"[This] book is breaking one of Western culture’s unwritten taboos: it talks openly about the emotional pain of men and boys. This taboo is rarely conscious and most people are simply unaware they even have it. I wouldn’t have known about it but was confronted with it repeatedly in my psychotherapeutic work with men and boys for the last 30 years in helping them heal from trauma. It was blatantly apparent that no one wanted to hear the emotional pain of these men and boys. Most people would justify this by blaming the men as being cold and unfeeling. At first I wasn’t sure what was happening, but over time it became clear. The emotional pain of men and boys is something that people will avoid like the plague. The men know this and act accordingly, taking care of their own emotional states by themselves.

It is this very taboo that helps us understand a bit more about circumcision. The taboo creates a situation where a man’s emotional pain is avoided and a woman’s emotional pain is a call to action. When we hear women in pain, we feel obligated to help in some way, to do something. When we hear about women facing the trauma of circumcision, we see it as an outrage and join forces to stop it in its tracks. But when we hear a man in pain, we turn it off. We don’t hear it. “He can deal with it himself,” we say to ourselves. Our politicians are no different. They are very sensitive to women’s pain and will draft legislation to try and be of help. That is how they get re-elected. But they do nothing for the men (and doing nothing for men rarely impacts their re-election). This, of course, is the situation we now face where female circumcision is outlawed in most western cultures in all its forms and is seen as a human rights violation. Meanwhile the circumcision of infant males is the most popular surgical procedure in America.

Since the emotional pain of men and boys is taboo and walled off, there is much less public concern for their pain than there is for that of girls and women. Almost every magazine or newspaper article you have seen on circumcision was probably about the circumcision of girls. If you look at the professional journals you will see a similar bias. There have been numerous journal articles about the traumatic psychological consequences of female circumcision, but I have yet to see one journal article about the psychological consequences of the circumcision of males.2 The articles that do appear are touting that male circumcision will prevent the disease of the day. Now it is HIV but the medical profession has sung this song before. They have assured us that male circumcision will prevent syphilis, epilepsy, spinal paralysis, bedwetting, eye problems, deafness, dumbness, tuberculosis, penile cancer, cervical cancer, and now HIV.

With the press framing women’s circumcision as oppression and boys’ circumcision as being healthy and life giving—and the medical profession doing much the same—it is little wonder that our general population will voice a very similar bias. Ask a random person on the street about female circumcision and they will tell you of the evil it takes to do such a thing, but ask them about boys and they will shrug their shoulders. They simply don’t care, since they really don’t know.

[...]

The world we live in is much less likely to render compassion for men and boys. This can change. You are changing it by reading this book. Thank you for your courage. The men and boys you love will thank you, too."

"I was born on 28 September 1975 in Concord, Massachusetts. My mother was seventeen at the time, and my father was a nineteen-year-old, enlisted in the US Air Force. I’m told that it was a beautiful autumn day, and all went well.

After I was delivered by the obstetrician, I was examined by a pediatrician. I’m told that he was about fifty years old and a snappy dresser. This is all I know about this man, all I will ever know about this man as the records are not kept longer than twenty years. There was nothing at all the matter with me: I was a healthy baby boy.

However, the pediatrician, for reasons that I will never know, found my penis objectionable. This was an issue of great concern to him. I had a pretty, perfect penis, with a prepuce, and he was determined to deprive me of it. My parents, on the other hand, were not worried about it. They didn’t feel there was a reason to do anything to my penis. My mother told the pediatrician, “No.” He became very annoyed with her.

He came back the next day to press the issue; he insisted that I’d want to be like my father. (Years later when I argued with my wife, she stung me by saying, “You’re being just like your father.”) My mother relented because this high status, well-dressed doctor was determined, and she would stand in his way no longer. On 30 September 1975, a Tuesday, I was strapped into a Circumstraint, positioned hips elevated, with my penis perfectly presented to the pediatrician. I could not understand, consent, refuse or escape. No analgesia would have been used. The intense pain that I was to endure would have a lasting impact on my neurological development. Unperturbed by my pain, the pediatrician proceeded.

There is no absolute medical indication for routine circumcision of the newborn.99

What were this man’s motivations? Why was it so important to him what my penis looked like? Why did he think that the most intimate part of my body, my “private parts,” my penis, was his prerogative? I’ll never know what he wanted from me. But whatever it was, he took it.

He got what he wanted. He had his way with me. He carved his paycheck into my penis. He carved his religion into my penis. He carved his tribal marking into my penis. He carved his custom into my penis. He carved his grotesque esthetic preferences into my penis. He carved his obscene signature into my penis. He carved his sadistic sexual fetish into my penis.

My mother thinks that the pediatricians’ predilection for pruning the prepuce from penises was primarily pecuniary. I look at the scar on my penis, and wonder, “What is this?” A night out on the town—flushed down a toilet. A pair of wing-tip shoes—at the bottom of a landfill since 1978. A golf club—sold at a yard sale in 1983. Whatever enjoyment he had was fleeting; it’s long gone. But 38 years later, the scar is still on my penis, and will be until the day I die—and for what?

In the film Robin Hood, Men in Tights, Mel Brooks plays a mohel who attempts to sell circumcisions to a group of twenty-somethings. His pitch, “The ladies love it, the men all want it.” Then he explains the procedure, and the men want none of it. He concludes, “I gotta work a much younger crowd.”

While I will never really know the motivations of my assailant, I’m chillingly aware of why it had to be done to me in infancy. He would never see me again, he would never need to know what I thought of his work, he would never have to face me, he would never need to answer for what he has done. This is the reason, for there is no valid medical reason that this is the best time.

There are lots of medical reasons that this is a bad time. My prepuce was fused to my glans, and he tore them apart. Anesthetic is dangerous; he would have used none. My penis grew much larger and he could not know what the final result would be. He had to do it to me in infancy to exercise power over me, to deny me the opportunity to refuse, to deny me any memory of the pretty perfect penis with prepuce that I was born with, to hide the assault from me—as though I were just born that way. Most of all because it’s so easy to say yes—when it’s not your penis.

If the benefits of circumcision were compelling, competent well-informed men would choose it for themselves, but very few normal men do. Only 1 in 3000 genitally intact American men will request circumcision as an adult for non-medical reasons. The rates are even lower in Europe.101

They could hide the memory, but the scar will always be on my penis, and they could not hide what they did to me forever. When I was six years old, my bother and I were peeing into a toilet with my friend Lucas. I noticed that there was something different about Lucas’s penis, it had skin all the way down and tapered at the tip. His urine sprayed out, rather than coming out in a defined stream. I didn’t know why, or what to think. My younger bother noticed too. But he took the next step—he asked about it.

I’ll never forget that day. I was standing in the small backyard of our condo in San Diego, when he opened the glass door and announced, cryptically, that “they” cut off something that “could cause infections.” I had no idea what he was talking about. I remained oblivious, but an impression had been made.

Circumcision ablates the most sensitive parts of the penis.102

In 1993 I was a junior in high school. Howard Stern, the shock jock, was on the airwaves, and, boy, was I in for a shock—even though I never listened to his show. My friend Nathan did. One night, Nathan said to me, “That’s the most sensitive part.”

One angst filled sentence. I still didn’t really know what had been cut off. That one angst filled sentence would ring in my ears for years to come. I was upset. He was upset. I was upset, simple as that. Why was I upset? I didn’t know anything about the prepuce, or why it was important, or really even what it meant to be “the most sensitive part.” What did I know?

I knew that it was my penis. I knew that I wasn’t given a choice. I knew that I was upset. I knew that my friend thought it had value. I knew that it had value because it was mine. I knew that I wanted it back.

I knew that what little I knew was enough to know that it was wrong. Thus began a decades long journey to undo what my assailant did in minutes. Thomas 38 years Florida, USA 5 December 2013"