How Insensitive
A new stud confirms a longtime fear: circumcised men are missing out.
by Paul Festa
April 02, 2007
Late in the summer of 2005, I visited a nondescript medical office in San Francisco's fog belt, lay down on an examination table and had eleven regions of my penis poked by various gauges of monofilament. It wasn't quite what I'd envisioned when I'd signed up for the Penile Sensitivity Touch-Test Evaluation Study — "touch test" had conjured something a little sexier than a retired MD coming at me with medical-grade fishing line. But by the age of thirty-five, the human penis is nothing if not well schooled in disappointment, and so, for the good of science, I went through with the exam.
The science in this case concerned one of the most controversial and common medical procedures practiced in the West: circumcision of the penis. The study, published in the April 2007 BJU International (the former British Journal of Urology) under the title "Fine-Touch Pressure Thresholds in the Adult Penis," is the latest research salvo in the war for the neonatal foreskin.
Pro-circumcision forces have been getting the upper hand on the research front in recent months, brandishing high-profile studies associating male circumcision with significantly lower HIV-infection rates in Africa. And while the American Academy of Pediatrics continues to call the evidence "complex and conflicting," several older studies claim a link between male circumcision and lower rates of specific sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV, syphilis, and cancer of the sexual and reproductive organs.
Anti-circumcision advocates cite methodological problems with the STD studies while raising a separate question about the ethics of discarding a body part to prevent its becoming infected. In order to establish what, exactly, a male person loses when he loses his foreskin, the study set out to compare sensation in the cut and the uncut organ. Its conclusion may seem obvious to those of us with only a lay interest in the penis, but it's controversial, nonetheless: uncut dick feels more. A lot more.
"The study shows that the foreskin is the most sensitive portion of the penis," said study coauthor Robert Van Howe, a pediatrician at the Marquette General Health System in Marquette, Michigan. "It's not like you're chopping off plain old skin. The analogy would be like removing your lips, because the lips are more sensitive than the skin around them."
The study, organized by the anti-circumcision advocacy group NOCIRC (National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers), isn't the first to compare the sensitivity of the cut and the uncut. Masters and Johnson found no difference between circumcised and uncircumcised men's glans sensitivity, but they didn't subject that finding to peer review. Another dozen studies cited in the BJU International report compared sexual function of cut and uncut men, and some looked — from an anatomical, rather than sensory, perspective — at the loss of sensory tissue in circumcision. But the study authors say they've achieved something new with their study: a comparative sensory mapping of the male organ.
This new cartography of the penis proffers nineteen zones. Missing from the circumcised male are eight of these penile destinations, four on the dorsal side (the outer prepuce, the orifice rim, the muco-cutaneous junction, the ridged band) and four on the ventral (frenulum near ridged band, frenulum at muco-cutaneous junction, orifice rim, and outer prepuce). Missing from the uncircumcised anatomy are two regions on this new map, and they're both scars.
In the areas that cut and uncut men have in common, the study showed a sensitivity deficit of between two and thirty-three percent. In those areas peculiar to the intact penis, the deficit is by definition 100 percent. And it's in those areas, the study concludes, where most of the sensory action is. Perhaps the most salient of the report's findings is that "the transitional region from the external to the internal prepuce is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the circumcised penis." If the penile map were of New York City, the equivalent cut would be Manhattan from Fourteenth Street to Battery Park.
The genesis of the study was the day in May 1979 that nursing-school student Marilyn Milos witnessed a circumcision for the first time. Milos describes the experience on the NOCIRC Website in excruciating detail: a newborn, strapped down spread-eagle on a plastic board, shrieking and wailing as his foreskin is clamped, incised and finally amputated.
"I had not been prepared, nothing could have prepared me, for this experience," writes Milos, whose three sons were all circumcised before her stint in nursing school. "To see a part of this baby's penis being cut off — without an anesthetic — was devastating. But even more shocking was the doctor's comment, barely audible several octaves below the piercing screams of the baby, 'There's no medical reason for doing this.'"
Now Milos, the founder and executive director of NOCIRC, is a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother who proudly boasts of being thanked for her work by her "intact grandson — and his wife." Since her fateful afternoon in nursing school, says Milos, she has devoted every day of her life to bringing and end to what she describes as "an anachronistic blood ritual."
Harrowing narratives, many illustrated, are a staple of anti-circumcision websites, where doctors detail procedures gone awry and complain of poor documentation of the practice's true risks and consequences. (If parents had to do a Google Image search on "botched circumcision" before consenting to the procedure, its prevalence would surely plummet.)
Dispassionate analysis could sweep aside personal accounts like Milos's and dismiss accidental castrations, disfigurements and deaths to the margin of error. After all, male circumcision is or has been routine in the U.S. for >much of the last century, has been spiritually mandated among Jews for millennia, and the purported victims of this preputial pogrom are impregnating their wives and running the country and writing the very words before you. If there's a problem with snipping the foreskins of newborns, its manifestations are subtle.
I consider the fate of my own foreskin with ambivalence. Apart from bypassing a few Craigslist ads stating a preference for intact dick, I've never been aware of being discriminated against for lacking one. As a secular American Jew born in 1970, I've found myself for the most part in the company of men who were either ritually or routinely circumcised. While I take seriously the methodological qualms the anti-circumcision lobby raises about studies showing an STD-foreskin link, that research at least jibes with my own experience, in which sexual contact with some unimaginable number of sex partners has yet to manifest so much as a pimple on my dick. (Coming of age at Ground Zero of both AIDS and condom awareness may also have something to do with it.) I've heard people complain that their intact partners were too quick to orgasm, or were so sensitive they could barely be touched by another person. These are problems I'm happy not to share. So what are we, what I'll call the silent and ambivalent circumcised majority, really missing?
Nothing, I tell myself. But then I remember those moments, so routine in my sex life I barely notice them, in which I'm supposed to be approaching orgasm and the goal seems a long, long way off; in which I jerk myself off until I'm chafed; in which I've run my hands through the hair of someone giving me what has every appearance of a splendid blowjob and yet I am detached from the experience. And I am detached for the reason that I just don't feel it very much. The thought occurs to me that we who lost the most sensitive parts of our sexual organ to a ritual or routine procedure in the first days of life are detached and apathetic and ambivalent because we do not know what we are missing. ©2007 Paul Festa and hooksexup.com