Re: Bared Glans

Written by R J K at 27 Jul 2000 18:59:10:

As an answer to: Bared Glans written by John at 27 Jul 2000 13:18:41:

Yes John, there is a name (or 2 or 3 names) for it. Robin Stuart has recently termed it "virtual circumcision" since the penis looks and acts as if it were circumcised but is not. A doctor from Saginaw, Michigan, writing in a medical journal in 1951 coined the term "autocircumcision" for it, since he thought it was usually done intentionally by the owner of the penis, thus was a "self-circumcision." Somewhere else I saw the term "circumcisionoid" used, meaning it was like a circumcision even though no surgical circumcision had ever been done. The Michigan doctor in 1951 estimated that of American men born in 1900 about 5% were circumcised, 15% were "autocircumcised," and the remaining 80% of the 50-year old male population were uncircumcised. When circumcision became nearly universal after World War II, considerably fewer boys had foreskins to experiment with, so there were lots fewer men who wound up autocircumcised. When I was in the army, a couple of the guys I knew there had short foreskins that left the glans totally uncovered. They made no complaints about their condition, lived normal sex lives (one was happily married, the other chased women enthusiastically) and nobody else looked at them as if they were strange. (Of course they looked more or less like any other circumcised guy.) Your condition is perfectly natural in that it represents one kind of development of the normal penis. In late adolescence the shaft of your penis simply grew faster than the foreskin, and this left your glans permanently uncovered. There is of course nothing whatever wrong with you and you apparently quite wisely have left your penis alone, with the various parts staying where they "want" to be. In human development, most grown men have a foreskin that just covers the glans; others have long ("redundant") ones that hang over the end of the penis; you are at the other end of the bell curve with a normal, but short foreskin. So you can tell your girlfriend that you are just what you told her, never surgically circumcised but "autocircumcised" or "virtually circumcised," and you've never been cut. What you both need to do, in my humble opinion, is to relax and enjoy it, and not worry about how it got the way it is. Best wishes (and keep your cool!), RJK.
>I am in my late teens and are uncircumcised but my glans is totaly bared at all times. Before pubety my glans was covered, in my early teens my foreskin started to retract with errections and every morning I would pull my foreskin foreward over the glans, but it would always roll back as my glans had enlarged now that it was free of my foreskin. In the end I gave up and left my foreskin where it wants to sit, retracted behind my glans. Do many other uncircumcised guys have a bared glans like this and is there a name for it as my girlfriend insists that I am circumcised when I know I am not?

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The Origins of a Taboo