I happened to peek at a circumcision discussion on a Japanese message board and there’s a lot of disconnect between what I thought I knew and what they seem to accept. Some of which are:
[ul]
[li]For uncircumcized men, is it typical/normal for the glans to be exposed when flaccid?[/li][li]If the foreskin cannot be retracted even when erect, it’s a medical problem that needs to be corrected - correct? (I think phimosis is the term?)[/li][li]If surgical treatment for phimosis is necessary, is circumcision the most common procedure? Or is it more common to preserve some of the foreskin?[/li][/ul]
The answer to your first question is “no”, like scr4 says.
If the foreskin cannot be retracted, such as in phimosis or paraphimosis (http://www.aafp.org/afp/20001215/2623.html), circumcision remains a common treatment (http://www.aafp.org/afp/990315ap/1514.html), despite the objections of John Dean Tyler and NOCIRC. Sometimes this is done for pain relief, to reduce penile inflammation, or to prevent recurrence of the problem.
Paraphimosis is a urologic emergency. The blood and lymphatic supply to the penis can get cut off by the elastic foreskin. The penis becomes swollen and the foreskin gets harder to retrafct due to the increasing swelling. If the problem isn’t settled in a matter of hours, damage to the penis is permanent. If ice, pressure wraps, sugar, etc. don’t work quickly, circumcision remains a good option.
But it begs more questions - if it’s rare for an uncircumcized flaccid penis to have an exposed glans, why do most Japanese seem to think it’s natural to have the glans exposed at all times? And why such a prevalence of clinics in Japan offering adult circumcision?
I’m no expert on circumcision or Japanese culture, but based on my 2 weeks in Tokyo, I would assume that the only reason there is a prevalence of clinics offering adult circumcision in Japan is because the majority of American men are circumcized.
I wonder if you are misunderstanding the discussion at the other board.
Normally it is easy to manually expose the glans when flaccid. Given that phimosis was part of the discussion, could they have been talking about being unable to fully expose the glans even when flaccid (as opposed to it being exposed all the time)?
That’s rather unreasonable. Far more probable is that a not insignificant number of Japanese men have investigated the risks and benefits of circumcision and have quite justifiably concluded that the benefits outweigh the risks. These benefits are not by any means all medical in nature: for example, many scientific surveys all around the world have found that women vastly prefer the appearance, aesthetics, and generally lower odor of the circumcised penis. Also, women overwhelmingly prefer circumsized versus uncircumcized men for oral sex; many women will refuse to have oral sex with uncircumsized men.
See Morris and Schoner, et. al., for instance, for convincing scientific evidence for these facts.
I can’t imagine how making a penis smaller would be better for a woman. In my experience, the foreskin seems to be in a very strategic place, to coincide with a woman’s “strategic place”. (G spot)
Whilst it is probably abundantly true that it is typical for the glans of an uncircumcised penis to be covered while flaccid, it’s by no means exclusively the case - like pretty much any other feature, natural size/length of the uncircumcised foreskin is variable from individual to individual.
In some cases (well, at least one case - that I personally know of, if you get my drift), it doesn’t fully cover the glans in adulthood.
You’re joking, and that’s fine. But just for the record, please note that circumcision does NOT reduce the length of the penis. In an uncircumsized man, there is simply more loose flesh that is retracted during an erection. It has been scientificically demonstrated that there is no difference in the sensation in either in the man or the woman as a result of circumcision. The belief that there is is simply another policitcally motivated anti-circumcision myth.
I understand. It’s just that clinics ads in Japan (most prominently in porn magazines) say “if your glans isn’t exposed all the time, it’s an undesirable condition and we can fix it with a simple surgery.”
I find this hard to believe, considering how hard it is to come by unbiased information on which to base such a decision. Anyway, that’s not how Americans decide to get their children circimcized, is it? It’s done because it’s normal, or because the father had it done.
No joke. The women I’ve been with have commented that the “extra skin” , when it bunches up behind the head, actually feels different. And I can imagine it does, as it increases girth by a small margin. But I am not a double blind scientific study. I am only one dude with 30 years of foreskin experience.
First, neurologists have demonstrated that the nerves that are most involved in sexual stimulation are not effected at all. These are in the head of the penis, which is not affected. Some nerves are terminated, obviously, during circumcision but their role is ENTIRELY fulfilled by the nerves that remain.
Second, scientific surveys of people who have undergone circumcision as adults show that the overwhelming majority experience no difference in sensation whatsoever, and the very few who do complain are within the error noise of the survey.
I performed my own research into PubMed and other public medical-paper databases a few years ago and found that there were substantially more pro-circumcision medical papers than anti-circumcision. Now, sheer numbers are insufficient proof of anything, of course, but it does seem that the majority of individual researchers are pro-circ (even though most large medical organizations are neutral to pro-circ, but this seems to me to be little more than political correctness).
It is certainly true that there is a great deal of controversy on the subject, but it is clear that the overwhelming majority of the controversy is political in nature and not scientific. I’ve done extensive personal research into this issue and have found that the medical and personal survey data in favor of circumcision are profoundly more scientifically rational and well-justified than the anti-circumcision arguments, which are very often near-hysterical in their emotionalism.
Here’s just one fact: something like 95% of all medical studies – and ALL of those with large n – of the relationship between circumcision status and the likelihood of contracting HIV have shown that – all other things being equal – one is 8 (and possibly up to 12) times more likely to contract HIV if you are uncircumcised than otherwise, adjusting for all other variables. This pattern also holds for most STDs, the theory being that the foreskin is insufficiently easy to make sufficiently sterile when cleaning and thus traps infective agents, only to spread them during subsequent sexual encounters.
So you’re saying it’s normal in Japan to be circumcised, or Americans are now the norm in Japan? That’s not true, of course. Clearly, the Japanese decide to have circumcisions for very different reasons. In my admittedly limited experience with native Japanese men, they seem to be much more likely to turn to scientific information for such a decision than deciding to be circumcised just because Americans generally are.
Wait a minute, that’s not logical, and it’s not what I meant to say. It’s true that for these reasons uncircumsised men are far more likely to infect others, but the point I should have made is that uncircumsized men are more likely to be infected themselves by harboring these infective agents in their foreskin, where they come into contact with microscopic lesions or just thin skin which they can cross over into the bloodstream through. (I seem to recall reading something about particular relationship between white blood cells and the foreskin, though I can’t recall the details).
It makes no sense that circumcision would result in no loss of sensation.
For a circumcized male it’s painfully uncomfortable to have the exposed glans touch the underwear for example. That must not be the case for people who are circumcized, so they certainly don’t feel THAT.
So are you saying that it’s magical and only reduces unpleasant sensation and leaves the pleasant ones intact?
Plus, those studies are self-reported. For example, I’ve read somewhere that most people lose 60% of their taste sensitivity by the age of 20. Most people, if you ask them, would not report that since they always feel “natural” within their own body when the transition is very slow(as it is with circumcision, since the glans slowly gets rougher and rougher over the years)
