Back to the News 2007 page.SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, Sunday, July 15, 2007.
In "The Book of the Penis," a frisky almanac of all
things phallic, author Maggie Paley dedicates a brief
section to circumcision, foreskins and the effects they
have on female sexual pleasure. "Foreskins don't matter
that much to most women," Paley concluded. "When it
comes to penises, women can get used to almost
anything."
Paley probably understated the case. Women really do
care, if you bother to ask, but in most cases their
experience is limited to circumcised men. Especially if
they're American and older than 25.
Starting in the postwar years and peaking in the
1960s, circumcision was de rigueur for American male
infants. Ninety percent of new parents opted to alter
the penis, believing it was the hygienic choice. By
2003, because of changing attitudes and a large influx
of Asian and Latin American immigrants who
traditionally do not circumcise, that number dropped to
55.9 percent.
I wrote about the shift in a June 21 Chronicle
article, "Circumcision losing
favor with U.S. parents," and the e-mail response
was huge. Men bemoaned their parents' choice. Women
advocated for foreskin restoration. Doctors and parents
disputed the urologist quoted, who denied that
circumcision is "brutal."
People are vociferous on the foreskin question, none
more than Kristen O'Hara, the author of "Sex as Nature
Intended It" (2002), in which she claims women are more
likely to enjoy intercourse if their male partner is
uncircumcised.
"On the natural penis," O'Hara writes on her Web site,
sexasnatureintendedit.com, "the
soft, flexible foreskin cushions the coronal-ridge hook
(of the penis head, or glans) and prevents it from
scraping the vaginal walls, giving only pleasure, not
soreness. ... The loose, pliable foreskin bunches up on
the outward stroke to create a seal that
holds fluids in. Lubrication stays inside the
vagina."
For years, O'Hara says, she suffered pain and
discomfort during sex with her husband. She wondered if
the problem was hers. The problem, she finally
concluded, wasn't her own dysfunction – what
psychologists used to call "frigidity" – but "the
abnormal structure of the circumcised penis."
Like 85 to 90 percent of American men born in the
1950s, '60s and '70s, O'Hara's husband, Jeffrey, was
circumcised at birth. Twenty-one years ago, he went
through a foreskin restoration process and ever since,
O'Hara said in an e-mail from her home in
Massachusetts, "sex became a beautiful thing again and
was no longer painful. That's when I realized that
millions of women are having abnormal sex because of
circumcision, and millions of women fake orgasm because
of it."
For her book, O'Hara surveyed 139 women, drawn through
classified ads in various publications. By a margin of
9 to 1, she says, they preferred the natural penis over
his maligned, circumcised cousin. When the man is cut,
O'Hara found, women are "almost five times less likely
to achieve vaginal orgasm."
With her Web site, O'Hara keeps her campaign alive.
Photographs of "cut" and "uncut" penises are liberally
used, along with testimony from the women surveyed,
such as: "I went with one circumcised guy who was into
long sessions. After a while, I'd start to feel as if
he were sandpapering me down there."
O'Hara says she never consulted physicians or sex
therapists in researching her book. "Sexuality has
been, and continues to be, a relatively taboo topic,
and the research money is just not out there. So there
were no so-called experts to refer to. But I think the
information at the Web site makes sound logical sense
and is at the cutting edge of this controversial
topic."
Susie Bright, editor of the annual Best American
Erotica series, has spent the past 20 years studying,
writing about and lecturing on sex. If anyone's a sex
expert, Bright is. And she thinks O'Hara is full of
hooey.
"Some people make a cause out of their sexual
preferences, and find an eager audience," Bright said
by e-mail from her home in Santa Cruz. "You can buy
books about how black men supposedly have larger or
more 'magic' penises than white men, too. The myths are
apparently catnip to many."
In 1988, South African filmmaker Jo Menell ("Mandela")
was living in the Bay Area when he made "Dick," a short
documentary about women's thoughts about penises. "The
thing I remember most clearly," Menell said by e-mail
from South Africa, "is the women I listened to saying
that circumcised men were better lovers because they
lasted longer. Whether circumcised [penises] hurt – I
don't recall any women making that point."
Paley is also dubious. "I've never heard this, ever,"
she said by phone from New York when I mentioned
O'Hara's claim that uncircumcised penises are more
pleasurable to women.
When Paley was researching "The Book of the Penis,"
she says, the cut-vs.-uncut debate "didn't come up all
that much. There was a young woman who only liked men
with big penises and also liked them to be uncut
because she felt a big penis was manly and so was an
uncut penis. It was unfettered, it was free, it hadn't
been tamed by the forces of civilization."
Of the circumcised penis, O'Hara writes, "the head
flares out from the shaft like the hook on a harpoon.
This hook is overly firm and constantly exposed, and on
every outward stroke it scrapes vaginal walls, causing
irritation, redness, discomfort."
Bright, who also hosts a weekly talk show, "In Bed
With Susie Bright," says the cut-vs.-uncut question
really clouds the issue of female sexual fulfillment.
"The big thing that's missing from this discussion,"
she says, "is women's (clitorises). That's how most
women get off."
As for O'Hara's "harpoon" statement, she says, "It's
not 'true,' it's not scientific. Men's (penis) heads
are not harpoon hooks, circumcised or not."
Bright says she has no problem with people declaring
their sexual preferences "from the rooftops," but "to
make it into a biology lesson or draw these conclusions
that circumcised penises are unsafe and hurtful, is
completely unsupported. Why can't people just love
their fetishes for what they are?"
In the gay world, lots of men fetishize uncircumcised
penises, in the same way that "size queens" exalt large
penises. Foreskin Quarterly is a magazine
devoted to the appreciation of uncut men, and in online
gay sex postings the person seeking contact usually
states his penis size and cut-or-uncut status.
But according to Bright, women generally don't fixate
on genitalia as much as men. Carol Leigh, a sex
historian and prostitute who calls herself Scarlot
Harlot, is an exception. Raised in Long Island by
Jewish parents, she says she's always adored
uncircumcised penises because "they're exotic. It's
extremely sexy to a nice Jewish girl from the
suburbs."
When Paley was researching her book and asked about
fellatio, she says, most women said they preferred
circumcised. Foreskinned men "are harder to go down
on," one said, "because they have folds. And you don't
know what you're going to find there."
A New York yoga instructor, who chose not to give her
name, agrees: "I can't help but feel that smegma (or other fluids) get
trapped inside and they are not appealing to me." On a
purely esthetic scale, she adds, "I much prefer the
look of a circumcised penis. I can't help but think
that the uncut looks serpentine – and I'm afraid of
snakes."
A mother of two teenage children thinks the
uncircumcised phallus looks like "an anteater." Kathy
Brew, a New York filmmaker who was one of the
interviewers on Menell's movie "Dick," said a number of
the women she spoke to described it as "an elephant's
trunk."
Anteater. Serpent. Elephant's trunk.
Can Mr. Johnson get some respect?
"Circumcised is my preference," says Brew. "Maybe it's
just convention. Maybe familiarity." Indeed,
circumcision was so widely practiced in the United
States until the 1980s that most women over 25 have
little or no experience with uncut men. I spoke with
one woman, 56, who slept with 110 men in the footloose
1970s – she kept a record – and swears only one of
her lovers was uncircumcised.
If the reverse were true, and uncut men were the vast
majority, wouldn't women feel more squeamish about
knobs than they do about hoods?
Maybe not. "Most women, unfortunately, do not pay a
lot of attention to a man's penis," Bright says.
"They've been brought up not to look or dwell on a part
of the body, or to sexualize one's genitals. If more
women took an interest in their sexual self-interest,
we'd see more of this conversation among women."
E-mail Edward Guthmann at eguthmann@sfchronicle.com .
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