The Origins of a Taboo
Re: Retracting Foreskin
Written by R J Knight at 23 Dec 1999 01:23:59:As an answer to: Re: Retracting Foreskin written by Nick at 29. November 1999 at 21:07:21:
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>>Since a lot of years I try to keep my foreskin back. We are very often at a nudist beach in Europe an my wife wants me to pull the foreskin back. That works only for two days. After this time my foreskin starts to swallow and it slips over the glans. Does anybody knows if it is dangerous, to retract the foreskin, what can happen. My wife an me enjay ist, but we don*t want to circumzise. (sorry for the mistakes, I'm from germany)
>I must admit I wonder how common this situation is. My foreskin is naturally retracted yet most
>information seems to assume that either you're cut, or if uncut, always drawn forward. You should probably try and keep
>your foreskin permanently retracted while clothed - eventually the glans will expand at the rim and hold your skin back.
>Also, try and feel less consious of it as that can often make the penis contract
Nick, this situation is fairly common, or has been in the past in the USA. I personally think you're to be envied since you have the advantages (such as they are) of circumcision without having had to undergo surgery to get them. When I was in the army I knew a guy whose foreskin stayed retracted, and also in a movie theater line at Ft Campbell, KY, I once heard a guy tell another one, "Mine looks circumcised but it's not, it just stays skinned-back all the time!" A good many American men born before World War II kept their foreskins retracted. Of course most men born in the US since WWII were circumcised at birth, so haven't had the opportunity to practice retraction. This condition has shown upon occasion in literature, of course. Moll Flanders, Fielding's whore (or one of them) had a client whose penis was, as she put it, "half-capt." In the Italian movie "1900", a 3-hour-long epic that came out about 20 years ago, the kid who plays the protagonist as a boy goes into some high grass with another boy
boy and tells him, "See, mine looks like yours now. I yanked it back!" Don't know how common this was in Italy, but not very, I'd guess. Somewhere I saw the statement that about half of all uncircumcised British males have the glans at least halfway (and sometimes fully) exposed, apparently because the foreskin through time tends to become permanently retracted as a result of sexual activity. (I haven't peeked at the penises of British males--nor do I want to!--& so can't agree or disagree with the truth of the statement.) I have seen an article by a Michigan doctor writing in a medical journal in 1951 who stated that about 15% of all men living in the Saginaw area who had been born in 1900 (thus were about 50 years old at that time) kept their foreskins permanently retracted. Most of them had done this to themselves, he said, either for purposes of health & cleanliness or because they preferred the appearance of a penis with the foreskin retracted. The doctor coined the term "autocircumcision" to describe the condition where the penis appears to be circumcised but has no history of such surgery. I haven't seen the term in print anywhere else, so it evidently didn't catch on. Anyway, at the time, so many newborns were being circumcised that "autocircumcision" was doomed to become a lot less common in the future in this country. Historically among native Americans at least one branch of the Sioux nation, the Lakotah, kept their foreskins retracted: their word for the adult penis, "sluka," (pronounced sloo-KAH [?]) translates literally as "foreskin pushed back." Ruth Beebe Hill lets us in on this bit of information in her 1979 novel, "Hanta Yo." There would seem to be a perceived survival advantage in this practice for a tribe whose men often needed to mount their horses in a hurry and ride off across the plains: an infected penis would be a definite liability to a warrior trying to keep up with his fellows. Whether the rest of the Sioux kept their foreskins retracted I don't know. A linguist or anthropologist with access to a dictionary of dialects of the tribe as a whole no doubt could determine this. The penis like other parts of the human anatomy is pretty variable, as is the foreskin, so it's not too surprising that some men have short foreskins (just as others have quite long ones). If the anti-circumcisionists in time have their way and persuade most Americans to give up their present devotion to circumcision of the newborn, your retracted condition may assume more importance in the future as more boys grow up with foreskins of their own to experiment with, since most of this generation, at least, of American women express a preference for the appearance of the circumcised penis, judging from their responses to questionnaires. Who knows? Only a fool (or a sociologist, which I'm not) would try to predict which way this vibrant nation will jump next. If you collect any further information on this somewhat specialized subject, I'd appreciate your sharing it. Cheers, Bob.
- Re: Retracting Foreskin Hal 1/17/2001 20:23 (0)
The Origins of a Taboo