The cutting edge

A friend of mine was circumcised this week and it’s been quite a journey. He’d decided to have the chop because his foreskin was too tight and it was interfering with his pleasure and comfort. Because of financial and other constraints he had it done in a public hospital and I have to tell you it was a pretty good experience, all things being equal. Oh sure the ward could have been better appointed (not a bowl of flowers or soothing seascape in sight) and the bedside manner (sic) of the staff was a tad perfunctory but the whole thing was free, efficient and effective. Well, let’s put it this way, he no longer has a foreskin! As I write this, five days have passed and Themba, as I will call him, is still veering between panic and hope. The panic is linked to the fact that the wound is still quite sore and the hope rests in his anticipation of pain free (and better) sex.

I myself underwent this rather dramatic and scary procedure, certainly for an adult it was frightening, who knows what newborns think and feel about what could be quite a traumatic experience for someone so young? At least as adults (or teens in the case of young men who have “traditional” circumcisions linked to initiation ceremonies) we have our ego resources and our intellect to help us through the pain and fear. Even so I remember writing to my urologist after the operation complaining that he never properly prepared me for the pain and anxiety. Apart from the fact that he never bothered to write back (I can just see that letter – because yes this was in the days before we e-mailed and texted our practitioners – winding its way into the shredder) I guess he thought I was just being a drama queen. Still it would have been nice if he’d bothered – I guess medics learn to minimise risk and discomfort, and while this works for them the patient isn’t exactly soothed.

Well I am a bit of a drama queen and to be honest I was rather shaken by how important it became that I did not lose my penis to gangrene or discover it was horribly scarred and misshapen (though I guess with all those variations out there, one man’s misshapen is another’s turn on). It was such a relief when it all turned out ok and nothing tore or fell off when I, um, resumed relations. I’ll spare you the details of that first time after the circumcision (I do have some sense of decorum) but suffice to say I was extremely relieved.

And so all this leads me to ask whether we gay men are obsessed by our penises, or are we just doing what all men do, straight or gay, just that we do it together? If you read gay literature, or look at gay porn, or tune into alcohol fuelled sex conversations when gay men get together, you’ll notice that the main topic is size. I’m always struck by those profiles in gay dating sites where men talk about how deep and spiritual they are, and how they need to find someone who is not superficial, but will end off with, “must be well endowed”. Now I don’t have a problem with someone looking for, shall we say someone “larger”, but when this turns into a fetish and becomes the deal breaker in deciding whether to date someone (or at least date them a second time), I get worried. Surely at the end of the day the penis is attached to a person and it’s the person we fall in love with?
Now I am aware that there are men who have micro-penises, and my heart goes out to them because we gay men can be tough on each other, but in general we are all on a continuum of size and why don’t we just get over ourselves and look at the whole person? Still, we do live in an era of plastic surgery and penis enlargements (strictly speaking, the most successful procedure actually “lengthens” the penis by releasing the ligament which attaches it to the pubic bone) are now part of a broader repertoire of procedures to refine, enhance and repair what nature gave us (or in the case of older folk, is gradually taking away!).

Of course I haven’t even mentioned the debates around whether a penis is “better” if it is cut or uncut. From re-growing your foreskin (I kid you not, a friend of mine successfully used a stretching technique over a year), to fetish sites devoted to foreskins, to debates about hygiene, HIV and hotness, this is a topic which can animate, or bedevil, any gathering of gay men. At the end of the day I would hope that a relationship would not falter on the basis of whether your boyfriend was hung like a donkey (or Shetland pony) and had a foreskin like a Shar Pei (or a Manx cat!). There is a human being on the other end, friends, let’s remember that OK?