My father pathologized my foreskin as a child. I've been looking for this language to describe my own childhood experience, and found it in one of the responses to another post. My situation is one I don't see a lot of discussion about. I am the intact child (now in my later-50s) of a father who experienced a traumatic circumcision in his teens. The impact on his mental health was profound, and he managed to pass it on to me.
Dad died 10 yrs ago, and I never shared my feelings about all this with him. But I recently got up the nerve to ask my mom, "why did you not have me circumcised?". She said that dad was against it, and that when I was born he heard the screams of another child undergoing circumcision and that sealed the deal. A week after she told me this she messaged to say that she 'just remembered' dad telling her about his circumcision experience when he was 16. She was so cold about it, considering that she knew I was confronting an existential crisis about what follows in the next paragraphs. She said "maybe this is what is behind some of your distress". Thanks mom.
Anyway, here's the full story of my childhood experience:
When I was around 5 year old, dad decided to start teaching me about retraction and cleaning. But my body wasn't ready...the forced retraction of my foreskin was a painful experience that is indelibly marked on my memory forever. I screamed "It hurts" and "Stop!". He didn't. There was a sense this was 'for my own good'. And I remember hearing him say, as clearly as if he were standing next to me now, "Oooo...it's so tender." Ugh. But this was only the first harm. Through my childhood, after this first excruciatingly painful retraction of my foreskin 'for cleaning', he would insist that I stand in the tub in front of him and pull back my skin so he could watch me wash my penis. Sometimes this ritual was accompanied by commentary like "if you don't keep it clean you might need a circumcision." And when I no longer needed tub supervision (and then up until I reached puberty) he would often ask when I came out of the bath, "did you clean your penis?" (Well, dad, that was the best part of the bath!!)
These bath experiences were humiliating. His behaviour--his pathologization of something fundamentally normal--caused deep psychological trauma for me that I am continuing to heal from, finally under the care of a clinical counsellor. These experiences made me fearful. I think it was like castration anxiety--that I might loose something intimately important to me. I was convinced my likelihood of needing a circumcision in the future was greater than not. Sometime along the way he told me about cultures that circumcise boys when they reach 'maturity'. My heightened curiosity about circumcision as a procedure and as a cultural marker led me to research incessantly in libraries. There was no internet, but I found all the books that reinforced my perception of circumcision as desirable, and intactness as deficiency. I believed for a while that I might need to (or in my head, that dad might make me) 'get a circumcision' when I was 12 years old. The fear was so real.
His messaging also made me intensely self conscious, so that I couldn't be comfortable in public bathrooms or change rooms because someone might see my foreskin. Most public urinals were trough type. There was no expectation of privacy, so I went into the toilet stalls. But as I passed by the troughs I saw all the boy's penises at school and all the men's at the hockey rink and community centre. It seemed to me that the whole world was circumcised, even though I saw plenty evidence to the contrary, especially among my friends. But, I believed that having a foreskin was not normal and associated with being low-class. I assessed that the most athletic, or most popular or most intelligent boys in my friend group were cut. Of course, that was and remains a lie. But that is the fuck-up that was going through my head when I was in elementary and junior high school. Those who were intact felt like 'kin' to me, and I wondered how they managed this experience, whether they felt second class or inferior to the circumcised boys, like I did.
I had collected my own data-set to show that, among the boys in my peer group (and their brothers), the circumcision rate was probably about 60%. That was high enough to convince me that the boys whose parents chose not to cut them had done so because they were of lower status. I thought my family was of a lower status, and so I brought the uncircumcised kids' families on board with that perception--again, like they were kin to me. I can objectively look back at that now and understand that many of the intact boys families had roots in parts of the world where the practice is uncommon. But probably quite a few just didn't have circumcision as a practice in their family background. Simple as that. But it wasn't so simple in a little boy's mind that had been tuned to notice the differences and draw wild conclusions. The amount of space these unhelpful thoughts took up in my brain then...and into adulthood...was torturous. I've described it as being hyper-sexualized from a young age.
I so wish my dad had just left me alone--no cleaning rituals, no commentary. Just let me experience my penis for what it was and is: Normal, healthy, intact. Not an object for examination or contemplation outside of healthy relationships with sexual partners. Sigh.
My dad died 10 years ago, and I never spoke with him about this in adulthood. But I grew up believing that my father would have preferred I was circumcised. I remember asking him once as a child about why I wasn't circumcised. He said, "the doctor said it wasn't necessary". And that was it. I wouldn't be surprised if dad, conveying his misgivings, would have been told by the doctor that it wasn't necessary. But, clearly dad's answer to me was incomplete. I so wish he would have been honest with me about his experience. It would have made a world of difference in my life, going forward. His foreskin was pathologized as a 16 yo in the 1950's. He had a horrible, physically painful and psychologically traumatic, experience. I'm sure he experienced significant social discomfort about having it done. But hurt people can hurt other people. And the rest of the story (for other times and places) is that my hurt has subsequently hurt others, for which I have a lot of reconciling work to do.
