[ ARC forum 2 ]

Re: Purity

Written by glider at 06 Nov 2002 19:36:21:

As an answer to: Re: Just regained consciousness . . . but still woozy. written by The Anti-Mutiliation Manager at 31 Oct 2002 16:03:13:

Well yeah. Jim/Cliff tried stretching with betamethasone(?), but found this didn’t work. A month, however, isn’t an awfully long time, especially if you’re starting out with very tight phimosis. A month is actually a pretty short time if you aren’t trying very hard. Also, since circumcision seems to have a recovery period of around two months, a month is really hardly any time at all.

Sure, circumcision is an option. It just doesn’t seem the best option that’s all. The foreskin makes an important contribution to sex, though it often needs to be worked on before it will cooperate fully. This can take six months. A year. Two years. Actually, it seems to get better and better as time goes on. Shame not to do the work. And shame so many guys don’t find out about this work very much sooner.

Jim/Cliff seems to have become aware of his problem around the age of eleven. Perhaps he became aware of it retrospectively, though if he was aware that things weren’t as he wished at the age sixteen say, it certainly seems a pity he didn’t find out that he might be able to fix it for himself, and that if he went at it diligently would likely have it sorted out by the time he was nineteen.

It would probably be unusual to get this information from a doctor. Doctors, I imagine, don’t tend to give advice that boils down to telling a sixteen-year-old boy that he should try masturbating in ways that are good at stretching the skin. It’s rather bizarre. The treatment of first resort cannot be mentioned.

If you personally hadn’t got hold of information until years after it would have first been useful to you, you might find yourself resenting various cultural forces that seemed responsible for the delay. Circumcision, taboos on masturbation, and various other etc etc type matters, seem to me to be fairly obviously responsible for a delay that probably cost me several years of enjoyment. So. I resent the things mentioned. RIC, in particular, though.

Of course, Jim/Cliff’s experience (six days and counting depending on your time zone) isn’t an argument for Non-Consensual Circumcision, and I don’t suppose he’d claim it was. But it’s the fact that this is done routinely to infants that generates all the heat here. If NCC were stopped – a complete ban would allow no religious excuses – then people would be able to listen calmly to Jim/Cliff’s experience, and wouldn’t always be distracted by the flames of a different issue that can be tricky to see as completely separate.


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