Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

O Tin-nenbaum
This year, we welded our holiday totem; maybe next year we'll get it chromed.
By Gayle Brandeis
[12/16/99]

Die Santa! Die!
As I see it, lying about Santa is like covering for a friend who's having an affair with a jerk.
By Elizabeth Bobrick
[12/16/99]

A swine in Harvard Yard
David Mamet's children's book puts Ivy League angst in the heads of babes.
By Alexandra Jacobs
[12/15/99]

Jack and Baby Vicky sittin' in a tree
A gender-bending love story about a boy and his toy.
By Virginia Gilbert
[12/14/99]

Singing the pink blues
Why do makers of toys and computer games still practice segregation?
By Margot Mifflin
[12/13/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

My husband had just announced his newest do-it-yourself project.

"I'm going to re-grow my foreskin. Here's a book about it."

As the book slid across the table, my mind swirled with "Young Frankenstein"-type images of Gene Wilder holding a home skin-grafting kit and Marty Feldman standing near a refrigerator full of gelatinous brown blobs growing in petri dishes.

"How‚ w-w-what?" I continued to fumble.

"It'll take awhile; it's a very gradual process," he said.

"See," his hands began an illustrated dance in the air, "you pull the skin from the shaft up over the top of the penis, tape it, then apply constant tension, causing it to stretch and grow. It's called 'tugging.' Eventually, after a few years, the extra skin is long enough to cover the glans and act as a makeshift foreskin.

"I'm going back to do some research on the Internet," he said, and casually tra-la-la-d past my petrified cadaver of a body, practically skipping on his way to the room he uses as a home office.

What just happened here? I thought. Did I hear the word, "years"? I followed in hot pursuit.

"Where did you hear about this?" I questioned.

"In men's group," he mumbled, barely looking up from the computer. "They say once you're restored, you can have up to a 30-percent increase in sensation. Plus, I really want to look like our sons."

I knew it! That damned men's group, the one I frequently credit with saving my husband's life and our marriage, as well as making him emotionally whole again, is also the one that has introduced him to the sometimes radical ideas of the new Men's Movement: that smaller, fewer-axes-to-grind, reverse-gendered twin of the '60s feminist confab.

Invariably, the morning after group night there is a large leaflet strategically positioned on the suspiciously bare kitchen table. Curious, I wander over with my cup of coffee, sit down and begin reading about the unbelievable orgasmic nirvana I could provide my male sex partner if only I'd strap on an elbow-length latex glove slathered with about a jar of lubrication, enter what's usually an exit, then fish around for the male G-spot located just an inch or so below said partner's Adam's apple. If I'm lucky, there'll be a grotesquely detailed accompanying diagram with You Are Here marked on the anus.

My husband's group must reserve the last five minutes of each session for wife-shocking leaflet distribution. "Sorry, Tom, we'd really like to hear more about your feelings of unimportance, but it's LEAFLET TIME!" High-fives and whoops abound.

What baffles me is how I'd missed the foreskin restoration leaflet.

Worry rapidly filled my thoughts. Had anyone done this successfully before? Surely there is a risk of permanent disfigurement when you decide to grow new pieces of your body. Did my husband draw the shortest straw at men's group?

I was a bundle of festering questions, but I decided it was best not to grill my husband just yet. I was afraid that if I made too strong a case against this process, or especially if I questioned its validity too quickly or vehemently, I might stoke his desire to proceed. Maybe he's just exploiting the shock value of it all, I lied to myself. Maybe it's a Drama King thing and in a short while he'll lose interest.

It was a day or two later that they started appearing all over the house: miniature treasures left behind by the absent-minded Foreskin Fairy. Coin-shaped pieces of tape, some featuring crudely hacked holes in the center and others festooned with clumps of gnarled pubic hair, would stick to the bottoms of my feet. A thin white strip of elastic, formed into a loop and then sewn together with erratic, black, big-as-a-staple stitches, like some "Flintstones" hair holder, showed up. And then there was my favorite: a warped little disk of forged and hardened clay possessing what appeared to be a teeny-tiny handle right in the center. It was like the Lilliputian Refuse Service had accidentally left behind a trashcan lid.

Then my 5-year-old son's suspenders started disappearing.

"Honey, have you seen Greyson's blue suspenders?" I called from my son's closet, where I'd been on the floor rifling ineffectively through train tracks, stray Legos and other fragments of boyhood in search of my elasticized quarry.

"I'll be out in a minute," my husband trilled from behind the bathroom door.

An hour later I heard him emerge and scuttle back to his office, closing the door behind him. I thought nothing of it until I noticed the frayed chunks of leftover suspenders scattered in the bathroom trash.

"Did you cut up these suspenders?" I asked hesitantly.

"Yeah, I needed them. I'll get Greyson some more."

I could just barely see a section of suspender peeking out of his T-shirt.

"What's that?" I asked.

So began my introduction to the first in my foreskin farmer's series of cobbled-together suspender-remnant contraptions known as: the Devices.

Next page | His poor penis looked miserable