Check out this (NSFW) picture (scroll down to pic number four). Take note of the giant dick being paraded through the streets of Komaki, Japan.
Notice anything unusual about that dick? It’s circumcised. AFAIK the Japanese don’t practice circumcision (excluding the very very small number of Christians and, possibly, Jews in the country).
Then there’s also Haesingdang Park in South Korea, featuring all manner of circumcised dongs. I know that Korea has a somewhat-large (for Asia) Christian population, but still… I didn’t think circumcision was an East Asian thing.
I’m not sure those pictures are actually showing circumcised penises.
A stylized sculptural representation of an erect penis may not make it clear that it’s actually an uncircumcised penis with the foreskin retracted (as normally happens during erection) rather than a circumcised penis with no foreskin at all.
Plenty of such representations, such as Indian lingam statues, don’t clearly depict a retracted foreskin or an un-keratinized glans surface. But given that they come from cultures where circumcision is traditionally not practiced, I strongly doubt that they’re intended to represent circumcised penises.
I don’t think that the pictures you have linked to necessarily represent circumcised penises. After all, the foreskin retracts when the penis is erect.
Also, circumcision doesn’t have much to do with Christianity. Although circumcision is very common in America, that’s more to do with tradition than religion. In Europe, it is very uncommon to be circumcised unless you are Jewish, Muslim, or suffered from a medical problem. Obviously it’s not something that comes up in day-to-day conversation, but I imagine that most (non-Jewish / Muslim) people in the UK would consider it genital mutilation.
Ancient Egyptian carvings can show circumcised penises, along with other maladies. This carving also showed the effects of polio, and the carving was meant to show medical information. So the supposition is, that in the face of a serious infection, the Ancient Egyptians also performed the surgery. It way have been a well known procure in the region. This page has an Ancient Egyptian image of the procedure, although its not a carving: Male circumcision and HIV: a web special series | UNAIDS
I’ve seen, multiple times, folks assert that the foreskin retracts automatically when the penis is erect, but I can say for absolute certain that this isn’t always true. Mine stays in place unless I manually retract it. Am I just a freak of nature? How common is it for it to retract?
The accompanying picture (they can show that on Wikipedia? :eek: ) shows a fully retracted foreskin, but there’s nothing pathological about a non-retracted foreskin during erection.
Typically, though, as all those stylized representations of erect penises from cultures that don’t routinely practice circumcision suggest, an erect uncircumcised penis has the foreskin retracted so that the general shape of the glans and shaft looks very similar to that in an erect circumcised penis.
