D R A M A_ Q U E E N

This won't hurt a bit! Ever been brought to tears while lying on your back with your legs open in front of a stange doctor? Share your tales of gynecological woe in Drama Queen for a Day contest.

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T A B L E_ T A L K

Your spouse is jealous of the time you spend with your kids. Your kids are jealous of the time you spend with your spouse. What do you do? Join the discussion in Table Talk's Mothers area

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R E C E N T L Y

Citizens of the world, turn on your televisions!
By Sallie Tisdale
TV opened up my world. Really
(10/22/98)

Mommy's little accessory
By Dayna Macy
Jo Copeland designed glamorous couture clothes for the rich and famous. But while she was an extraordinary designer, she was a disaster as a mother
(10/21/98)

The worst trip ever
By Susan McCarthy
A sweaty cross-country trek in a 1937 Plymouth with two cranky siblings, a kangaroo rat in a box and a pogo stick turns into family legend
(10/20/98)

Beautiful Dreamer
By Lisa Kleinman
Babies No. 1 and 2 had to suffer through less-than-perfect strollers. But baby No. 3 will have the ideal ride -- that is, if there is a baby No. 3
(10/19/98)

Turtle time
By Anne Lamott
Salon welcomes back Anne Lamott after a six-month hiatus, and she announces she has overcome Linda Tripp, an expanding waistline and her compulsion to keep writing books
(10/15/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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BY DEBRA S. OLLIVIER | When I told people that our newborn son would not be circumcised, I didn't realize that a tiny but vital part of his penis would touch off deeply held convictions about cultural mores, aesthetics, psychology, hygiene, father-son relations, American identity and thousands of years of biblical traditions. In fact, I hadn't given penises much thought since my teenage years, when every penis was a circumcised penis and the only issue of overriding concern as the tentative probings of adolescence bloomed into full-blown sexuality was: "How does this thing work?" Years later, I was given a detailed, hand-etched poster called "Penises of the Animal Kingdom"; in this vast forest of mammalian genitalia the only thing more striking than the banality of man's penis next to that of the 20-foot gray whale was the fact that all of them, including man's, were intact. Aside from this brush with reality, however, the mushroom leitmotif of the circumcised penis remained the unequivocal, unquestioned status quo of my youth and of all my peers. It was the uncircumcised penis, with its strange fleshy retractability, that was somehow freakish, a slightly vestigial aberration, like being born with a tail or a set of gills.

Years of living in Europe and being married to a French (uncircumcised) Catholic changed all that. Because only Jews and Arabs practice routine circumcision in Europe -- in fact, the United States is the only country in the industrialized world to practice it across the board -- I eventually grew so accustomed to the intact penis that a circumcised one now looks startlingly bereft. Still, when I told people in the States that our son would not be circumcised it was as if, in keeping his little foreskin intact, I was committing a perfidious impropriety: refuting both my Jewish and American identity and, in so doing, robbing my son of both. For all those who expressed their convictions, however -- the astonished Jewish relative, the slightly repelled girlfriend, the perturbed American husband -- a number of questions hung in the air, unanswered. Why, exactly, do we circumcise? How did circumcision evolve from a strictly Jewish and Muslim ritual to a standard medical procedure performed on a vast majority of American males, irrespective of religion? Why is the United States the only Western nation in the world to practice it routinely, despite overwhelming evidence debunking medical claims and enduring myths? More important, what exactly is the foreskin, what happens when we remove it and why do we continue to opt for circumcision?

It doesn't take much to realize that nature didn't intend the foreskin and the penis to be separated at birth. Try retracting the foreskin of a newborn's penis and you're struck by the steadfast, tenacious grip it has on the glans, or head. The foreskin is sealed to its bounty like a silo, and only slowly, over the years, yields to full retractability. But it's far more than just a sheath. The foreskin contains thousands of highly sensitive sensory receptors called Meissner corpuscles, which are more abundant there than in any other part of the penis. Richly endowed with a profusion of blood vessels, it also has a ridged band of peripenic muscles that protects the urinary tract from contaminants, and an undersurface lined with mucocutaneous tissue found nowhere else on the body, which contains ectopic glands that produce natural emollients and antibacterial proteins similar to those found in mother's milk. With its frenar ridges and its thousands of nerve endings, the foreskin not only protects the glans, which in an intact male is extremely sensitive, it also accounts for roughly one-third of the penis' sexual perceptivity. In short, evolution has seen to it that the penises of all mammals come protected in a remarkably fine-tuned and responsive foreskin.

After nine months of infinitely complex and elegant work at literally becoming whole persons, however, the majority of American newborn males have their foreskins removed. Curiously, in a culture where the rights of every living thing are vigorously endorsed by the vox populi, most parents opt neither to view nor to question the mechanics of this procedure. Dr. Hiram Yellen, one of the two inventors of the Gomco Clamp, a tool used in circumcision, describes the standard procedure for circumcision in the following passage:

Within minutes, three feet of veins, arteries and capillaries, 240 feet of nerves and more than 20,000 nerve endings are destroyed; so are all the muscles, glands, epithelial tissue and sexual sensitivity associated with the foreskin. Finally, what nature intended as an internal organ is irrevocably externalized.

Perhaps for parents who don't watch a circumcision (the majority don't; the minority that do wish they hadn't), the reality here -- the strapping, forcing, cutting, bleeding, stripping, slicing and creating of immeasurable pain -- is a little like the Bomb: something you'd rather not think about unless you absolutely, positively must. But the fact remains that millions of American newborns routinely undergo this procedure, and most parents don't really know why. How did this come to pass?

N E X T_ P A G E: "Curing" masturbation with circumcision