The Scandalous History of Circumcision (w/ Ben Bernard)

We’re back from our summer vacation and ready, naturally, to talk about dicks. We’re joined for our tenth episode by fellow historian Ben Bernard to talk about the strange career of circumcision in America, which the writer Edward Wallerstein in 1980 called “a solution in search of a problem.” Wallerstein’s book made an appearance in a Christopher Street dialogue between George Stambolian and Larry Mass at a time when gay men–and increasingly, Americans writ large–were skeptical of medical expertise. We learn that circumcision was recommended in the late 19th century as a masturbation-prevention technique; when this sort of moralism fell out of fashion, it was outfitted with new (but equally dubious) medical justifications. We talk about how our evangelical and Jewish backgrounds shaped our awareness of circumcision, Ben and Blake's experiences of uncut cocks in France, how gay guys think about their own dicks and other guys’ dicks, how sameness and difference can be eroticized in different ways, and why circumcision has never really become a major political issue despite people vigorously objecting to it.

Click here to subscribe to the Off Christopher Street newsletter.

Benjamin S. Bernard is a historian whose work focuses on education, gender and sexuality, and the culture of early modern France. His writing has appeared in The Hedgehog Review, Public Seminar, Inside Higher Ed, the Princeton Alumni Weekly, and others. 

Sources

• George Stambolian and Lawrence D. Mass, “The Unkindest Cut of All,” Christopher Street, May 1982.
• Edward Wallerstein, Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy (1980).
• Ben Bernard, “The University’s Never-Ending Crisis,” The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2026.
• Lawrence D. Mass, “The New Narcissism and Homosexuality: The Psychiatric Connection,” Christopher Street, January 1980.
• George Stambolian, “Paris and Poppers,” New York Native, 1983.
• Todd Shepard, Sex, France and Arab Men, 1962-1979 (2017)
• Todd Shepard, “Against Vanilla History: Why and How Histories of Sexual Acts Could Matter to Intellectual Historians,” The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas (2023).
• Danielle Spencer, Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity (2020).
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star (1994).
• John Powers, A Bull of a Man: Images of Masculinity, Sex, and the Body in Indian Buddhism (2012).

Creators and Guests

Host

Blake Smith

Blake Smith is a historian, writer, and translator. His writing has appeared in The Hedgehog Review, American Affairs, Tablet, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere.

Host

David Sessions

David Sessions is a historian and journalist. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Point, Dissent, The Daily Beast, Slate, and others.

Guest

Ben Bernard

Ben Bernard is a historian whose work focuses on education, gender and sexuality, and the culture of early modern France. His writing has appeared in The Hedgehog Review, Public Seminar, Inside Higher Ed, the Princeton Alumni Weekly, and others.

What is Off Christopher Street?

Historians David Sessions and Blake Smith gossip about the gay life of the past and the gay discourses of the present.

(00:00:00.091):
There's actually very little about what actually happens during sex.

(00:00:04.578):
And I think in my own education as someone who took a lot of history of gender

(00:00:09.445):
and sexuality courses,

(00:00:11.267):
it's kind of amazing to me in retrospect how circumcision is the...

(00:00:15.073):
This pervasive surgery is one of the most common surgeries performed in America,

(00:00:21.583):
especially prophylactically.

(00:00:23.746):
And it really is kind of a gender unconfirmation surgery in a way.

(00:00:27.892):
Let me put it this way.

(00:00:30.095):
What's great.

(00:00:45.057):
This is Off Christopher Street.

(00:01:14.821):
I'm David Sessions and I'm joined as always by my co-host and fellow historian Blake Smith.

(00:01:25.090):
We are finally back from our summer break, which was not exactly a break.

(00:01:28.973):
Blake is in the home stretch of finishing his book.

(00:01:31.474):
I finished a couple of essays.

(00:01:33.036):
We even hung out with each other in Chicago, which you will be hearing more about soon.

(00:01:36.878):
We have some surprises coming up.

(00:01:39.760):
But today we are talking about an issue that I confess I hadn't thought a lot about

(00:01:43.463):
before our conversation, which is circumcision.

(00:01:47.220):
Of course, most gay guys have thought about cut and uncut cocks.

(00:01:51.201):
You know, all you have to do is look at Twitter to see that.

(00:01:53.962):
But it turns out there's a lot more to say on the subject if we look into the past

(00:01:57.363):
a bit, as we like to do here, considering that we are all historians.

(00:02:01.565):
So to do that, we are joined by my friend Ben Bernard, who, like us, is a French historian.

(00:02:06.366):
He did his PhD in French and gender history at Princeton,

(00:02:09.467):
and he knows everything there is to know about the very strange

(00:02:12.649):
and even scandalous history of circumcision as it's practiced in the United States.

(00:02:17.670):
So, the writer Edward Wallerstein,

(00:02:19.611):
who we talk a bit about in the episode,

(00:02:21.693):
famously called circumcision in America "a solution in search of a problem,"

(00:02:26.075):
because no matter how much it's debunked,

(00:02:27.676):
it keeps finding new and equally dubious justifications.

(00:02:31.718):
In the Victorian era, circumcision supposedly made it harder for boys to jerk off?

(00:02:36.661):
Yay!

(00:02:37.742):
And later,

(00:02:38.282):
when people didn't care about that so much anymore,

(00:02:40.964):
then it supposedly prevented cancer and STIs,

(00:02:43.945):
which is also really not backed up by scientific research.

(00:02:47.087):
So what's the deal?

(00:02:48.188):
Why does this practice continue?

(00:02:50.548):
Circumcision is of course historically associated with Judaism and with Islam,

(00:02:54.870):
but not with Christianity except in America,

(00:02:57.511):
where even today a majority of boys are circumcised as newborns.

(00:03:02.183):
Blake and I really didn't start out with strong feelings in favor of the uncut cock,

(00:03:06.467):
but we learned a lot from Ben about this very strange history and we try

(00:03:10.471):
to situate it in the context of the gay male relationship to medical expertise in

(00:03:15.396):
the late 1970s and early 1980s,

(00:03:17.859):
which also happened to be the beginning of the AIDS crisis.

(00:03:21.322):
We talk about How gay guys think about their own dicks and other guys' dicks,

(00:03:25.246):
how their sexual experiences shape that perception,

(00:03:28.589):
how both sameness and difference can be eroticized in different ways.

(00:03:32.452):
And we talk about how the unquestionably gruesome practice

(00:03:35.936):
of circumcision has never really managed to become a major political issue,

(00:03:40.159):
despite some people very vigorously objecting to it.

(00:03:44.961):
Also make sure you give us a rating in your podcast app.

(00:04:14.641):
So without further ado,

(00:04:15.662):
we are glad to be back for our 10th episode and we hope you enjoy our conversation

(00:04:18.824):
about the cut and the uncut.

(00:05:02.083):
All right.

(00:05:02.506):
We are back again.

(00:05:03.270):
Blake is here again.

(00:05:04.336):
How's it going, Blake?

(00:05:05.829):
Hello, David.

(00:05:06.590):
Hello, guest.

(00:05:07.670):
And we have a special guest this time, my good friend, Ben Bernard.

(00:05:11.213):
Welcome to the show.

(00:05:12.134):
Thanks for joining us.

(00:05:12.894):
Thanks so much, guys.

(00:05:14.035):
I have been listening to the podcast and really excited to be here and make

(00:05:19.319):
that parasocial relationship real.

(00:05:22.501):
Well, at least we know each other in real life somewhat.

(00:05:25.923):
And this is,

(00:05:26.384):
you won't know this because it's not out yet,

(00:05:27.785):
but this is our second episode in a row with three French historians.

(00:05:32.148):
Yeah.

(00:05:32.765):
You see what you can do with a PhD in French history?

(00:05:34.946):
You can become a semi-employed podcaster.

(00:05:38.348):
In my case, an unemployed podcaster.

(00:05:40.689):
I feel like with all this French knowledge floating around our pod,

(00:05:44.031):
we should have done a French topic or we should do a French topic.

(00:05:47.733):
But instead, today,

(00:05:48.714):
we are going to talk about,

(00:05:50.034):
to paraphrase the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss,

(00:05:53.436):
the cut and the uncut.

(00:05:55.911):
Okay, so before we talk about, like,

(00:05:58.853):
so as usual,

(00:05:59.433):
we're going to talk about an article from Christopher Street, jump off from that.

(00:06:02.835):
Blake, you want to tell us the guys we're talking about today?

(00:06:06.338):
Okay, so we have a conversation in,

(00:06:08.879):
I think,

(00:06:10.180):
May 1982,

(00:06:11.801):
spring of 1982,

(00:06:12.782):
between George Stambolian,

(00:06:14.343):
whom we already know from our conversation about hot guys

(00:06:18.125):
from his interview.

(00:06:18.826):
Our very first episode, in fact.

(00:06:20.867):
Oh, oh yeah, that was, okay.

(00:06:21.988):
Yeah.

(00:06:23.029):
And Lawrence Larry Mass,

(00:06:26.094):
who at this time,

(00:06:27.576):
like in the early 80s, is kind of Christopher Street's resident medical expert.

(00:06:32.383):
And she becomes like a really big figure both for the magazine and

(00:06:35.568):
for its spinoff newspaper, New York Native.

(00:06:39.611):
He's also,

(00:06:41.112):
in this year, 1982,

(00:06:42.293):
one of the co-founders,

(00:06:43.854):
along with Ed White, Larry Kramer, some other guys of Gay Men's Health Crisis.

(00:06:49.256):
So, very, very important figure.

(00:06:51.077):
I think only passed, like, a few years ago, not that long ago.

(00:06:54.599):
I mean...

(00:06:56.755):
For some reason, I thought he was still alive.

(00:06:58.356):
Oh my God, he's still alive.

(00:06:59.717):
Yeah, he's still alive.

(00:07:00.998):
Okay, yeah.

(00:07:01.318):
I think I have mentioned my long-running desire for "Still Alive!",

(00:07:04.881):
exclamation mark magazine,

(00:07:06.342):
which every month would just remind you of people who are still alive.

(00:07:12.146):
And this also happens to be,

(00:07:13.527):
okay, so he is, Larry Mass is the guy who is being interviewed in this article.

(00:07:20.852):
And the other, the interviewer is...

(00:07:23.494):
Yes,

(00:07:23.794):
10 billion

(00:07:24.174):
is in principle the interviewer all Although there are some questions

(00:07:28.538):
that Stambullian asks that are just like paragraph block statements.

(00:07:33.163):
Yeah, as usual.

(00:07:34.224):
So Stambolian often appears as the interviewer in Christopher Street,

(00:07:37.888):
whether it's about like the male nude and art,

(00:07:40.851):
or he's doing his like interview series,

(00:07:43.073):
Interview with a Hot Guy, or in this case, circumcision.

(00:07:46.416):
He was like a trained academic with a PhD in French-related stuff.

(00:07:51.220):
And the thing you learn in academia is how to ask a question that is not a question

(00:07:56.003):
and is very long.

(00:07:58.365):
This also, by the way, just happens to be the issue that the Foucault interview is in, too.

(00:08:04.258):
There's the Foucault interview.

(00:08:05.660):
There's this thing on Hitchcock.

(00:08:08.062):
This is a great issue, except it's on cheapo newsprint for a year.

(00:08:12.147):
They like experiment with saving money by making a shittier magazine.

(00:08:17.299):
Yeah, I'm showing the cover,

(00:08:18.621):
but I feel like we should show,

(00:08:19.823):
just for the video, I'm going to show the actual, what the magazine looks like.

(00:08:23.708):
It has this kind of amazing,

(00:08:28.875):
unsettling medical drawings of adult circumcision, of doing it on a big adult cock.

(00:08:36.085):
Um, and apparently these were used,

(00:08:38.466):
I don't know for what year,

(00:08:39.647):
like maybe 82, maybe 81, um, for the Saint, the nightclub's black party.

(00:08:45.132):
And we tried online to find the original flyers

(00:08:48.474):
that used these grotesque 19th century medical illustrations and have not been able

(00:08:52.858):
to.

(00:08:53.658):
I don't know what you think, Ben.

(00:08:54.779):
Like, this is, it's very odd.

(00:08:56.841):
This is like the least hot, like, club circuit party invitation illustration I can imagine, but.

(00:09:03.145):
Yeah, I feel like it's got to be kind of ironic a little bit,

(00:09:05.649):
like a little bit tongue in cheek,

(00:09:07.111):
like a particular kind of edgy that appeals to a certain kind

(00:09:11.097):
of like San Francisco kinkster.

(00:09:12.980):
I'm not sure.

(00:09:13.661):
And I also don't really think of maybe I'm wrong,

(00:09:15.724):
but I don't really think of the saint, like the whole thing.

(00:09:18.087):
The whole thing about the Saint was it was like super high tech and it had the,

(00:09:21.989):
you know, the best sound system of all time and the best lights of all time.

(00:09:25.191):
I don't think of it as being like especially a kink place, but.

(00:09:28.353):
They had weird ads though.

(00:09:29.694):
So one, like some of their classic ads have this weird like Conan the Barbarian kind

(00:09:33.277):
of fantasy stuff.

(00:09:34.497):
And then the Black Party ad specifically because I was looking the other night

(00:09:37.279):
to see if I could find like.

(00:09:39.754):
So it ran through the 80s and it was S&M informed, the flyers were very edgy, not medical.

(00:09:51.253):
I imagine that this was part of a collage or folded into other stuff.

(00:09:56.958):
It couldn't have just been this and then the date of the party.

(00:10:00.982):
Right.

(00:10:01.723):
But Old Queens,

(00:10:02.463):
if any of you were there,

(00:10:03.504):
you know,

(00:10:04.024):
this is a question that we could ask Data Lounge, except Data Lounge is closing.

(00:10:09.966):
Oh, is it?

(00:10:10.506):
Oh, is it?

(00:10:11.947):
End of July, it will be gone.

(00:10:13.987):
The bars are closing.

(00:10:15.348):
The magazines are closing.

(00:10:17.149):
The forums are closing.

(00:10:18.749):
But the podcasts are flourishing.

(00:10:21.910):
We're keeping the tradition alive.

(00:10:23.531):
Thank you, David and Blake.

(00:10:24.931):
As we've said before, we are the last remaining rampart of gay culture.

(00:10:32.347):
It all depends on you listening and subscribing.

(00:10:35.169):
Especially

(00:10:36.270):
subscribing and paying.

(00:10:37.471):
Especially subscribing and paying.

(00:10:39.552):
So these guys are,

(00:10:41.314):
they are not really talking about explicitly about,

(00:10:45.237):
or the interview is not like openly pegged to the release of a book

(00:10:48.799):
or something like that.

(00:10:50.040):
But they do talk about this 1980 book by,

(00:10:53.583):
And Wallerstein,

(00:10:54.744):
which I just closed the magazine, so I'm not going to have the title in front of me.

(00:10:58.587):
Circumcision, an American health fallacy.

(00:11:00.970):
So you can guess.

(00:11:02.211):
Yeah, so released

(00:11:03.171):
in 1980.

(00:11:04.473):
And that was, Ben, I could tell from your sort of, oh, he has the, oh, he has it right here.

(00:11:10.738):
I actually have the Yale Library copy right here for you guys.

(00:11:14.501):
Springer's series focused on men.

(00:11:17.136):
Well, from your exhaustive bibliography that you sent us on this topic,

(00:11:24.646):
it was clear that that was like an important book.

(00:11:26.848):
So I wondered if you might want to...

(00:11:28.915):
Tell us a little bit about what that book is and why it's important in

(00:11:33.617):
the circumcision literature.

(00:11:35.337):
Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to say a word about it.

(00:11:37.618):
So Edward Wallerstein is actually a kind of business executive.

(00:11:42.160):
He had a four-decade career in tech and cable TV and this kind of stuff.

(00:11:47.902):
He became the communications director at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine for a few years.

(00:11:53.746):
And that's a moment in my mind that maybe I would imagine starts to solidify some

(00:11:59.510):
of his thinking around circumcision.

(00:12:03.373):
The way he tells it in the preface of the book is that he came from a Jewish family,

(00:12:09.057):
a Jewish background, and his son was born in the mid-1940s.

(00:12:13.240):
So that puts him like...

(00:12:15.082):
In the generation kind of of my grandparents, maybe a little older.

(00:12:19.628):
And he and his wife were told that basically they were told all about the benefits

(00:12:25.116):
of neonatal genital cutting and they did this for their son.

(00:12:30.124):
And then almost a generation later from the sound of it,

(00:12:33.068):
he met a young couple who told them about their OBGYN who was really

(00:12:37.014):
against circumcision.

(00:12:39.257):
And for him, a light bulb went off like, this is crazy.

(00:12:42.902):
Whoever heard of such a thing?

(00:12:45.045):
And so he goes off and describes how he kind of, quote unquote, did his own research, right?

(00:12:50.510):
And so he went looking in the medical literature to see what he could find.

(00:12:54.214):
This is not,

(00:12:55.415):
this is not deconfirming my like long time impression that this is like a topic

(00:12:59.879):
for Crank's.

(00:13:01.528):
Well, I mean, it's,

(00:13:02.629):
I think it's something that we should talk about because

(00:13:06.712):
like my memory of it, like,

(00:13:08.553):
or maybe my,

(00:13:09.413):
I was trying to think back,

(00:13:10.354):
like my main exposure to it,

(00:13:12.015):
kind of the,

(00:13:13.436):
and I guess we should say for listeners, yes, that,

(00:13:15.978):
you know,

(00:13:16.558):
part of the fun of talking about this is like what we think about cut

(00:13:19.620):
and uncut cocks, but also the circumcision as a political issue.

(00:13:23.543):
And I think I was introduced to that by Andrew Sullivan,

(00:13:26.325):
like Oh

(00:13:28.346):
my gosh, she just has an opinion on everything, doesn't she?

(00:13:32.489):
Yeah, it was one of his big hobby horses in the 2000s,

(00:13:36.712):
along with weed legalization and gay marriage.

(00:13:40.034):
That one we went into Iraq to stop them from doing that.

(00:13:43.677):
That was the real, we must save Arab foreskin.

(00:13:50.273):
Anyway, sorry, Ben.

(00:13:52.355):
Continue.

(00:13:52.855):
I mean, if anything, American foreign policy is predicated on spreading circumcision.

(00:13:57.419):
Like this was America's... That's how the Koreans got it.

(00:14:00.382):
That's true.

(00:14:01.102):
It's part of America's HIV policy in Africa, right?

(00:14:05.066):
Well, luckily, Donald Trump has ended the war on foreign foreskin.

(00:14:10.030):
So you're welcome, people of color in the global South.

(00:14:13.713):
Listen, I mean, stop the clocks.

(00:14:15.675):
I don't know.

(00:14:17.855):
I actually think this is a really interesting question, though,

(00:14:20.339):
because this question of scientific and medical authority and cranks and charlatans.

(00:14:25.326):
I mean, I have a piece in the Hedgehog Review coming out this summer that deals

(00:14:29.713):
with this idea of the charlatan.

(00:14:32.917):
And, you know, sometimes like the epistemic populists have a point.

(00:14:39.507):
And this is a case where,

(00:14:40.889):
you know,

(00:14:41.149):
people like Wallerstein write really convincingly about how the doctors

(00:14:45.416):
in their lives are like a little bit...

(00:14:47.639):
Right.

(00:15:09.257):
So I should say, I mean,

(00:15:10.038):
part of the fun for me of thinking about the interview is like this same moment

(00:15:15.223):
that Mass is thinking about circumcision with Stambolian.

(00:15:19.927):
And I want to get some more context from you,

(00:15:21.548):
Ben, on the Wallerstein book and what's happening maybe like around 1980.

(00:15:23.970):
But Mass...

(00:15:28.004):
It comes to be, like,

(00:15:29.745):
over the course of the 80s,

(00:15:31.066):
sort of the voice of the emerging scientific consensus in Christopher Street

(00:15:36.088):
in New York Native,

(00:15:37.549):
whereas Ortleb,

(00:15:38.410):
the editor of both publications,

(00:15:39.971):
becomes increasingly, like,

(00:15:41.652):
from 1984 on, A,

(00:15:44.213):
I did my own research,

(00:15:45.374):
and it's swine flu, chronic fatigue syndrome, don't do the HIV test, yada, yada.

(00:15:50.697):
But at this moment, 82...

(00:15:53.598):
And Ortleb is very concerned about AIDS and like we need to be centering it.

(00:15:58.622):
And he's really like we need to be running all the possible viewpoints.

(00:16:02.805):
We need to be like fostering debate.

(00:16:04.726):
We need to be publishing Larry Kramer,

(00:16:06.187):
who he later falls out with because Larry Kramer is like he thinks in league with

(00:16:09.910):
the drug companies and Dr. Fauci.

(00:16:12.231):
And Mass is actually very suspicious of media media.

(00:16:17.315):
Medical scientific narratives about AIDS at first,

(00:16:21.341):
like it is like for most of 81 and early 82 is really suspicious.

(00:16:27.450):
And part of the context of this is like, you know, it's only in the late 70s that the story.

(00:16:32.277):
Of the Tuskegee experiment is really like released in the media.

(00:16:37.139):
And I mean,

(00:16:37.559):
for other reasons related to like the Vietnam War,

(00:16:40.800):
Watergate,

(00:16:41.760):
there's a legitimate global distrust of experts like throughout American society,

(00:16:47.322):
particularly among gay men.

(00:16:48.823):
So indeed, it's not like this.

(00:16:50.744):
This is both a good time and a fraught time to be questioning medical expertise.

(00:16:57.246):
But OK, like Wallerstein, I take it like so the book is like, a big deal?

(00:17:02.754):
It's a huge deal.

(00:17:03.712):
I mean, he writes in the preface that,

(00:17:05.314):
you know,

(00:17:05.615):
as he starts doing research,

(00:17:07.137):
kind of as a layperson into this topic,

(00:17:09.480):
he's like, yeah, I mean, there's stuff from like the 30s that doesn't make sense.

(00:17:13.886):
You have all these like anti I was rereading Wallerstein this afternoon

(00:17:17.209):
before our talk and I realized like...

(00:17:32.135):
You can kind of tell it's not written by a professional academic in the sense that

(00:17:35.536):
the argument of each chapter is not always super tight.

(00:17:39.337):
But he has, you know, an interesting take on things.

(00:17:43.159):
And each chapter,

(00:17:44.579):
it's like when something,

(00:17:45.760):
you know,

(00:17:45.980):
when a book is so broad that you can tell like each chapter is going

(00:17:50.741):
to become its own like field of debate,

(00:17:52.902):
like a chapter on like,

(00:17:54.763):
I'm just going to,

(00:17:55.743):
you know, I'm just going to give you guys the table of contents here.

(00:18:00.509):
Like the circumcision mystique.

(00:18:02.450):
Why only in the United States?

(00:18:04.552):
Is it informed consent?

(00:18:05.813):
I mean, consent is like its own huge field of bioethics.

(00:18:10.356):
If the baby blinks twice, that's yes.

(00:18:12.097):
Go for it.

(00:18:14.358):
Yeah, I was a little surprised to see that language of consent like this far back.

(00:18:21.063):
Yeah, I was surprised by that too, actually.

(00:18:23.024):
Oh, so all I was going to...

(00:18:24.824):
For listeners who don't have a sense of the history of the practice,

(00:18:29.812):
it is historically odd that it caught on in the United States among Gentiles

(00:18:37.323):
for reasons that involve a set of championships.

(00:18:41.128):
The most famous quote from Wallerstein in this book is

(00:18:46.216):
that he basically calls circumcision a solution in search of a problem.

(00:18:54.828):
It's going to cure cancer.

(00:19:01.318):
It's going to prevent HIV.

(00:19:02.880):
It's going to do all these things.

(00:19:04.603):
And the reality is that none of them are really that supported in the scientific literature.

(00:19:09.850):
And so he's very aware,

(00:19:12.314):
I think,

(00:19:12.734):
of how these like discourses around genital cutting just keep changing

(00:19:17.060):
in each generation in a way that to him seems really suspicious.

(00:19:20.985):
And I think it's suspicious to a lot of historians of gender and sexuality.

(00:19:26.123):
And is 1980, like,

(00:19:28.006):
I think of it as, like,

(00:19:29.788):
I was circumcised as was,

(00:19:31.211):
I think,

(00:19:31.411):
pretty much, like,

(00:19:32.332):
all the white Gentiles I grew up with in the American South were circumcised,

(00:19:37.680):
and it wasn't until, like,

(00:19:39.623):
college that I realized that this,

(00:19:41.045):
I think that this is historically not normal and is part of a particularly kind

(00:19:46.433):
of American formation.

(00:19:47.915):
But now I think of circumcision among those kind of people as somewhat provincial

(00:19:53.363):
and backward and that the top shelf Yeah,

(00:19:56.447):
like, could you situate 1980 a bit further?

(00:20:12.988):
So, by 1980,

(00:20:14.370):
I think circumcision had pretty much become a neonatal norm,

(00:20:18.837):
like it's something you're going to do for all the babies in the hospitals,

(00:20:21.481):
all the baby boys, at least in America.

(00:20:24.205):
So, you know, numbers are not just in the double digits, but like...

(00:20:28.090):
We're getting more uncut Latin cock in this country.

(00:20:53.402):
Exactly.

(00:20:54.123):
Yeah.

(00:20:54.544):
And some of it may have to do with changing medical practices and some

(00:20:57.408):
of it may just have to do with changes in record keeping.

(00:21:00.673):
So maybe a baby boy isn't cut in the hospital on day one or two,

(00:21:07.122):
but a little bit later and So they don't catch it in the neonatal

(00:21:10.545):
statistics.

(00:21:13.426):
So from what I read, like you said, there are different numbers.

(00:21:18.489):
The numbers don't all line up.

(00:21:19.689):
But it looked like it could,

(00:21:22.050):
with some regional variation across the country,

(00:21:25.172):
it looks like it could be as low as 50% now or like 50% to 60% as opposed to 90%.

(00:21:29.334):
Is that right or is that correct?

(00:21:36.908):
Would you say it's that low?

(00:21:38.809):
I don't think so.

(00:21:39.709):
Yeah, I don't buy it.

(00:21:42.360):
Yeah, I was going

(00:21:43.811):
to say,

(00:21:44.452):
in all of my experience of boys younger than us,

(00:21:49.214):
down to early 20s, I would say still all white boys are.

(00:21:54.816):
Which David, apparently, that's his type.

(00:21:59.158):
First personal experience.

(00:22:00.899):
David, you would know better than anyone at this point.

(00:22:04.381):
I don't know about that.

(00:22:06.991):
I'm not.

(00:22:07.952):
I know.

(00:22:08.372):
I know what you do.

(00:22:09.753):
It's all Asian in my house, so I don't know.

(00:22:12.594):
Well, that's going to be interesting, too, though, Blake.

(00:22:15.035):
Well, but no,

(00:22:15.576):
a lot of, I mean,

(00:22:16.156):
I don't know if they're mostly cut or not,

(00:22:17.617):
but just the ones that I see,

(00:22:19.097):
East Asian, they're cut.

(00:22:21.118):
Really?

(00:22:21.499):
Yeah, I didn't know that.

(00:22:24.260):
Besides penises that I've dealt with in my sexual career have been mostly South Asian.

(00:22:32.452):
And I have to say, like, I mean, we'll talk about, you know, the interview.

(00:22:36.398):
Like, in the interview,

(00:22:37.219):
what looms very large about the foreskin is is either the menace or

(00:22:42.226):
the sexual appeal of smell, filth,

(00:22:46.973):
you know, it's,

(00:22:48.835):
you know,

(00:22:49.256):
it's somehow more,

(00:22:50.097):
it's sexually or morally charged,

(00:22:52.781):
good or bad, that,

(00:22:54.003):
you know,

(00:22:54.203):
the The foreskin might have,

(00:22:55.345):
you know,

(00:22:56.526):
dick cheese in it,

(00:22:57.668):
which my experience has been rather that,

(00:23:00.432):
you know, I'm sort of alarmed by its sensitivity.

(00:23:04.398):
And then they are alarmed that I'm going to town on, you know, the sensitive side.

(00:23:09.826):
End of their dick.

(00:23:11.347):
So, you know, poor Indian guys.

(00:23:15.993):
So what did you guys think of the interview?

(00:23:18.676):
Did anything in particular jump out at you?

(00:23:21.800):
Oh, I mean, tons of stuff.

(00:23:23.482):
This is an amazing conversation they're having.

(00:23:26.486):
So I guess this...

(00:23:28.047):
I was not sure,

(00:23:28.708):
you know,

(00:23:29.029):
not really knowing much about Wallerstein or, you know, or the topic in general.

(00:23:34.076):
I wasn't sure how much to, how much to, because there are other pieces by Larry Mass.

(00:23:39.283):
So he has this like, you know, kind of hysterical review of Christopher Lasch.

(00:23:43.589):
Oh, right.

(00:23:44.410):
That was her!

(00:23:45.412):
I forgot that that was her.

(00:23:48.677):
We know that Larry Mass is capable of being rather over the top, so I wasn't sure.

(00:23:52.763):
Can you say a word about that, David?

(00:23:54.285):
Because I forgot that that was Mass.

(00:23:55.967):
That's a great document.

(00:23:57.990):
So I'm not sure which issue, but he reviews Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism.

(00:24:04.260):
He talks about,

(00:24:05.882):
I'm not going to remember the details,

(00:24:07.524):
but he talks about Lash speaking at some psychology conference, I think.

(00:24:12.732):
Well, criticism.

(00:24:34.383):
Anti-narcissism is homophobic.

(00:24:36.424):
That's basically massive.

(00:24:38.245):
And then I went and did a control F on like a PDF of Culture of Narcissism.

(00:24:42.126):
And weirdly, Lash does not even talk

(00:24:44.547):
Like it would not be surprising if Lash were homophobic, but it doesn't seem like he even is.

(00:24:50.870):
Okay, so Larry Mass is given to big reactions.

(00:24:55.514):
Love that.

(00:24:56.455):
Right.

(00:24:56.855):
So some of these statements can read,

(00:24:59.357):
you know, without context, they can read as kind of over the top.

(00:25:02.360):
So I was like, I wasn't sure like how much we should credit them.

(00:25:06.023):
For example, just a couple of the ones I underlined.

(00:25:08.485):
I think there is kind of a tacit understanding between medicine and the public

(00:25:12.468):
that circumcision will prevent death.

(00:25:14.510):
Quote, unquote, precocious sexuality.

(00:25:18.216):
And then later on,

(00:25:18.977):
he says,

(00:25:19.478):
this is part of the psychiatric thinking that it is still so powerful

(00:25:22.302):
in this country is basically kind of medical updating of the Old Testament.

(00:25:26.958):
So this idea that the medical establishment as a whole or kind of even

(00:25:31.580):
the popular support for circumcision is driven by a kind of puritanism

(00:25:36.702):
and like belief that it somehow keeps boys from jerking off or keeps them

(00:25:41.064):
from being like precociously sexual,

(00:25:43.405):
which seems like a bit of a stretch for 1980, but...

(00:25:47.467):
You know,

(00:25:47.747):
it sounds like there are there,

(00:25:49.468):
you know,

(00:25:49.688):
it's fairly well documented that,

(00:25:51.248):
you know,

(00:25:52.298):
anti-masturbation was, you know, at some point part of the medical reasoning.

(00:25:55.849):
Oh, yeah, absolutely.

(00:25:57.490):
So this is a major trope in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

(00:26:02.591):
You also have like amazing, amazing quotes.

(00:26:06.072):
Like I think this is probably in Robert Darby's History of Circumcision in Modern Britain.

(00:26:11.074):
But he has this amazing quote from like John Maynard Keynes who gets cut

(00:26:14.178):
when he's 11 and he like has such an awful experience with this

(00:26:18.004):
and his parents do it so that he doesn't become like masturbating and of course,

(00:26:23.332):
you know.

(00:26:23.672):
He was just sucking all that cock, so.

(00:26:25.635):
Well, so that's the thing.

(00:26:26.436):
It didn't really, you know, maybe it didn't work in that sense.

(00:26:30.843):
I mean, I actually had an interesting conversation with a very prominent historian

(00:26:35.149):
of sexuality once about this period specifically.

(00:26:38.534):
I mean, to me, a lot of these like...

(00:26:40.617):
Ways of talking about masturbation and circumcision are really similar to the ways

(00:26:45.358):
that people talked about like congenital sexual inversion and,

(00:26:49.960):
you know, homosexuality and things like this, right, as a pretty serious moral vice.

(00:26:55.841):
And so for me,

(00:26:56.701):
it's sort of the way that we're suspicious of these like 19th century like Yeah,

(00:27:03.149):
but of course.

(00:27:17.530):
Of course, like,

(00:27:18.451):
you know,

(00:27:18.731):
circumcising couldn't prevent American boys from masturbating,

(00:27:22.513):
obviously, as we know.

(00:27:24.194):
And my response to that is kind of like, yeah, but it makes it worse, dude.

(00:27:27.557):
Like, it's, you know, it does hamper it.

(00:27:30.899):
And, you know,

(00:27:31.960):
especially if you, you know, maybe if you're getting cut as a neonate, it doesn't.

(00:27:36.325):
You know,

(00:27:36.605):
give you that same experience of somebody like Keynes at age 11,

(00:27:39.847):
like going through this trauma so that like your parents are trying

(00:27:42.768):
to tell you like, don't touch this, it's going to be painful.

(00:27:46.329):
But like, it's kind of lame and not that fun and funny.

(00:27:50.591):
But, you know, I do think it's kind of a serious, you know, a serious thing.

(00:27:55.694):
So, yeah, I mean, I wonder like, when...

(00:27:59.328):
And to what extent, like,

(00:28:00.249):
is there a shift, like,

(00:28:01.370):
from a kind of moral hygiene argument,

(00:28:06.375):
like an anti-masturbatory argument, to, like,

(00:28:10.819):
an essentially medical,

(00:28:13.061):
or, like, this somehow prevents cancer or the spread of STDs, etc.?

(00:28:18.386):
Because I guess, like...

(00:28:19.967):
Part of the fun that Stambolian and Maas are having,

(00:28:22.669):
I mean, they're putting on their big theory hats.

(00:28:24.850):
Oh, yeah, big time.

(00:28:26.551):
And they're wanting to think,

(00:28:27.831):
you know, oh,

(00:28:28.752):
this expresses like deep-seated Western American compulsions,

(00:28:34.835):
and they're sort of conflating all of the different eras of attitudes

(00:28:38.597):
towards circumcision, which I feel like is, I mean, it's fun.

(00:28:42.759):
They're being a bit Camille Paglia,

(00:28:45.141):
but it's maybe not very helpful for arguing against the practice, because like...

(00:28:49.623):
You know,

(00:28:49.863):
one thing that I always think of with gay stuff is there was a time

(00:28:53.405):
when one could maybe plausibly argue, like, oh,

(00:28:57.507):
the liberation of homosexuality will overturn the whole edifice

(00:29:00.909):
of Western civilization, which is good or bad.

(00:29:04.451):
And it turns out, no, it actually doesn't really overturn anything else.

(00:29:08.533):
It can totally fit into the matrix of Western culture.

(00:29:14.836):
Similarly, they're really...

(00:29:18.558):
Yeah.

(00:29:40.602):
And so you can see that.

(00:29:55.463):
And see how he's sort of inspired by this feminist movement to kind of reclaim.

(00:30:00.070):
I mean, this to me is part of why I think an article like this is appearing in

(00:30:05.940):
a magazine like Christopher Street.

(00:30:08.464):
Yeah, because there's a broader

(00:30:09.706):
discourse about it.

(00:30:11.047):
Exactly.

(00:30:11.488):
It's not a gay topic per se.

(00:30:14.450):
And they sort of read the book and then riff on it through their own experience

(00:30:20.314):
as gay men who are interested in engaging with Freud because gay people had

(00:30:26.378):
so much baggage with psychoanalysis.

(00:30:29.240):
They're interested in engaging with sex and sex practices

(00:30:33.482):
because that's something that's so central to their perspective on this issue

(00:30:37.645):
that isn't really represented in the book that way.

(00:30:40.505):
Oh, okay, right.

(00:30:41.445):
So this is interesting.

(00:30:42.806):
Yeah, because they also see it as so psychoanalytically freighted.

(00:30:46.166):
I mean, David and I were talking like, this is kind of a dividing line within the CS universe.

(00:30:50.287):
There's people like Seymour Kleinberg who went through analysis,

(00:30:54.548):
who think that overcoming analysis,

(00:30:57.529):
overcoming the homophobia of Freud is really important.

(00:31:00.610):
And then there's not even necessarily a younger generation,

(00:31:03.410):
but there's a cohort of people who just don't give a fuck about psychoanalysis.

(00:31:08.592):
And I think now...

(00:31:10.392):
I mean, maybe there are some people within Jewish studies who are really interested

(00:31:13.457):
in like Freud and smegma,

(00:31:15.059):
but in general,

(00:31:16.161):
I would think to critique circumcision,

(00:31:18.644):
one would not be needing to make an appeal to psychoanalysis, right?

(00:31:24.253):
That would not seem maybe...

(00:31:25.535):
Yeah, I mean,

(00:31:29.741):
I

(00:31:31.003):
was interested,

(00:31:31.563):
like they even rope in the incest taboo as like one of the reasons

(00:31:36.090):
for circumcision is that like,

(00:31:37.953):
if you're intact, your mom is going to have to clean up.

(00:31:40.356):
yeah, yeah.

(00:32:06.608):
You know, be very strong, like, no, no, this will be my journey.

(00:32:12.509):
Did it work?

(00:32:13.829):
Yeah, maybe in another era.

(00:32:15.590):
That would be a great Almodovar scene.

(00:32:18.050):
I hope, you know, Pedro, if you're listening, take that inspo.

(00:32:22.331):
That's right.

(00:32:23.451):
It does come up several times.

(00:32:25.131):
This is, like,

(00:32:26.711):
taking a step away from that, but, like,

(00:32:28.672):
it does come up,

(00:32:29.572):
the question of,

(00:32:31.072):
you know,

(00:32:31.332):
and I think they bring it up as, like,

(00:32:33.333):
maybe kind of a conspiracy theory that That this is somehow the result of

(00:32:37.795):
the Jewish medical establishment in America.

(00:32:41.618):
And I was just doing,

(00:32:43.159):
I said to Blake that like,

(00:32:45.100):
I sort of feel like this is like maybe not so present in gay discourse today

(00:32:48.964):
or like it's kind of fallen off the radar as like a topic.

(00:32:51.706):
So I was like just poking around on gay Twitter since it's like partly my job

(00:32:55.268):
to keep an eye on the dregs of-

(00:32:58.391):
Twitter search uncut cock every few days.

(00:33:01.453):
Yeah.

(00:33:03.355):
And of course,

(00:33:03.975):
you know,

(00:33:04.235):
as you would expect there,

(00:33:05.176):
there is,

(00:33:05.816):
like I said,

(00:33:06.497):
like at the other day,

(00:33:07.418):
like uncut cock seems to be like a thing that's used erotically or like this is hot

(00:33:12.321):
or like, you know, there's these threads of like post your uncut cock.

(00:33:15.443):
And so, so I found a lot of that,

(00:33:17.044):
but I also found one of these like anonymous profile trad cath slash,

(00:33:23.089):
you know, fascist question mark who says, and this was like two days ago.

(00:33:28.474):
Circumcision is an evil Jewish attempt to surrender masculine virility

(00:33:32.056):
to God instead of accepting it as a divine gift for man to fully experience eros.

(00:33:36.819):
So that's certainly, you know, I can see where that, you know, that conspiracy would come from.

(00:33:41.161):
I was kind of curious,

(00:33:42.202):
like also is just like a data point that you might know as like,

(00:33:46.504):
is there,

(00:33:47.285):
they seem to see it in this article as,

(00:33:50.367):
and the literature as this kind of American peculiarity.

(00:33:54.965):
Is there any precedent,

(00:33:57.409):
like does this happen in Europe or anywhere else where like a Christian culture kind

(00:34:01.194):
of widely adopts circumcision?

(00:34:04.339):
The answer to your question is not that I'm aware of.

(00:34:07.664):
I really think not.

(00:34:10.427):
It's obviously very widespread in the Islamic world already.

(00:34:14.928):
And so the question is, how does it get to America?

(00:34:17.569):
And I actually haven't read a really convincing history of that.

(00:34:21.330):
I started to look into like, who are these first Protestant moralizing doctors?

(00:34:27.052):
And they talk about, oh,

(00:34:28.572):
like I talked to this Dr.

(00:34:29.853):
Kaplan who told me about how, and I'm like, oh no, this isn't good.

(00:34:35.295):
Y'all have given us so much.

(00:34:36.937):
We're so thankful.

(00:34:38.439):
I should mention I am Jewish.

(00:34:40.603):
And so part of my interest in that is like grappling with that history and that legacy.

(00:34:45.991):
But I'm not sure that that has really been well.

(00:34:49.716):
Well answered by historians.

(00:34:52.359):
I suspect that,

(00:34:53.380):
you know,

(00:34:54.301):
I don't want to write that idea off completely as a conspiracy before kind

(00:34:59.426):
of looking for the receipts here.

(00:35:01.168):
I mean, the entangled histories of, you know, Protestant Christian Zionism and circumcision.

(00:35:07.094):
What a wonder of all the things to take from the Jews, you know, not the humor.

(00:35:13.121):
One of I have this memory of when I was a kid,

(00:35:15.424):
my so my mom was really into home,

(00:35:19.089):
like kind of this like slightly hippie-ish, like natural home birth things like.

(00:35:23.576):
Oh, my God.

(00:35:24.157):
Also, you're one of like a billion, right?

(00:35:26.480):
Ten.

(00:35:26.941):
So like the second.

(00:35:27.782):
Half of my siblings were all born at home.

(00:35:30.266):
And my cousin, like my mom's cousin, you know, it's like her age, also was doing that.

(00:35:36.534):
And she had,

(00:35:37.776):
for one of her kids,

(00:35:38.597):
she had a rabbi, like, come over to their house and do everything.

(00:35:42.903):
They'll

(00:35:44.265):
cut anyone's dick.

(00:35:45.387):
I assume they charge Gentiles more.

(00:35:58.045):
Well, so this is not,

(00:35:59.626):
because,

(00:36:00.427):
you know,

(00:36:00.867):
we would be reading, like,

(00:36:02.148):
Paul saying,

(00:36:02.689):
you know,

(00:36:03.089):
it's the circumcision of the heart,

(00:36:04.330):
you don't have to get circumcised, I mean, for, for, like,

(00:36:24.507):
1500 years, part of Christian identity was like, we do not do that.

(00:36:30.869):
The fact that they do that is part of them being stupid, garbage idiots, whatever.

(00:36:35.410):
We're so great, we can eat the lobster.

(00:36:37.470):
We don't cut our penises.

(00:36:39.411):
And then somehow, in American Protestant self-conception, we took on this practice.

(00:36:45.672):
But at least for me growing up, it was like...

(00:36:48.593):
It was so ubiquitous that it wasn't ever thematized.

(00:36:52.255):
Like, I don't think my parents thought about it.

(00:36:56.257):
And since we weren't, like, I grew up without seeing any uncut.

(00:37:00.640):
Like, it was really not a thought thing.

(00:37:03.521):
It was just, like, so automatic and built into.

(00:37:05.963):
Do you remember when you realized that you had been cut?

(00:37:10.418):
Yeah, I don't even know.

(00:37:12.039):
And I don't have a memory of

(00:37:16.166):
connecting the shape of my penis with the...

(00:37:19.884):
I think I had grown up for a longer time aware of our discourse from the Bible

(00:37:24.867):
about debates in the New Testament about circumcision than realizing my own penis is

(00:37:30.911):
a particular way.

(00:37:32.092):
I mean, it wasn't until well into my late teens that I think I saw a flaccid, uncut, Yeah.

(00:37:54.258):
Blake you sound exactly like someone who has ever seen one.

(00:38:12.015):
Sadly, in our most recent episode I discussed with David,

(00:38:15.749):
I have made love on a number of occasions to two different women who had

(00:38:20.492):
a terrible time.

(00:38:25.014):
It's a different olfactory experience with the hair.

(00:38:30.198):
Where is this going?

(00:38:31.318):
Yeah, I think we're off topic for the subject of today's podcast, Blake.

(00:38:35.201):
When did you have a thought about,

(00:38:36.842):
I guess maybe for Jews it's always already,

(00:38:40.245):
it's more,

(00:38:40.945):
like we're doing it because we're Jewish or this way because we're Jewish.

(00:38:44.688):
Like Blake was saying, I have,

(00:38:46.349):
you know,

(00:38:46.569):
it's very present in my childhood in the discourse,

(00:38:49.171):
but it's more like the Bible and a religious discourse.

(00:38:52.073):
It's not so much about, oh, this is my literal body.

(00:38:54.795):
And I wondered like how that compared, like it was, How is that for you?

(00:39:00.611):
Is that similar?

(00:39:02.553):
Is it similar?

(00:39:03.574):
Or is there more of a kind of embodied, you know, visceral connection to it?

(00:39:08.258):
Well, for me, I guess there are going to be two factors at play here.

(00:39:12.863):
So by way of background, like, I grew up in a Jewish community in Massachusetts.

(00:39:19.468):
Everybody's cut.

(00:39:20.329):
And I mean, everybody.

(00:39:22.491):
Do you know Sharon?

(00:39:24.160):
I don't know Sharon, can you describe?

(00:39:25.901):
So my partner's from Lexington.

(00:39:28.022):
Oh, sure.

(00:39:28.862):
Yeah, sure.

(00:39:29.763):
I know Lexington.

(00:39:30.663):
Yeah.

(00:39:32.244):
It's south of there.

(00:39:34.325):
But growing up, everyone was cut.

(00:39:38.626):
And my first high school boyfriend was intact, but he was also kind of a total bottom.

(00:39:44.449):
So I didn't really like- Wait, what was he ethnically?

(00:39:46.870):
Touch it that much.

(00:39:47.931):
He was like, think like Connecticut WASP.

(00:39:51.112):
Oh, great.

(00:39:51.532):
Okay.

(00:39:51.772):
So they're over circumcision.

(00:39:54.221):
Right.

(00:39:54.441):
And apparently there they were then as well in the in the late 80s and early 90s.

(00:40:01.923):
And so that was kind of like my first kind of encounter.

(00:40:05.104):
But I didn't probably think about it too much.

(00:40:08.425):
But I would say like the two biggest factors in my life that made me aware of this

(00:40:12.466):
as an issue were number one,

(00:40:15.207):
being gay and number two, This is a white guy we're talking about.

(00:40:18.508):
What's that?

(00:40:18.968):
This is a white guy we're talking about.

(00:40:20.889):
Yeah.

(00:40:35.532):
Because, right, I mean,

(00:40:36.433):
I think for them,

(00:40:37.273):
I don't know if it's like "Sexagon" or,

(00:40:39.835):
you know,

(00:40:40.295):
some of this like recent literature on like constructions of French sexuality

(00:40:45.219):
and ethnicity.

(00:40:46.560):
But my understanding there is like, as in,

(00:40:49.402):
I guess,

(00:40:49.622):
a number of places in Europe is whiteness is much more linked

(00:40:52.544):
to not being circumcised.

(00:40:55.666):
And especially in France with like,

(00:40:56.867):
you know, Muslim and Jewish other, like you're being cut is...

(00:41:02.460):
Yeah.

(00:41:02.801):
Yeah.

(00:41:03.261):
Yeah.

(00:41:17.382):
And I would say what was really shocking.

(00:41:32.384):
I think, actually, mostly better.

(00:41:47.386):
Like I definitely experience advantages to being intact.

(00:41:51.951):
And a couple of my friends who had a really tight foreskin,

(00:41:55.675):
had phimosis and wanted to get cut in their early 20s did.

(00:41:58.939):
And that was fine.

(00:42:00.020):
And so that was, oh,

(00:42:01.181):
and also meeting French Jews who were intact to me was like,

(00:42:06.667):
that totally blew my mind.

(00:42:08.822):
As something I hadn't considered really as a possibility.

(00:42:11.124):
Do you know the numbers on that?

(00:42:12.765):
Because I'm not aware of this.

(00:42:14.146):
No.

(00:42:15.026):
I should say Stambolian,

(00:42:16.407):
you know,

(00:42:17.808):
I'd been reading his diaries,

(00:42:20.129):
had just gotten back from an erotically charged few weeks in France.

(00:42:25.493):
So how accurate this description of what the French are into and what they think

(00:42:32.137):
about,

(00:42:32.737):
you know,

(00:42:32.978):
cut or uncut dick is,

(00:42:34.399):
this may be through Stambolian's selective memory of a few people.

(00:42:38.481):
Particularly dear moments well he also has a column in a very short column in

(00:42:43.623):
the new york native and like this around the same time it might be like 83

(00:42:47.145):
or something called paris and poppers where he talks about like going to

(00:42:50.367):
the bathhouse in France and like how

(00:42:53.088):
the french people are just like everyone's asking about like where to get poppers

(00:42:56.830):
and like and I think it makes a similar kind

(00:42:59.151):
of point like American gay culture is ahead and all

(00:43:01.592):
the French people are just like fascinated by it and

(00:43:04.632):
Which even could have been true

(00:43:05.874):
in 82, I don't know.

(00:43:06.755):
And they're like, where can we get AIDS?

(00:43:09.019):
But, you know, I don't know.

(00:43:11.242):
I don't know how general that was.

(00:43:13.024):
And it certainly might not apply now.

(00:43:14.787):
Although in this conversation that Lawrence Mass and George Stambolian have,

(00:43:18.532):
don't they say something that...

(00:43:19.694):
Like, you know,

(00:43:20.695):
they looked at the classifieds in Jean Le Bitou's magazine,

(00:43:24.457):
Le Gay Pied, and they said, oh, they don't talk about cut or uncut cocks.

(00:43:28.881):
It's because the French aren't so frank about sex as the perverts in San Francisco are.

(00:43:34.545):
And I'm thinking that is total hogwash.

(00:43:37.867):
Like they're not mentioning it because it's not salient as an issue in their culture.

(00:43:43.031):
Yeah.

(00:43:43.735):
And my impression even is like,

(00:43:45.037):
I think probably the 2010s,

(00:43:46.520):
like when I was living there felt like a kind of high watermark

(00:43:49.644):
for problematic sexual fascination with like the Arab thug.

(00:43:58.997):
If you looked at pornography, like,

(00:44:00.438):
you know,

(00:44:01.559):
or like,

(00:44:02.160):
you know,

(00:44:03.160):
this kind of thing,

(00:44:04.281):
there was a lot of like the violent Arab thug rapist who's going to fuck you in

(00:44:09.364):
the basement of the apartment.

(00:44:10.946):
But the being cut,

(00:44:15.028):
like this like obvious physical difference of like the,

(00:44:17.970):
you know,

(00:44:18.230):
muslin penis is actually like,

(00:44:20.572):
as far as I'm aware, like not really sexually salient or interesting.

(00:44:24.935):
Like that's not, that doesn't seem like part of the fantasy of

(00:44:37.850):
Yeah.

(00:44:53.762):
It's kind of amazing to me in retrospect how,

(00:44:56.923):
you know, circumcision is this, like, pervasive surgery.

(00:45:00.925):
It's one of the most common surgeries performed in America, especially prophylactically.

(00:45:07.308):
And it really is kind of a gender unconfirmation surgery in a way.

(00:45:11.449):
Like, it's supposed—it's— Yeah.

(00:45:29.571):
I love what's great about circumcision, anti-circumcision discourses.

(00:45:34.218):
You could both have like the super woke, like, you know, it's assigning gender.

(00:45:39.585):
That's what circumcision is doing.

(00:45:41.048):
You could also say it's an ill-advised genital altercation.

(00:45:44.573):
So you can have both like the wokey and the TERFy arguments against it.

(00:45:59.293):
I think like cultural anthropologists out of the UK who basically made the argument

(00:46:03.237):
that like in the West we've been too anti-female genital cutting and that like in

(00:46:08.162):
a lot of cultures around the world we want to respect.

(00:46:11.445):
Even you have done a line of the PC take on it because you're calling it cutting.

(00:46:17.991):
We used to call it female genital mutilation.

(00:46:20.733):
Well, I'm ventriloquizing

(00:46:21.974):
their position,

(00:46:22.874):
but I actually,

(00:46:24.996):
you know,

(00:46:25.736):
sometimes refer to circumcision as,

(00:46:28.097):
you know,

(00:46:29.158):
male genital cutting just as a kind of, I mean,

(00:46:31.119):
it's something that some bioethicists have adopted to try to speak in kind

(00:46:34.401):
of neutral terms about what we're doing.

(00:46:38.684):
But why speak in neutral terms?

(00:46:39.984):
Well, because it's just a

(00:46:41.545):
huge contested debate, yeah.

(00:46:45.424):
You got to frame the language.

(00:46:46.705):
You got to take ownership of that.

(00:46:48.547):
I just want to ask you guys,

(00:46:49.728):
actually, I mean, what your experiences with, like, intact guys have been.

(00:46:56.313):
Like, I know, David, you were saying that it's kind of a nothing burger for you as an issue.

(00:47:01.958):
Yeah, like I,

(00:47:03.380):
so I actually,

(00:47:04.662):
since we were talking about this as three,

(00:47:07.506):
as far as I know, three cut people, you know, I consulted a lover who is uncut.

(00:47:13.776):
And, you know,

(00:47:14.657):
he was also kind of like,

(00:47:16.299):
before that,

(00:47:16.900):
I would say my default was just aesthetically to cut better people

(00:47:23.109):
who that's just what I'm familiar with or what looked like myself.

(00:47:26.715):
And it was liking him and liking his dick that kind of opened me to it at least.

(00:47:32.082):
To at least be neutral about it or to be like, oh yeah, this is kind of nice and different.

(00:47:37.049):
So I asked him what it was like for him and he was aware that it was different maybe

(00:47:44.860):
than most people but never had any negative feelings.

(00:47:46.823):
How big is he?

(00:48:15.465):
Does he identify as massive?

(00:48:17.088):
That seems presumptuous.

(00:48:18.810):
What'd you say?

(00:48:19.371):
I couldn't hear you.

(00:48:19.912):
Does he identify as massive?

(00:48:20.753):
No, that's my term, but yeah, I mean...

(00:48:30.447):
Well, this brings up a really interesting point that comes through this article.

(00:48:34.633):
It comes through some of the, like,

(00:48:37.297):
testimonials that I've read about from this time period,

(00:48:42.385):
like books where people kind of write in and,

(00:48:44.968):
you know— They give their own stories or their encounters,

(00:48:47.652):
which I think is also a really interesting thing about this topic is

(00:48:50.977):
that everyone you talk to or everyone I talk to has a story to tell about it.

(00:48:55.143):
They have some encounter with it that is sort of surprising or interesting to them.

(00:49:00.331):
A lot of this discourse from the middle of the 20th century focuses on the fears

(00:49:07.353):
of what a baby will one day experience in the locker room as an adolescent or as

(00:49:12.575):
a teenager.

(00:49:13.295):
The idea that teenage boys are so cruel.

(00:49:16.176):
And so there's this temporality where at birth,

(00:49:20.597):
you're going to wish later in life when it's too painful to do

(00:49:23.958):
that you had had it done when you were born.

(00:49:26.079):
Yeah.

(00:49:26.699):
Yeah, that kind of struck me as like,

(00:49:28.300):
that's great, that's right, but I,

(00:49:30.422):
in both,

(00:49:31.103):
on both sides,

(00:49:31.964):
it's like, you're,

(00:49:33.065):
you're either,

(00:49:34.506):
you're either gonna wish that you had had it done when you were a baby

(00:49:37.849):
and it wouldn't hurt,

(00:49:39.490):
or you're gonna wish that you hadn't had it done,

(00:49:42.213):
and, you know, because it can't be reversed.

(00:49:44.855):
Exactly.

(00:49:45.356):
Well, not just because it can't be reversed,

(00:49:46.938):
but because you think it's actively harmful because it's like,

(00:49:50.123):
you know,

(00:49:50.443):
we focus a lot on the issue of consent,

(00:49:52.406):
but like you don't need to consent to things that don't make a difference

(00:49:56.332):
or don't matter.

(00:49:57.033):
So like if you said, oh, you can have vanilla or chocolate ice cream.

(00:49:59.977):
I'm just going to give you one and be like, I don't care.

(00:50:01.760):
I like them both.

(00:50:16.543):
You know, wishes that it hadn't been done to them.

(00:50:18.664):
And if they want it done, they can just do it.

(00:50:20.665):
But what I was going to say is that that experience of like the teenager in

(00:50:24.026):
the locker room as being like this salient symbol is also something

(00:50:29.148):
that gay men share, right?

(00:50:31.209):
It's something that we hear of like, what's your experience?

(00:50:35.791):
And yeah, Blake, do you want to tell us about that?

(00:50:38.392):
Yeah.

(00:50:45.532):
David believes that the locker room is this central moment

(00:50:51.221):
of psychosexual development, which I don't know if I missed that day in gym or what.

(00:50:58.410):
But it's interesting that that can be a kind of blackmail, I guess, in either direction.

(00:51:02.992):
Like one day your kid will be looking at a bunch of big cocks in the locker room

(00:51:06.953):
and you want to make sure they feel the right thing about it.

(00:51:09.234):
Well, yeah, and it's also a little bit about like whether you fit the norm or not.

(00:51:14.355):
So if you're in a situation where everyone around you is cut and you're going

(00:51:17.356):
to get teased and then you have to wait until your it gets better phase in your 30s

(00:51:21.477):
and 40s to realize that actually...

(00:51:23.938):
You know, your

(00:51:24.879):
body is better intact.

(00:51:26.079):
Have the anti-circumcision people tried that?

(00:51:28.081):
Because it gets better.

(00:51:28.961):
Didn't that work?

(00:51:29.822):
Question mark?

(00:51:30.962):
What was the consensus on that?

(00:51:34.044):
Well, so I think this is interesting, too.

(00:51:35.785):
Like, this is one of the things I wanted to talk about, is that...

(00:51:39.900):
That dimension of being like other people and whether it's like you're the father

(00:51:45.542):
and you want your son to be like you or you're worried that your kid is going

(00:51:50.324):
to feel bad about not being like everyone else.

(00:51:54.245):
And then also these questions of like what we eroticize,

(00:51:58.047):
like do we eroticize kind of like being like everyone else or kind of our similarity

(00:52:04.129):
or Eroticize the thing that's different from us.

(00:52:08.581):
Those questions that they kind of come up at the end of the article

(00:52:10.942):
that I thought were interesting.

(00:52:13.124):
Yeah, I mean, to me, that's like sort of... And also, I think... Yeah, go ahead.

(00:52:20.049):
The reason that it doesn't...

(00:52:23.031):
That kind of political opposition,

(00:52:25.693):
intactivism,

(00:52:26.494):
or political opposition to circumcision kind

(00:52:29.896):
of perpetually remains this minority thing.

(00:52:32.158):
And the people that...

(00:52:34.073):
The people who are cut, like,

(00:52:37.114):
majorities of them,

(00:52:38.855):
you know,

(00:52:39.295):
even if people have kind of become more aware of it and the practices, like,

(00:52:43.176):
sort of dropped off somewhat,

(00:52:45.377):
the people who are cut, which,

(00:52:46.657):
you know,

(00:52:46.917):
I would include myself in that,

(00:52:48.558):
like, just can't, you know, a lot of us just can't get my...

(00:52:52.797):
You haven't considered foreskin restoration with the rubber bands or whatever.

(00:53:20.246):
You guys, I would do that in a heartbeat if I thought it would work.

(00:53:23.927):
Yeah, go ahead.

(00:53:24.848):
I have a like or have, you know, I'm pretty, you know, agnostic at this point.

(00:53:30.069):
Like it's fine either way.

(00:53:33.231):
But I do have an erotic investment in like, you know.

(00:53:38.170):
My own, the way my own dick looks and the way that other, you know, other cut people look.

(00:53:43.133):
And also in kind of being like, you know, that's kind of just one of my things.

(00:53:47.196):
It's like, I want to be like everyone else or I want to look the same as everyone else.

(00:53:50.918):
David is vulnerable to peer pressure.

(00:53:52.739):
It sounds like this is good to know.

(00:53:54.140):
Go figure.

(00:53:55.461):
But I think both of these things can.

(00:53:57.002):
And other people like,

(00:53:58.203):
you know, maybe,

(00:53:59.123):
maybe minority of people kind of like can either eroticize

(00:54:03.486):
the thing that's different or feel this kind of like,

(00:54:06.068):
oh, well, Why did this happen to me?

(00:54:07.856):
Or, like, why did, you know, what am I missing out on?

(00:54:11.037):
Yeah, I mean, I think both things can be true, though.

(00:54:13.777):
Like, on the one hand,

(00:54:14.697):
I can love my body and also recognize that,

(00:54:18.038):
like, something was done to me that shouldn't have been done.

(00:54:21.159):
So I should say, I mean,

(00:54:22.519):
unironically,

(00:54:23.199):
I think it's a, like,

(00:54:24.059):
terrible barbaric practice that,

(00:54:27.360):
you know, ought to be abolished and that's not going to happen.

(00:54:31.240):
But, yeah,

(00:54:33.321):
part of,

(00:54:33.621):
I guess, the difficulty is, like, On the one hand, people shouldn't be doing it.

(00:54:40.516):
On the other hand, it's difficult for me personally to work up much animus against it.

(00:54:47.520):
So I think it ought to be easy,

(00:54:50.521):
but somehow it's hard to put the burden on the people who want to do it.

(00:54:56.005):
Um, cause if it were like,

(00:54:57.246):
if we were starting from nothing,

(00:54:58.807):
the practice were being introduced for the first time.

(00:55:01.149):
It would never be.

(00:55:02.030):
Yeah.

(00:55:02.571):
It would be like,

(00:55:04.432):
and both from very like PC,

(00:55:06.054):
Tinder, queer, like woke reasons, like don't assign a gender to my child.

(00:55:09.577):
And also reactionary men's rights reasons.

(00:55:12.760):
JK Rowling would also say like, you know, don't do it.

(00:55:15.983):
Um, and, I actually think there are like political affinities to be explored

(00:55:21.107):
between intersex people, cis men who have been cut, and trans people.

(00:55:26.411):
Because we're all kind of dealing with the medical establishment.

(00:55:28.993):
In 2026, that seems like a losing... You know who was like the king of...

(00:55:35.598):
Bad alliances in this sense.

(00:55:36.980):
There's, oh,

(00:55:38.082):
now I'm forgetting,

(00:55:38.623):
there's this translator from the Spanish and Catalan who's super into,

(00:55:43.450):
oh, like Nathan, Adrian, something.

(00:55:45.273):
He's really into lifting.

(00:55:46.454):
He has this book,

(00:55:46.995):
My Father's Diet,

(00:55:48.938):
and he had this thing in The Baffler a I mean,

(00:55:50.660):
that's a configuration that you've outlined.

(00:55:51.982):
That's one possibility.

(00:56:06.282):
Well, to go back to David's point, though,

(00:56:08.583):
about politics and why there isn't like political mobilization,

(00:56:12.523):
I mean, I was actually thinking about two really related questions.

(00:56:16.524):
So the first is like, why is this in a gay magazine?

(00:56:20.505):
And for me, I think we've been circling around the answer a little bit.

(00:56:24.206):
So there is this medical humanist at Columbia called Danielle Spencer,

(00:56:29.907):
who wrote a book called Metagnosis.

(00:56:32.067):
She coins this new word.

(00:56:33.268):
What does metagnosis mean?

(00:56:35.829):
It's when you get a diagnosis later in life

(00:56:39.675):
that retroactively helps you understand how you've been different all along this

(00:56:43.621):
whole time.

(00:56:44.121):
So it's like a late in life diagnosis.

(00:56:46.465):
My adult ADHD diagnosis.

(00:56:50.992):
Oh, definitely the different person, different Danielle Spencer.

(00:56:57.040):
And I actually think there's a lot of parallels with like the gay experience

(00:57:00.365):
of like coming to realize that you've been different in the way

(00:57:03.169):
that you've been flouncy, like a flouncy little fairy boy is like...

(00:57:05.993):
Right.

(00:57:35.565):
Well, even what you said earlier about the Our Bodies,

(00:57:37.728):
Ourselves made me think, like, as far as I know.

(00:57:40.052):
But, you know,

(00:57:42.255):
the Boston Women's Health Collective that put that book out,

(00:57:44.739):
I don't think there was ever a men's health collective.

(00:57:47.903):
And in fact, as soon as you talk about, like, men's health, It sounds gay immediately.

(00:57:54.392):
Men who are concerned about men's bodily health or men's psychic health sounds crypto gay.

(00:58:05.568):
Male, you know, eroticized images of the male body or ideal beauty is all sounds gay.

(00:58:11.571):
Which is sad and weird that like I think our constructions of masculinity

(00:58:14.513):
or such like I say this as someone who's like my father died last year

(00:58:17.954):
of prostate cancer that he could have caught much earlier.

(00:58:21.236):
He'd been comfortable with like a finger going up his butt.

(00:58:23.497):
I'm sorry, Blake.

(00:58:25.038):
Well, you know, I mean, it was it was it was his time.

(00:58:28.500):
But where is this kind of but I think I mean,

(00:58:30.501):
that's that's expressive of a general truth of straight masculinity,

(00:58:36):
which is a distrust of the doctor,

(00:58:39.681):
which is not totally illegitimate,

(00:58:41.882):
but also a sense that being concerned about one's health,

(00:58:45.524):
one's body, that's kind of for women.

(00:58:50.065):
I oughtn't to do that.

(00:58:52.987):
And I think it's not just that gay men are more interested in their penises,

(00:58:56.208):
but I think in some way this is a concern that's disallowed to straight guys.

(00:59:02.707):
Yeah, I mean,

(00:59:03.128):
it's interesting because the book that Mass and Stambolin are talking about,

(00:59:06.973):
Edward Wallerstein's Circumcision and American Health Fallacy, I mean,

(00:59:11.800):
he's married to a woman,

(00:59:12.922):
he has kids, like,

(00:59:14.044):
as far as I know,

(00:59:15.165):
he's presenting himself as straight in this And so that kind of leads me

(00:59:20.151):
to my second question,

(00:59:21.993):
which is why didn't Wallerstein's book have more of an impact?

(00:59:26.358):
So when I talk to people who are OBGYNs today and ask them about what they learn

(00:59:31.223):
in med school about circumcision, they basically say like, we learn how to do it.

(00:59:35.947):
And we learn that if you're going to do it,

(00:59:38.290):
you might as well do it when they're newborns,

(00:59:40.912):
when like They don't feel pain the same way, and it's just not as big a deal.

(00:59:46.578):
That's what we used to say about our slave.

(00:59:51.683):
They're less sensitive to pain.

(00:59:52.884):
That was a classic.

(00:59:54.306):
That's what they say.

(00:59:55.266):
I mean, that's also contested.

(00:59:56.868):
And the third thing that they learn is in areas without access

(00:59:59.931):
to routine HIV testing,

(01:00:01.252):
like sub-Saharan Africa, it's correlated with a lower incidence of HIV transmission.

(01:00:06.838):
And at no point do they sort of learn like how this changes the sexual function of an adult.

(01:00:13.628):
So like you're going to have like less naturally produced lubrication.

(01:00:20.437):
You're going to Lose the gliding motion of the foreskin

(01:00:23.219):
that I think there's one intactivist group that says like facilitates

(01:00:26.902):
the smooth contact or relations between partners or in Blake,

(01:00:31.184):
in your case, maybe your hand.

(01:00:33.345):
Right.

(01:00:33.946):
Where was I going with this?

(01:00:34.846):
Reading is fundamental girls.

(01:00:35.987):
Yeah.

(01:00:37.880):
I lost my train of thought.

(01:00:38.581):
Where is it going with this?

(01:00:39.421):
Oh, so why didn't Wallerstein's book have more of an impact?

(01:00:42.303):
Right.

(01:00:42.443):
So I was saying,

(01:00:43.164):
so this is like what OBGYNs are still learning is they're not actually talking

(01:00:47.207):
about like the function of the foreskin in an adult man's body and in his sex life.

(01:00:55.272):
And it's also not just sex, by the way.

(01:00:56.733):
Like I remember talking with a French friend who I was like,

(01:01:00.056):
does it ever irritate your penis when you're wearing like a mesh baiting suit?

(01:01:04.439):
And he was like, no, it's protected.

(01:01:06.260):
Yeah.

(01:01:25.857):
Because so much of it still feels current.

(01:01:29.239):
Like, the rates are still really high in America.

(01:01:31.880):
Yeah, I guess I had the impression that rates were... Like,

(01:01:36.642):
I understand my being circumcised as like a sign of my Dixie backwardness relative

(01:01:41.985):
to...

(01:01:42.905):
You know, some Connecticut WASP.

(01:01:45.026):
But it sounds like in your estimation, like rates have not been actually that much.

(01:01:50.149):
I don't think they've really gone down that far.

(01:01:52.310):
Yeah, absolutely.

(01:01:53.330):
I mean, and it varies a lot by region.

(01:01:55.111):
So the West Coast, you know, circumcision rates are much lower.

(01:01:58.873):
Maybe it's like a quarter or something like that.

(01:02:00.654):
And in the Midwest around Chicago is some of the highest.

(01:02:04.376):
Like Chicago and like West Virginia and stuff like that, apparently.

(01:02:07.037):
Yeah, I was going to say the South is also.

(01:02:09.779):
Yeah, and, you know, so to kind of...

(01:02:12.801):
If you guys will allow me to answer my own question here a little bit

(01:02:15.445):
of like why this didn't take up.

(01:02:17.388):
Academic tactic.

(01:02:18.229):
I know.

(01:02:18.850):
I have a couple of ideas.

(01:02:21.073):
I mean, I'm curious for y'all's theories about this too.

(01:02:24.407):
No, please answer your own question.

(01:02:25.507):
But also,

(01:02:25.968):
so I have a parenthetical,

(01:02:27.428):
which is,

(01:02:28.068):
so you're doing active research on this in order to,

(01:02:34.191):
like you have a book,

(01:02:35.431):
you have an article, you have a.

(01:02:36.912):
Yeah, I have some like book and article ideas.

(01:02:39.132):
It's not on the front burner for me right now,

(01:02:41.433):
but it's definitely something I'm really engaged in.

(01:02:44.084):
Because it sounds like, I mean,

(01:02:45.546):
you do not anticipate circumcision practices collapsing in the U.S. in the meantime.

(01:02:49.812):
So this is not.

(01:02:51.695):
It's not super timely.

(01:02:53.057):
Yeah.

(01:02:53.918):
Although we keep getting news from the federal government and from RFK geniuses.

(01:02:59.106):
Yeah.

(01:03:16.207):
The sort of trans-political do-your-own-research,

(01:03:20.450):
anti-vaccination coalition, like, I don't know if that's part of it.

(01:03:24.653):
I mean, one thing that's unfortunate,

(01:03:26.635):
I guess, about, like,

(01:03:28.276):
I think this is a bad practice and people shouldn't do it,

(01:03:31.158):
but then it seems unfortunate to me to have to mobilize, like,

(01:03:37.262):
the kind of sentiments that might drive a hippie mom or trad wife

(01:03:41.545):
to not vaccinate their children, right?

(01:03:44.287):
Yeah, well, this is a...

(01:03:46.436):
This is a question about the relationship between people's experiences of medicine

(01:03:51.381):
and their body and the medical profession.

(01:03:53.584):
I mean, this is a huge,

(01:03:54.845):
huge topic that I think doctors and public health people across America and

(01:04:00.171):
the world are really confronting in a new way over the last 10 years.

(01:04:06.845):
I think some of the reasons why Walderstein's book hasn't led to

(01:04:12.888):
a massive sea change probably relates a little bit to that idea.

(01:04:16.669):
He's not a credentialed doctor with a PhD.

(01:04:20.631):
I think OBGYNs have a lot of experience with anti-abortion activists,

(01:04:27.094):
and so they're really used to really encountering a lot of emotion in public,

(01:04:32.076):
and so they may have some...

(01:04:34.437):
Resistance to outside people telling them about ethics and morals.

(01:04:39.121):
As far as I know, anti-activists have not

(01:04:40.942):
murdered anyone.

(01:04:43.184):
Is that true?

(01:04:44.722):
I don't know.

(01:04:45.222):
Yeah, I guess maybe.

(01:04:47.544):
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure.

(01:04:50.327):
I hadn't thought about anti-abortion as a parallel.

(01:04:53.569):
Well, that's what OBGYNs that I've talked to have told me is,

(01:04:57.292):
you know,

(01:04:57.553):
they have a really hard time because,

(01:05:00.335):
you know,

(01:05:00.555):
they're so accustomed to people kind of screaming and picketing and being violent

(01:05:04.578):
that it makes them very wary, which I completely understand.

(01:05:07.501):
Yeah.

(01:05:07.956):
Okay, but I,

(01:05:09.677):
you know,

(01:05:10.658):
the Christian anti-abortion people might legit, I mean,

(01:05:14):
I don't know if they've killed anyone recently,

(01:05:15.361):
but at least in my growing up, they were killing people.

(01:05:18.224):
I don't know that the circumcision people, Ben Bernard wouldn't, never.

(01:05:23.572):
No, I mean, well,

(01:05:24.553):
I think part of the difference, too,

(01:05:26.114):
is that anti-abortion activists sometimes construe abortion as a form of murder.

(01:05:30.537):
So this question of mortality is already activated.

(01:05:34.100):
But I was going to say like a second reason for not having more of an impact here is

(01:05:38.884):
the AIDS crisis.

(01:05:40.445):
So if the kind of This kind of new orientation to the body in

(01:05:47.472):
the sexual liberation movement is just starting to take off and there's lots

(01:05:51.258):
of gay men and gay lib activists involved.

(01:05:54.983):
A lot of that energy gets really taken up with the...

(01:05:58.788):
It's green.

(01:05:59.948):
It's green in the U.S. Like it's covered by...

(01:06:26.116):
A bunch of American states have stopped covering it with Medicaid.

(01:06:30.619):
That has also happened, yeah.

(01:06:32.701):
That's right.

(01:06:33.642):
And then the fifth reason that I was thinking of is,

(01:06:37.586):
I mean, there's obviously taboo and straight guys talking about their penises.

(01:06:42.310):
So maybe the sixth reason here is going to be,

(01:06:45.332):
there's nothing you can do politically for yourself once you've been cut.

(01:06:49.976):
This is like a one-way street.

(01:06:51.958):
And with, like,

(01:06:52.459):
the gay marriage movement,

(01:06:53.639):
you can, like,

(01:06:54.220):
get involved politically and,

(01:06:56.482):
like, lobby Congress, and then you can get gay married if you want to, right?

(01:07:01.065):
Or you can get married to a same-sex partner.

(01:07:03.567):
And with circumcision,

(01:07:04.508):
I think for a

(01:07:05.068):
lot of people,

(01:07:05.569):
there's this feeling of, like,

(01:07:07.250):
it remains kind of abstract because there's,

(01:07:09.292):
you know— It's not going to change me, and I'm okay.

(01:07:11.734):
Yeah, I mean,

(01:07:12.554):
as hard as—

(01:07:13.953):
And I don't know,

(01:07:14.874):
this may be stupid to harp on this,

(01:07:16.976):
but I wonder, I mean,

(01:07:18.237):
if there's any kind of analogous problem where it seems like there's the danger that

(01:07:23.661):
to be very concerned about the issue.

(01:07:27.144):
Like, I think the antagonist,

(01:07:28.745):
like, do you remember the men's rights, like, the Batman advocate-like guy?

(01:07:34.189):
So he was, like, very concerned about father's visitation rights, so he dressed as Batman.

(01:07:37.472):
Oh, yeah, yeah.

(01:07:38.192):
Yeah, they all hate criminal court, and they're like, yeah, right.

(01:07:41.215):
Right.

(01:07:42.557):
I guess it was effective in raising awareness because I remember him.

(01:07:46.841):
And I'm certainly aware of Intactivist.

(01:07:49.624):
It's a funny name.

(01:07:51.245):
But I don't think my awareness is very politically useful to their own cause.

(01:07:57.571):
Whereas it ought to be the case that Somehow one could just imagine like,

(01:08:02.465):
you know,

(01:08:02.685):
this didn't work for the Democrats in 2024,

(01:08:04.407):
but one would want to be able to say to like,

(01:08:06.569):
you know, the pro circumcision people, don't be weird.

(01:08:09.492):
Like, this is a weird practice.

(01:08:11.354):
Like, why would you do that in the first place?

(01:08:13.717):
Like, that's crazy.

(01:08:14.838):
But this is also something that like,

(01:08:17.761):
gay people talked about during the gay liberation era is like,

(01:08:22.346):
If we want to claim sexual justice,

(01:08:24.447):
we have to talk about the things that are taboo to talk about.

(01:08:28.588):
And so you're painted as weird anytime you try to contest a normative regime

(01:08:34.749):
of power in domains relating to sex and gender.

(01:08:38.570):
And I think that's a very real problem around circumcision.

(01:08:45.572):
Do we see that in this article at all?

(01:08:47.793):
This question of taboo?

(01:08:49.634):
Well, let me read this part because I think this kind of explains that.

(01:08:53.379):
So this is Stambolian talking,

(01:08:55.703):
you know, one of his long, you know, non-questions at the very end.

(01:09:00.249):
But these ideas don't change the fact that circumcision,

(01:09:02.813):
like other sexual issues, is responsible.

(01:09:04.075):
Thank you.

(01:09:20.498):
I

(01:09:25.766):
think it's going to be much more difficult to get rid of something

(01:09:28.322):
that has become ritualized to that extent.

(01:09:30.603):
So it's almost like the disappearance of any reason for it,

(01:09:34.866):
like the fact that the moral and then medical reasons have all collapsed,

(01:09:40.188):
and yet everyone still has this kind of ritualized,

(01:09:43.891):
you know, possibly like family inflected, possibly erotic, you know, Yeah.

(01:10:10.093):
But the insurance point sort of suggests that, like,

(01:10:13.174):
I don't know,

(01:10:13.735):
even a slight,

(01:10:14.655):
this is very, like,

(01:10:15.655):
15 years ago neoliberalism, but, like,

(01:10:17.596):
even a slight nudge might get people to stop the practice or,

(01:10:22.238):
like, might get a large number of people to, you know, modify their practices.

(01:10:26.780):
So that it, like, Stambolian and Master sort of talking about it as if it's a...

(01:10:31.662):
A deeply rooted kind of self-sustaining thing,

(01:10:35.305):
which is like so charged with like values and fantasy and myth.

(01:10:39.768):
And I guess I'm both I'm suspicious of that claim.

(01:10:44.151):
And then I guess I also wonder tactically how useful that is,

(01:10:48.915):
because it sounds like even like I don't know how people in in these like the UK or

(01:10:54.459):
in states in the US lobbied legislatures to change like insurance practices.

(01:10:59.402):
But that sounds like a Yeah, absolutely.

(01:11:15.565):
I'm actually thinking about a different topic that relates to what David was saying,

(01:11:19.688):
which is the sense that like in Wallerstein's book,

(01:11:22.690):
he's kind of saying that like there's all this mystification around circumcision.

(01:11:26.193):
We're not really sure why we're doing it.

(01:11:27.654):
There's all these different reasons and there are all these taboos.

(01:11:30.036):
Like you can't really talk about it.

(01:11:31.717):
People get really uncomfortable.

(01:11:33.619):
And I'm going to sort of take us out of that.

(01:11:36.821):
I'm I'm going to dispel the mist and the fog and like bring us into take this topic

(01:11:43.626):
into the light.

(01:11:44.407):
Right.

(01:11:45.248):
And it makes me think actually of the repressive hypothesis from Foucault's History

(01:11:50.233):
of Sexuality,

(01:11:50.853):
Volume 1,

(01:11:51.374):
this idea that like the Victorians were so prude about sex,

(01:11:54.757):
they started cutting people's dicks and like we could never talk about it anymore.

(01:11:59.322):
And now I'm going to talk about it.

(01:12:01.124):
And I think one of Foucault's critique of that hypothesis,

(01:12:06.772):
what he calls the repressive hypothesis,

(01:12:08.895):
is that it's not that these Victorians were so repressed,

(01:12:11.559):
it's that they have a million ways of talking about sex in sort of other obliques.

(01:12:15.725):
That's to say that if you are cut and you don't know how the foreskin works,

(01:12:17.866):
you're fine being cut.

(01:12:19.667):
And the more knowledge you have about the foreskin,

(01:12:45.717):
The more unhappy you're likely to be about having been cut.

(01:12:48.819):
Now, have y'all considered a kind of equivalent of those drunk goggles they use

(01:12:52.501):
to warn you about drunk driving?

(01:12:55.003):
A foreskin VR simulator to make people feel what they're missing.

(01:13:01.567):
That could really galvanize.

(01:13:03.769):
That's the demographic you need to get.

(01:13:06.980):
The technology isn't there, maybe.

(01:13:08.632):
I don't know.

(01:13:09.585):
Yeah, I don't know.

(01:13:10.225):
I have to say,

(01:13:12.847):
I was going to say when you asked earlier about our personal experiences with it,

(01:13:19.011):
it's mostly been neutral, not uninteresting, but I have had a couple of guys who...

(01:13:27.616):
We're just so sensitive that you could, it was annoying and you couldn't really do anything.

(01:13:32.700):
Like you could barely touch them and like they could just not handle anything.

(01:13:36.042):
And I found that,

(01:13:36.783):
and that might've just,

(01:13:37.603):
maybe just they were uptight as individuals uptight and annoying.

(01:13:40.545):
David has an iron grip is what we're learning.

(01:13:43.888):
But I was also like, this sucks.

(01:13:45.689):
Like get rid of this foreskins.

(01:13:48.297):
Yeah, I don't know.

(01:13:48.957):
I guess I haven't had that experience.

(01:13:51.258):
I feel like I've had more of the other experience.

(01:13:53.358):
So I'll give you maybe two anecdotes here.

(01:13:56.019):
One is, you know, I was talking to an American friend who's an art historian.

(01:14:01.100):
So he's supposed to be attuned to close looking and details.

(01:14:05.381):
And he Snapchatted me a picture of his boner and said,

(01:14:08.941):
where would I look to see if there's a scar?

(01:14:11.702):
Yeah.

(01:14:12.843):
Like he just had no idea that the ring of discolored tissue running around

(01:14:19.044):
the circumference of his penis was a circumcision scar.

(01:14:22.265):
Like he just didn't know where he had been cut.

(01:14:24.566):
Are historians actually have any better nudes than the rest of us?

(01:14:30.107):
Because they dress better.

(01:14:31.527):
That's undeniable.

(01:14:32.628):
That's for sure.

(01:14:33.488):
For sure.

(01:14:33.928):
But are their nudes better?

(01:14:35.328):
That would be the real pudding proof.

(01:14:38.109):
That's right.

(01:14:38.549):
Yeah.

(01:14:40.532):
I would imagine probably yes, like when you have an aesthetic sensibility.

(01:14:45.299):
But I mean,

(01:14:45.960):
the point of the story, though,

(01:14:46.961):
is just to say like,

(01:14:48.163):
you know,

(01:14:48.984):
this is somebody who like has sex with a lot of guys,

(01:14:52.149):
and he just kind of had no way of looking.

(01:14:55.193):
He's looking at his own body to see what wasn't there, which is a very happy place to live in.

(01:15:02.384):
And then a couple months later,

(01:15:03.485):
he was like, oh, Ben, I've been hooking up with all these French guys.

(01:15:06.710):
It's actually so much easier to bottom with someone who's intact,

(01:15:09.834):
like they're I never actually thought about that part.

(01:15:32.463):
This is my argument for Asian guys, by the way.

(01:15:34.445):
I don't need to win any contests for taking the biggest dick.

(01:15:39.011):
Less friction.

(01:15:41.274):
You would just risk a colorectal cancer.

(01:15:43.416):
But I also wonder if there isn't even...

(01:15:49.450):
You could be very sexual, very sexually active and not be very attuned to your own body.

(01:15:54.937):
I think I've mentioned to David this anecdote of Michael Denneny's where he's

(01:15:58.421):
the baths in the late 70s and he complains to Vito Russo at like four in the morning

(01:16:03.507):
that he hasn't had any luck that night.

(01:16:05.810):
And Vito is like, I saw you have sex with four people.

(01:16:09.714):
I'm glad you brought this story up again because that is an episode where like,

(01:16:15.778):
why didn't I say anything?

(01:16:16.819):
Why didn't I say how often that has happened to me?

(01:16:21.482):
You are a run-through whore.

(01:16:23.123):
I'm not saying I'm going to remember everyone I've had sex with,

(01:16:26.405):
but I could at least

(01:16:27.125):
remember an hour later.

(01:16:28.906):
At the end of a bathhouse night or an after-party, like, no, I can't remember anything.

(01:16:34.750):
For the record, that was David.

(01:16:36.211):
That was not Ben or Blake speaking.

(01:16:38.052):
That was David.

(01:16:39.617):
So that to say that like indeed you could be you could be very sexual.

(01:16:45.060):
You could be like a little too sexual and actually still really unaware of

(01:16:49.203):
the basic things about your body.

(01:16:51.124):
Like what does your body look like and how did it get that way?

(01:16:54.666):
Yeah, which that yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

(01:16:56.948):
But it is like I'm also like,

(01:16:59.009):
you know,

(01:16:59.229):
I've had a lot of sex with,

(01:17:00.730):
you know,

(01:17:01.130):
someone who's uncut and like I haven't noticed any

(01:17:05.573):
for bottoming especially like no difference.

(01:17:07.794):
You know,

(01:17:08.095):
it's And I don't know,

(01:17:09.620):
maybe they're all different or it's

(01:17:13.661):
almost like he doesn't see it

(01:17:15.281):
as like making any difference.

(01:17:16.922):
Like he's the one I've like questioned about it and he's like,

(01:17:19.322):
you know,

(01:17:20.282):
to him it doesn't,

(01:17:21.542):
you know, make that much difference either way except for maybe jerking off.

(01:17:26.723):
I don't feel like,

(01:17:27.444):
you know,

(01:17:27.704):
maybe in the 80s there was such a thing,

(01:17:29.424):
but even like a gay male, Our Bodies, Ourselves, like I don't know.

(01:17:35.645):
Like, Stambolian and Mass sort of take it as given that gay men have an interest

(01:17:41.049):
in this issue of circumcision because we're interested,

(01:17:43.671):
like, in our bodies in a particular way.

(01:17:46.032):
But, yeah, I mean, the art historian Snapchat thing, I think...

(01:17:50.315):
That reveals a truth,

(01:17:51.737):
which is like,

(01:17:52.739):
the way that we're interested in our bodies as gay men,

(01:17:55.362):
maybe actually...

(01:18:05.517):
Sometimes in gay culture, it's both political, intellectual, and eroticized at the same time.

(01:18:11.646):
So I was looking at this one book in

(01:18:14.430):
the Yale Library earlier today called Cut/Uncut, I think.

(01:18:19.297):
And it's by one of And then all

(01:18:35.260):
Okay, that's interesting.

(01:18:36.441):
I was going to ask you if you had seen any literary descriptions of...

(01:18:55.471):
of an uncut cock.

(01:18:56.892):
I actually have been kind of collecting some of these references,

(01:19:00.616):
but if people find,

(01:19:01.777):
if listeners find really good references in literature,

(01:19:04.761):
I would be really interested to be compiling some.

(01:19:09.130):
I love this because I looked back at my favorite literary description just of a dick

(01:19:15.312):
in general.

(01:19:17.573):
This is a thing I do too.

(01:19:20.134):
For a while I was collecting a file of descriptions of rimming and the way

(01:19:24.635):
that literary authors describe the taste of asshole.

(01:19:29.957):
So who writes best about rimming and who writes best about cock?

(01:19:33.958):
Well, anyway,

(01:19:35.199):
and I think like any of this,

(01:19:37.560):
like sex in general is hard to write about because it's so easy to lapse either

(01:19:42.882):
into cliche or into self-parody.

(01:19:46.484):
So I looked at this,

(01:19:48.385):
I couldn't remember if this passage by Alan Hollinghurst mentioned a foreskin

(01:19:53.687):
or not.

(01:19:53.948):
So I looked at it and unfortunately it doesn't,

(01:19:56.269):
but it's still, I wanted to read it anyway just because...

(01:20:00.335):
That's so great.

(01:20:01.958):
So this is from his novel,

(01:20:04.742):
The Folding Star,

(01:20:06.284):
which is not, to me,

(01:20:09.569):
not one of his,

(01:20:10.430):
compared to The Swimming Pool Library or The Line of Beauty, not one of his best.

(01:20:15.718):
Even a lesser Hollinghurst novel is still pretty great.

(01:20:19.943):
And it's about this English teacher who goes to teach high school in Belgium

(01:20:27.011):
and falls in love with this angelic blonde twink that he eventually tutors.

(01:20:34.045):
And anyway, so here's the context is not that important.

(01:20:37.807):
It's a locker room scene.

(01:20:38.987):
And so he's, you know, this is what this is one of the Twink's friends.

(01:20:41.889):
And he's like watching him undress after they swim in the locker in the pool or bathhouse.

(01:20:46.791):
I can't remember.

(01:20:48.271):
So this is what he said.

(01:20:49.972):
Patrick pursued Matt with a few more questions,

(01:20:52.233):
slipping out of his towel and drying his arse so that his cock swung back and forth.

(01:20:57.130):
It was a sumptuous monster with a lazy confidence of mastery about it,

(01:21:01.857):
a veined softness and sheeny bloom that suggested astounding powers of extension

(01:21:06.704):
and engorgement.

(01:21:08.066):
In fact, the whole genital ensemble was just about the most breathtaking idea.

(01:21:13.273):
You like that.

(01:21:15.355):
You're in favor.

(01:21:17.658):
I think it is slightly...

(01:21:22.679):
It's a kind of humor that I like.

(01:21:24.104):
It's like this deliberately over-formal about something that is...

(01:21:27.508):
I think the English...

(01:21:30.471):
For descriptions of penises,

(01:21:32.915):
and this is the rice queen in me,

(01:21:34.457):
but there's this great book from a few years ago,

(01:21:36.821):
a bull of a man about classical Indian constructions of the Buddha's masculinity,

(01:21:42.970):
and the Buddha has a number of signs.

(01:21:44.632):
And so there are many classical Indian stories about the Buddha can wrap his penis around.

(01:21:59.633):
I think I've seen drawings or images of this.

(01:22:14.635):
Yeah.

(01:22:33.567):
That actually reminds me of something I meant to say earlier,

(01:22:36.048):
which is that,

(01:22:36.808):
you know,

(01:22:37.688):
I think they can complicate the story of Christianity and circumcision after Paul.

(01:22:42.910):
Because,

(01:22:43.670):
you know,

(01:22:43.930):
remember that for,

(01:22:46.451):
I don't know, decades or centuries, the foreskin of Christ is a venerated relic.

(01:22:52.932):
And there are like Renaissance paintings of this.

(01:22:55.865):
The big Jewish art historian with the book about Jesus' penis,

(01:23:00.347):
you know, we are very educated girls and yet we are blanking.

(01:23:04.388):
So it's a perfect sweet spot, learning and having somewhat forgotten our learning.

(01:23:09.890):
Culture is what you have after you forgot who wrote the book about Jesus' penis.

(01:23:13.572):
Okay.

(01:23:14.812):
This is fun.

(01:23:15.753):
This is fun, you guys.

(01:23:17.894):
I feel like we have said all that we have to say, though.

(01:23:20.334):
Yeah, I could keep talking, but...

(01:23:23.273):
Is there something of yours to plug?

(01:23:25.817):
There's a forthcoming?

(01:23:27.158):
There will eventually be.

(01:23:28.841):
Yeah, I mean, I want to keep thinking and writing about this stuff.

(01:23:31.565):
I don't have anything kicking around at the moment.

(01:23:34.950):
I am interested in this question of literary reference.

(01:23:37.693):
Like if people have suggestions,

(01:23:39.254):
you know,

(01:23:39.574):
go to my website,

(01:23:41.815):
benjaminsbernard.com and,

(01:23:42.475):
you know, via the comment form, submit a comment and send me your references.

(01:23:45.996):
And David, in the show notes, you want to see your list.

(01:23:49.897):
It's not related, but I want to see the rimming list

(01:23:52.018):
as well.

(01:23:52.838):
I was going to say to listeners,

(01:23:55.160):
if you have any favorite literary descriptions of dicks or rimming or anything like

(01:24:01.245):
that, send it our way.

(01:24:02.866):
I would love to hear that.

(01:24:03.827):
If you have a weird cock,

(01:24:05.528):
also if your cock is somewhere weird on the spectrum that Ben has described,

(01:24:09.632):
send it to us and we'll place it along.

(01:24:12.354):
No.

(01:24:12.794):
Well, this is fun.

(01:24:16.037):
Thanks so much for having me.

(01:24:17.967):
And next time we'll have to get someone with an intact foreskin

(01:24:20.349):
to get their perspective because we didn't really,

(01:24:22.530):
we didn't center, you know, indigenous voices.

(01:24:25.353):
We didn't center uncut bodies.