My parents never talked about it and I never asked. Googling doesn’t seem to help me. I have had a very small number of lovers and it never came up. My wife doesn’t seem to know for sure either. Yes, I come from a repressed background but I’m not dumb and if I can’t figure it out easily I can’t be the only one.
Is there some kind of ‘test’? I’ve actually been wondering this for years but never had the courage to ask out of embarrassment, or because I couldn’t find the right board where the question might get treated with at least some respect.
There’s a sort of hood on the end of a flaccid uncut penis that isn’t there when the penis has been circumcised. Do you have some sort of search filters on your computer? Because it’s pretty easy to find pics of cut vs uncut penises. Circumcision - Wikipedia (scroll down to Complications for pics of adult male penises).
Do you have an extra flap on the tip of your penis, which retracts when you become erect?
If things STILL aren’t clear…ask your doc next time you need to see him/her anyway.
Edit: I’m shamelessly abusing my admin privileges to spoiler my link, which contains Penis, though not Unexpected Penis, and even though this is a medical discussion, most workplaces seem to frown on Penis, erect or not.
(Putting it in a spoiler in case this needs to conform to the 2-click NSFW rule, which it probably should.)
Does your guy at rest (i.e., flaccid) look like the one on the left or right? If you can’t tell, what is confusing you?
ETA: Here’s one more. Can you do this with your penis:
[spoiler]
If you can, then you have the skin covering your glans and you’re uncut. If that image looks bafflingly impossible given your parts, you’re circumsized.
I think part of what confuses me (and again, embarrassing) is that I’m not very well endowed. Which (to me) makes it harder to determine. The pictures shown in both post links so far, are of men larger than me.
Should I drop this? I don’t want to cause or get in trouble. But, damnit, it’s bugged me for decades lol.
This is, for the most part, accurate . . . except that some guys have so much foreskin that, even with a full erection, it doesn’t entirely retract. But it can certainly be pulled back manually. My partner is like this. Even when he’s erect, his glans is still mostly covered with foreskin; and when it’s flaccid the foreskin hangs down at least an inch below the tip.
Another indicator is that many circumcised penises have a somewhat “raw-looking” band of scar tissue on the shaft, just before the glans.
if it looks like a sausage with the pee coming out of a hole on the nipple end, it’s natural. if it looks like darth vader’s helmet with the pee coming out of a slit, it’s a “german-cut” style of circumcision.
sorry, this is a once-in-a-lifetime posting chance.
Also, some men have foreskin that doesn’t retract or is difficult to retract because it’s too tight (phimosis).
OK, to the OP. If none of those images are helping you out, I think asking your physician would probably be the best bet. Here’s one more image on a smaller penis:
The one on the left? You can pull the skin back from the head so it resembled the one on the right. However, if you’ve got the one on the right, you won’t be able to pull any skin up (since you don’t have any) to look like the one on the left.
It’s kind of like–imagine you’re wearing a sweater. Make a fist with your left hand. That’s the head of your penis. The sleeves of the sweater are the skin. If you can move the sleeves up over the fist without a problem, you’re uncircumcised. Generally, when your penis is at rest, it will be in this state, like a fist just tucked in behind the cuffs of the sweater. When it gets excited, the sleeves will pull back, with the cuff settling on the wrist. With a circumcised penis, the fist will always be showing, and there really isn’t a way to pull the sleeves up and over to cover it.
OK, that may be a bit convoluted, but I’m grasping at straws here.
No, the images definitely helped. I am the image on the left (I’m pretty sure). Which means, I am not circumcised. That’s rather interesting, because my understand is that in the year of my birth (1965) it was almost common practice, and parents were often not even consulted.
Unfortunately it’s not black and white. I am circumcised, but it was botched (in a DOD run hospital). I was born in 1960. There’s a dramatic difference between flaccid and semi/fully erect. Glans is fully covered while flacid and the foreskin is behind the rim of the glans when erect.
I was lucky, in a way. I pretty well always knew (or knew as long as I can remember), because I was circumcised and my younger brother was not, so I could see what an uncircumcised foreskin looked like. (I was born in Australia, at a time when circumcision was fashionable for all boys, and my brother was born in England.)
Right – and even if not botched per se there is such thing as not enough being cut or the remaining skin upon reaching adulthood stretching enough that this happens (specially if there is a large differential between flaccid and erect size).
Count me as another person who is not entirely sure. And it’s nothing to do with ignorance of how things look in either normal case. I’ll post a more detailed explanation when I’m not at work.
It’s not obvious for all penises. It’s less obvious on “growers” (men who have a large difference between erect and flaccid penis length) because the extra skin on the shaft which accommodates that growth doesn’t have anywhere to go when flaccid except to droop over the glans. And as men age, the skin on their penis, like all the rest of their skin, loses collagen and becomes less springy, leading to more “sag” over the glans. So it does look very much like an uncircumcised penis. And once erect, most circumcised penises look like uncircumcised penises.
There’s a good pair of pictures about a third of the way down this wikipedia page, circumcised and uncircumcised both flaccid and erect:
But you can see those are young, fit, well hung “showers” - so no skin droop. But it does show that an erect uncut penis can’t always be distinguished from a cut one.
Really, your best bet is to ask your doctor. He can tell if there’s a scar.
That’s like saying it’s always easy to tell whether something is a horseor a zebra- I mean, just look at the pictures and it’s so obvious! - they’re totally different!
Knowing that difference will not help at all when something like thisturns up.
