To Snip, or Not To Snip. That Is The Question.

Riding the baloney pony: Roger Daltry is uncut in
Ken Russell's hallucinogenic movie, Lisztomania.

There’s been a bit of a politically correct brouhaha of late, over whether or not babies should be automatically circumcised. I don’t mean by machine, of course, but rather by their physicians soon after birth.

I swear to the Lord God of Hosts and all his Saints that I was already working on this piece for my blog when I heard something about it Sunday afternoon on NPR, that bastion of taxpayer “supported” entertainment. Just one of those things. I was on my way to Walgreens to pick up some refreshment in tablet form, when up popped the sensitive subject of circumcision.

They were interviewing some guy who was a pediatric bioethicist, whatever in the hell that means. (Does he get to decide whether or not it’s still ethical to give kids a lollipop after their inoculations? Do kids still get inoculations?) He was blathering on about a recent study on the decline in popularity of circumcision for newborns, based on some brand-new study that was probably done on the public nut (no pun intended). These things generally are. At any rate, the figures were worse than I thought. A decade ago, 56% of American babies were still being circumcised at birth; that figure has now dropped closer to one-third. He pointed out that this figure did not include infant circumcisions that are done as part of a religious ceremony, but since less than a pathetic 2.2 percent of our population is Jewish, and God only knows how many of them still adhere, that wouldn’t seem to affect the figures by much, although we do have a small but steadily rising population of Muslims, and they, too, circumcise.

He also pointed out that the huge numbers of Hispanics in America have also skewed these numbers, since they, in general, do not approve of such things. We Catholics, I can tell you right now, often have our little quirks. Everyone knows that, in the age of sail, men killed in battle were given burial at sea. But did you know that the Spanish navy never permitted this? Instead, the bodies were kept until they could be given a proper Catholic burial, based on the papal idea prevalent at that time that the Bible was absolutely literal, and that on Judgement Day all bodies who’d believed in Christ would rise from their graves, and so you’d better be in the best condition possible under the circumstances. It was only after Vatican II that other forms of burial, including, eventually, cremation, received the grudging blessing of the Church. Unfortunately, it could make for a rather malodorous situation onboard, and so bodies were often folded and put into cooper’s barrels filled with rum or some other sort of alcohol, then stored in the dunnage, bung up and bilge free, until they could reach port, as was done with the immortal Nelson.

But I digress.

This bioethisist was, in all fairness, speaking more for my side than for the opposition, for let me make this abundantly clear: I believe in circumcision. If you had to put the thing in your mouth, you’d believe in it, too. He pointed out the vastly lowered rate of urinary tract infections in children who had been circumcised, an illness that can be an annoyance for an adult, but deadly for a baby. Also, men who have been circumcised have a much lower rate of contracting AIDs and other STDs. He also pointed up the other advantages in overall cleanliness.

Cleanliness being the one I like. As I’ve stated many times, even in this freewheeling forum, there are certain phrases that are difficult for me to utter and or write. I have gotten better. At sixteen, I still referred to my own genitalia as “down there,” as if it nested somewhere in Alabama. Nevertheless, the phrase I once heard my Christopher use (only once), back in high school when we were dating, still gives me a shudder of repulsed nausea - “dick cheese.” This is apparently the locker-room term for the nearly inevitable build-up of seepage gunk within the folds of the uncircumcised member, teeming with viral cultures so similar to the natural process that creates yogurt and cheese. I couldn’t look a piece of gouda in the face for months.

Then, after cleanliness, came the inevitable discussion of the opposition. I’d known already that this was, as with everything else these days, a touchy and politically correct issue, and far be it from me to say that they have no points on their side. Nowadays, like whole grain foods (a cultural gift of Euell Gibbons - “Did you ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible!”) along with yogurt, tofu and so much else of the currency of our Brave New World, many folks decided that if it came in that package, it should remain in that package. After all, isn’t what’s natural always better than what’s imposed by the mischievous mind of man?

Look, I love whole grains, and organic vegetables, and I’m even learning to like yogurt. But I would ask said purveyor of noble savagery to remember that hair lips, club feet and platycephalic heads all arrive COD from Mother Nature, as well.

But I must admit that when this bioethicist spoke of the opposition, some of whom call themselves “intactivists,” and who refer to the ancient practice of circumcision as “genital mutilation,” I began to get really steamed. Once I was done laughing, of course. Such are the PI’s, the Perennially Indignant, a phrase coined by the immortal P.J. O’Rourke.

But for God’s sake, “intactivists?” “Genital mutilation?” This is the sort of overheated rhetoric one reserves for fighting an oppressive regime roughly the size and scope of Stalinist Russia, not a simple practice that is forced upon no one, with each and every free citizen allowed to make up his own mind. Or his kid’s mind, anyway.

It’s a language, and a pose, that I abhor. Does anyone remember when the Susan G. Komen mega-foundation was just getting started? This was before everything from your undies to your Saran Wrap looked like Pepto Bismal, and Kay Thompson belting out “Think Pink!” in Funny Face is constantly keening in your ear. They were doing some sort of run for the cure, and Miss America was participating. As beauty contestants often do, she felt it incumbent upon her to say something both rousing and intelligent when a microphone got shoved into her mug. Like walking and chewing gum at the same time. And so, out of her over-painted puss pops this gem: “You know, if men could get cancer in their sexual parts, they’d have found a cure for it by now.”

Okay, laugh if you will, but I’m telling you, this kind of thinking is poisonous. It enobles the trivial and deflates the vital. “Genital mutilation?” Ladies and gents, if you want to talk genital mutilation, let’s discuss the practice of forced female “circumcision” in Islamic countries, even the relatively civilized ones like Egypt, where about 85% of the women living in the countryside still have this done, or should I say done to them. The operation has nothing whatsoever in common with circumcision. These young girls are held down, often by female relations, and their clitoris is removed. Later deaths from infection are appallingly common. Let’s make this abundantly clear to those unaquainted with medical euphemism. It would be exactly the same thing as taking a knife and cutting a man’s dick off. Sorry, there’s just no more delicate way to put it. As with so much else, the Islamic hordes who’ve moved into Western Europe have brought this charming practice with them. And the stone-cold silence on this subject from American feminists is just plain maddening. They’re too busy excoriating American men for not having coughed up a cure for breast cancer yet.

Of course, there is another way this can be handled, so to speak, avoiding all this contentiousness altogether. Parents can wait, and allow their son to make up his own mind, when he’s older. But I think this one has its own baggage.

Once, when we were in Turkey, we saw a young boy dressed in quite an outfit, as if he were about to be presented to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. We found out that the celebration was something akin to a Jewish bar mitzvah, but in this case, the circumcision is done on the boy then, that very day, before he gets his Cross pen.

Yes, it was a glorious party. But the look on that poor kid’s face will stay with me, always. If you can get this thing over with as quickly as possible, before he even has time to know what’s happening or be haunted by images of what’s coming, I think you’re doing your kid a big favor.

"Let me get this straight.

You want us to cut the ends of our dicks off?"

What amazes me is how far back this delicate operation goes. It’s like eating eggs that you found underneath a chicken’s ass; who had the nerve to do it first? I took Jewish Studies in college, and once, going over a book about the archeological digs in Masada in Israel, I came across a photo of an ancient set of bris tools dating from the period. They were nothing more than crudely sharpened stones. Any woman who’s ever even changed a baby, seeing that teeny, tiny little dingle of theirs, will have a fainting spell at the thought of anybody going after the thing with these. Still, it must have worked, somehow.

And throughout the Middle Ages and early modern history in the West, it remained principally a Jewish practice. During World War II, when Nazi thugs found a kid in the street without his papers, they often yanked his pants down to see if he was circumcised before hauling him off to the nearest ghetto or cattle car. Apart from the horrors of war and the brutality of the Nazis, neither being exactly fresh news, these stories illustrate all too clearly that as late as the 1940's, it was still only Jewish children being routinely circumcised.

But many cultures have practiced circumcision, all the way back to the ancient Egyptians, including devout Muslims. In America, circumcision of newborns on a routine basis began about the late 1950's and on into the 1970's, based on studies of the time, before some people began to object. Nowadays, doctors present the pros and cons, and allow parents to decide.

The most blood-curdling arguments put forward by those opposing circumcision often fall into the billion-to-one category, though they are unarguably true. There was a notorious one from the 1960's of a slip of the incompetent surgeon’s knife, and his decision to go all the way and perform a sex change on the child. He ordered the parents to raise the boy as a girl in every way, blithely assuring them there would be no problems. There were, in fact, major problems, that led to the kid getting his three-piece set back in adulthood. As best he could, anyway.

Uncircumcised men like to claim that their “head”, if you will, is more sensitive, and that therefore they enjoy lovemaking more. One of my friends even said that he found the very idea of an uncircumcised, unprotected penis being slung against loose change, Chapstick and car keys in a man’s pocket to be horrifying, as if a foreskin were similar in nature to an aluminum bottle cap. He claimed, as well, that this “protection” had made his member more “sensitive.”

Tough to prove, of course. I must admit, all these claims of additional sensitivity sound a lot to me like the claims on late night TV about certain all-natural “male enhancement” products. They send you nothing more in its essentials than herbs and vitamins that could be argued to improve general circulation, and in return they harvest your credit card number, which you will regret unto the seventh son of the seventh son. In the 1950's, at least they had a sense of humor about it; teenagers promised an eleven-inch penis by ads in the back of sleazy mags ended up getting a foot-long dildo in the mail. But sensitivity (of both kinds) has certainly never been a problem with my Christopher, who’s been peeled since birth, nor have I ever heard or read of any other circumcised male complaining of it. If I ever do, perhaps I’ll give the claim more credence. Until then, I think it’s a lot of mahaha.

My problem that started me on this quest, as with so many of my problems, was a bit stranger. It occurred when I had to write my first 19th century love scene. Journals, diaries and period erotica had convinced me that, though the minutia of arrival in the bedroom was very different, the mechanics of the thing were the same. But I did have one small problem. Being a happily married lady who’d never taken a walkabout, I hadn’t the first clue what an uncircumcised penis looked like.

So, as with all else, I began pawing through my massive research library. According to our movers, we own over five tons of books. (Hey, lady, do me a favor and give someone else the job next time, okay?) And we’ve acquired six more full bookcases since then, making a total of 23. But, for the first time, my own little Library of Congress let me down. I could find nothing.

I peered at Michelangelo’s David until my eyes were sore, but I just couldn’t make out anything concrete, pardon the pun. But paintings, drawings and my Christopher’s assurances convinced me that, in an erect state, there wasn’t much difference, so I went ahead and wrote the scene. Yet, like all true research hounds, the not knowing bugged the hell out of me.

At last, as with so many other queer questions, it was Wikipedia that came to the rescue, and I finally encountered my first photograph of an uncircumcised male member in its natural, unagitated state.

I was horrified. I’d expected to see more, not less. To my untrained eye, it looked like Joan Crawford had taken a hatchet to it in some bilious and bloody William Castle flick from 1960. The top was like the shriveled, withered, dimpled remains of an arm taken off at the elbow.

No wonder, I found myself reflecting with a shudder, that so many guys get all hung up on the power of the little blue pill. In its state of homo erectus, a man possesses a wonder of nature, no less than the mighty oak or the rolling river. In a flaccid state, he looks like a pathetic photo of a World War I amputee.

However, in the final analysis, to snip or not to snip is a manly decision, one in which the distaff side really shouldn’t, I suppose, take part, except in the most general terms. But then again, perhaps this, too, is unfair, for in my next posting I’ll relate how this little flap of genital tissue has altered the course of history in no less than an earthshattering fashion on several occasions.

In the meanwhile, I’ve no doubt the battle will rage on. Just remember one thing; it’s tough to sew it back on again, so whatever your choice, let it be a happy one.

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And speaking of circumcision, it’s amazing how many times this little piece of genital tissue has had such a momentous impact on history.

Pink Poodles & French Pornography

The erotic painting at left is the work of François Boucher (1703-1770). He was not a pornographer, though he did love painting nudes, particularly with a Grecian theme. He was, in fact, an important artist of the period, First Painter to the French Court. But of course, like all artists, (Michelangelo once said “We’re all whores,”) he knew which side his bread was buttered on. And so, he produced the work as part of a whole packet of drawings on the subject of sex to be handed over to the dauphin of France (akin to the Prince of Wales in Britain). They were called grivoiseries, meaning saucy or bawdy stories. They were intended to provide the boy with a graphic representation of what his grandfather, Louis XV, had spent most of his reign doing, to his mistresses, as well as the French people.

But these Rococo didactics went out to the future Louis XVI, so, all in all, it was a bit of a wasted effort.


Back in the day, before the invention of hygiene classes, no one had to be more certain than a king that his son and heir had absorbed the Facts of Life; the fate of the nation literally hung in the balance. (NPI) There were two common routes to this enlightenment, apart from a trip out to watch the animals in the barnyard. One was to provide a set of provocative drawings, such as those above, an 18th century version of Playboy; the other was to hand over the royal mistress for a night or two. Sometimes both.

But Louis was a sensitive boy, embarrassed by the whole subject. In fact, seen in the light of his little problem, the Boucher paintings could probably qualify with Amnesty International as a form of torture. That’s because they were a flop for a far more down to earth reason than sexual embarrassment. Louis had a problem, that seemed to relate more to fear his of his physicians (justifiable in those days) than any latent fear of sexual inadequacy.

The whole damn mess that would lead to the guillotine started with a part Joan “Don’t fuck with me, fellows” Crawford was born to play, with a little fatty padding, this being the Empress of Austria, Maria Theresa. On the Continent, away from sensible England, there was a really dumb but almost universally accepted dictate called Salic law, meaning that a woman could not inherit the throne. Primogeniture, the feudal idea of the oldest son getting everything and the others being packed off with an allowance to lead wasted lives, extended to the highest in the land. But sometimes ladies got round this, and Maria Theresa, for reasons too complex to go into here, was one of these iron-skirted “Ma Barkers” of history. Despite being married, despite the fact that after her husband’s death she produced not one but two emperors (Joseph, followed upon his death by his brother Leopold), she wore the pants in the family at all times. She had produced for her husband the Emperor Francis I something like 37 children. (I’m kidding. It was only 30.) Consequently, she didn’t think reeling out heirs was much of a task, since she went right on governing the country afterwards like a pioneer wife hanging out laundry, while her husband courted opera singers, went to lodge meetings, and generally frittered. But she didn’t even remotely consider the possibility that it might be more difficult for somebody else, including her own youngest daughter, Maria Antonia Josepha.

The French and the West End Austrians had been bitter enemies for centuries, an enmity that would survive the many name changes and real estate shifts brought about by lots of small wars and two World Wars, still alive and kicking, into the 20th century. After all, let’s face it - every time Germans got bored they invaded France.

Consequently, it was quite a diplomatic coup that, of all the high-powered alliances she arranged for her massive brood, the most impressive was the marriage of her fourteen-year-old daughter, now re-christened Marie-Antoinette, to the dauphin of France, Louis-Auguste, who was an equally-green fifteen.

At first, the two kept a pretty low profile, because the king, Louis XV, was a terrifying character with little love for his grandson, and the most favored out of his virtual stable of whores, Madame du Barry, called the shots socially at court. Everyone cut the young couple some slack at first, simply for being so young. But when seven long years passed, and they were still childless, the situation was growing dangerous. The people hated the Austrians as passionately as ever, and Marie-Antoinette’s devil-may-care behavior, probably born out of despair as much as anything else, wasn’t helping matters. Louis XV was old and sick, as well as temperamental, and there was talk of sending the Austrian baggage home, so that someone could be found to do the job. The formidable Maria-Theresa was completely exasperated, and laid all the blame at her daughter’s doorstep. At last, she sent her eldest son Joseph to Paris to find out what in hölle was going on.

As was so often the case, the old bag had misjudged the situation completely, clever as she could be. The problem was not a recalcitrant princess, but rather a useless prince. Louis was lonely at court and isolated from his family, what was left of it. He’d never been born to rule - he was a third son of the dauphin. But a parade of death, culminating in the death of his father of tuberculosis when he was eleven, his mother following soon after, left him a lonely and confused heir to the throne. After seven years of virgin marriage, he must have been by that point pretty humiliated, and must, as well, have wanted to confide in someone. Joseph seemed safe, as well as sympathetic; he wouldn’t be hanging around the French court to compose limericks that would humiliate the young dauphin even further. And so, Louis confided his little problem to his brother-in-law.

It’s called phimosis, a somewhat bizarre condition in which the foreskin has somehow gotten deformed, tightly twisted, looking like nothing so much as the first twist in a clown’s balloon sculpture of a French poodle. It’s a sort of Peter Pan thing, because according to scientists, all babies in the womb, and many infants and little boys, have a “non-retractable” foreskin, or what is essentially a similar state of affairs. But phimosis in adulthood is a painful condition, the worst part being that any sexual arousal was agony for him. He was just too tightly wrapped to be able to rise to the occasion, and so had to take an immediate cold shower.

Of course, the royal physicians, incompetent as they could be, were familiar with the condition, and had already explained to Louis, on several occasions, what had to be done. Then, as now, the principal effective treatment for this condition is essentially circumcision, freeing the penis from the choke-hold of the deformed foreskin. They also explained that, as operations go, this one was relatively simple. But Louis had stood by and watched these gentlemen help kill a half-dozen members of his family with their incompetence; they bled people for everything from head colds to the pox, usually hastening death in the process. However, and most men would probably understand this, his fear was really deeper, almost primal; he wasn’t going to let these guys come at the family jewels with a sharp knife.

But when Joseph discovered there was a simple answer to this dilemma, he exploded, becoming the father figure Louis had never had. The dauphin got himself a thorough wigging - if Jewish babies could endure this operation, so, surely, could the future king of France. It was the boot up the bum he needed.

The operation was a complete success, and a year later Marie-Antoinette delivered up her first child, though the court was disappointed that it was a daughter, a child that she wanted even if nobody else did. But once the factory got jump-started, it continued unabated, delivering up two sons and another daughter. One son and one daughter would die in childhood of tuberculosis at the hands of the aforementioned royal physicians, but the fact remained that she’d done her duty by God and country, and received the grumbling approval of the nation.

Unfortunately, that seven-year period of childlessness had started a downward spiral, in terms of the intellectuals and radicals of the day feeling it was all right to despise her. And despise her they did, in print, without respite. It was like poor Gerald Ford; you trip once on an icy airline stairway, and suddenly you’re a lackwitted stumblebum, with a salacious press waiting in the wings like hungry wolves for anything they could use against you, in order to burn that image into the national consciousness. Yes, for many years Marie-Antoinette was a spendthrift and a flake, but once she had kids she settled down. And poor befuddled Louis was at heart a liberal and a reformer, with great plans for calling together France’s first National Assembly in nearly two centuries to implement them. But both of them never got any respect. Whatever they did was wrong. It is arguable that this long period of disrespect and ridicule, along with a dozen other factors, fed the national hate-fest that would end so tragically for the entire royal family.

Louis XVI might have feared his doctors, but he went bravely to the guillotine on January 21st, 1793. The pathetic Marie-Antoinette, accused of every foul crime imaginable including incest with her own son, followed just as bravely nine months later. The only survivor of the Terror in the immediate family was their daughter, Marie Thèrése, with the honorific title Madame Royale, as the first daughter of the King. Of course, she was at that time referred to as simply Marie Capet, daughter of the Austrian Bitch.

She was left to rot in the grim Conciergerie prison, alone, since even her Aunt Elizabeth, Louis’ sister, had been taken from her to be guillotined a few days after the Queen. Like her mother, she had nothing but rags to wear, and no fire in her ice-cold cell, nor even a candle at night. She knew her father was dead, but no kind soul ever bothered to inform her of the death of her mother and aunt. There is still a message from her scratched in the walls of her cell, the gut-wrenching misery of a frightened sixteen-year-old girl, praying that her mother still lived. Her brother, the dauphin Louis, after horrific treatment at the hands of his captors that included virtual brainwashing against his parents, died under mysterious circumstances that DNA is only now unraveling, in a terrific book by Deborah Cadbury called The Lost King of France.

As for Marie Thèrése, after Robespierre went, not so bravely, to the guillotine in the Great Terror of 1794, she was released to her Austrian relations. She wandered the world from relative to relative, like so many who were dispossessed royalty, until she married her cousin Louis, (imaginative with names, weren’t they?) the son of her father’s youngest brother. During the Bourbon restoration after the fall of Napoleon, she eventually became the daupine of France. Yet her lousy luck ran true to form. After the Revolution of July 1830, her father-in-law abdicated, but for a brief time, her husband, who was at that moment legally Louis XIX, refused to sign his own abdication. She has since gone down in history as the woman who was Queen of France for twenty minutes. RIP