately her attitude changed. Friendly, to slightly cold and clinical- like there was an elephant in the room. After she did all the normal doctor things (like getting my weight, height, etc) She kinda scrunched up her noise when looking at me, and it just made me feel uncomfortable. I stood there naked, with everything hanging, like so many boys before me had over the years. It was the first time I felt slight unease being naked.
Then she did something my old doctor never had done- she reached down toward my penis. I innately pulled away from her, she explained she had to see if I could pull back my foreskin. “What!” I remember saying. She then sat me down and asked if I cleaned under my foreskin every day. I obviously said no, I never even thought of that being a possibility. (I was 10 after all and still at an age where the foreskin often hasn’t naturally separated from the glans yet. Seeing as I was probably one of the few natural males she had seen in her life, I doubt she knew that)
I remember how upset my Mom was after she talked to the doctor. I remember thinking the doctor had infected her with the same sense of unease she had given me. I found out recently it was because that was the first time the doctor brought up circumcision for me. My twin was fine, because he could retract. But she even suggesting having us both circumcised so we would “match”. Apparently my Mom was against it, but the doctor pressed her saying my foreskin was “trapped”.
My mother had better sense than to listen to her. But she didn’t know what a natural male body was suppose to do, and I bet my Dad was no help as he was circumcised at birth. So the whole thing nagged at her. A seed of worry had been planted. And thats how it always starts.
I remember her saying she wouldn’t go back to that doctor, which was fine by me. But about a month later my brother and I both joined school sports- lactose and track respectively. Unfortunately to get into those at school we needed a more complete physical from a doctor. So back we went. This time she was far more extensive in her exam, which left me feeling like a farm animal being put up for sale. I had my reflexes tested, was told to undress, she even did the cough test. (Where they feel your testicles while you cough). She had me lie down, and pressed on different spots on my abdomen. Without a word, she slipped her cold fingers on to my penis and she began to try and retract my foreskin. I didn’t resist this time because I really wanted to be on a sport team, and thought I had to comply to her. In that moment all her lack of knowledge, and a life time as a woman living in a cutting society transferred to me in the form of pain. My whole body tensed, and my fingers dug into the table. At first the sensation was just “tight” but then I felt a sharp pain, and then what felt like a tear. I was in agony. She made my penis feel a sensation I hadn’t been use to feeling there- pain. And to her it was all just confirmation that she was right. That I needed to have my foreskin removed and be circumcised.
PREVIOUS CHAPTERS:
Part 2: http://choppedwheatfields.tumblr.com/post/150500171554/intro-httpchoppedwheatfieldstumblrcompost14
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So its Friday again. Next week you will get more of my story, I wanted to write this little summary of how I feel now. So you have a better sense of the stakes that are at play when you read the rest of the story. So you understand what got removed. Its not just my foreskin, but my opinions on dominance, submission and where I will exist in the social order as that boy (me) grows up. This is why circumcision is so powerful, it controls, defines and chains you into a place. Sexy, scary, horrifying, and some may say wonderful…. Anyway here is this weeks installment:
Part 2, The Stakes:
He knew nothing of what could be, but only what couldn’t. Locked into the perspective of what the knife had done, what it had limited him to, his manhood, his sense of self was diminished into the perspective of what his cutter wanted him to be. More than his sexual ability, more than the tribal nature of it all- his cut locked him into the world view of a culture that cuts. That THIS was what was good, and what was good, was for him to have less of himself- to not be what’s natural- but what is socially demanded. In this world, his native sense of sense was foreign, how he was born was deemed ugly and “extra”. To be what he became was to submit to something he wasn’t, but also to not consider what was done to him as submission. This world view was to view the altered, the diminished- as normal. So he instead existed between worlds. Not all too comfortable with what they made him, but also unaware of what he fully was. He existed in an indescribable place to anyone who wasn’t born there. Because birth is where you gain your sense of self. For many that evolves from a point of realization of what was always there since utero. But for him and many men in America, birth was the moment the knife cut through skin and what they became was not what they were, but what they were forced to be.
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